Mothering while conducting field-work

KUNIN, JOHANA

Bergamo evento pospuesto por covid19. Fecha inicial:06/2020

Congreso; 8th ETHNOGRAPHY AND QUALITATIVE RESEARCH CONFERENCE; 2021

The University of Bergamo

The goal of this paper is to analyze the changes between being a not-mother-researcher and a pregnant and later mother-researcher while conducting a four-year-long field-work among women in an Argentine rural district. I argue that being a mother normalized me and gave me status among the subjects of my study, as being a mother is for them a source of high reputation. That fact helped them be more open to me to discuss different issues and to participate in their activities while our kids played together, for example. That also contributedto reframe my research perspectives and to reveal new particular insights and generate relevant theoretical implications: in dialogue with postcolonial feminism, I ended up encouraging a consideration of the agency and political activism of women-mothers-caregivers in the rural world from a historically-situated socio-anthropological perspective. Initially my fieldwork did not explicitly focus on gender, as I followed the coordinators and participants ofa community theater group, a community medicine group, and a group of advocates and practitioners of agroecological family farming. However, gender rather emerged unexpectedly as a relevant category for analysis as I discovered that almost all coordinators and participants were women. Women who participate and even take part as coordinators many time with their own children. Women?who care for their children, for those from outlying neighborhoods, for the environment and even for themselves?break the barrier of ?discretion? and, as they say, ?lose their sense of shame? and propose alternative moral repertoires for a community in transformation. I then finally argue that certain characteristicsof caregiving that are attributed to women through a binary vision of gender relations serve to mobilize the agency of women and function as a source of potential power thereby enabling women?who are often perceived as ?caregivers? that do ?menial tasks? and are not ?dangerous??to become dissidents.