Abstract

This chapter reflexively explores the emotions, senses and social spaces that are shared between researcher and informants. I examine the ways in which an interruption to my ethnographic fieldwork on online memorialisation in Vietnam transformed the experience of research, as well as the ways I was positioned in relation to informants. Drawing on reflexive material, I demonstrate how the experience of returning home to my critically ill mother transformed my social space as a researcher when returning to Vietnam. Through the heightened emotional experience of coming home and being with my mother, amplified by the dulling of senses within the hospital walls and the monotony of illness, I underwent experiences which could be usefully applied to my relationship with informants. Consequently, when I returned to Vietnam, an altered social space opened up where I could empathise more readily with the emotions associated with having a family member close to death, and was accepted in a new way by informants.

The detachment of the scientific observer … by itself can never be sufficient; there has to be a way of providing for readers imaginative access to the emotional significance of events as felt by the informants … One has to become inward with a culture, and one possible avenue here is by a confrontation of one's own emotional responses with those of the people with whom one lives. (Watson 1999:144)