Positionality, Reflexivity & the Observer Effect

The set of social locations (gender, age, race, nationality, language, class, affiliation) that are legible to the people you study; it is relational and negotiated locally, not a fixed list.

Access (which doors open/close), Rapport (what relationship becomes possible), and Interpretation (what seems strange vs. obvious to you).

People behave differently when they know they are being watched, altering the behavior the fieldworker records.

Term from industrial psychology: workers at the Hawthorne Works became more productive largely because they were being studied.

Reactivity decays over time — performance is exhausting to maintain, so normal life leaks back in; a key argument for long-term fieldwork.

What people choose to perform for an outsider reveals public values and how they perceive the researcher.

Comparing what people say in interviews, what they say to each other, and what they actually do; the gaps are often the most interesting findings.

The systematic discipline of examining how your presence, assumptions, and relationships produce the account you write — not merely personal confession.

Essay in which Tiv elders reinterpret Hamlet, revealing that Bohannan's 'universal' reading was actually a local, Western one.

Clifford and Marcus argued ethnographies used a god's-eye voice that erased the messy, situated, power-laden encounters producing them.