Parenting and the production of ethnographic knowledge

Abstract

The ethics of fieldwork have long been interrogated in anthropology. A large body of scholarship has examined the ethical obligations that fieldworkers hold to the communities with whom they work and highlighted the need for an honest, collaborative, and decolonial approach (Bourgois, 2012;Gupta & Ferguson, 1997;Gupta & Stoolman, 2022). But there has been less reflection on the ethical obligations that fieldworkers may hold to others-namely to their own family members, those whom they care for and with. Moreover, there has been little discussion of how the very practice of fieldwork may challenge, in some cases compromise, those ethical principles and relations of care.Researchers may be embedded in multiple relations of care, from caring for children to caring for parents, partners, other relatives, or fictive kin. 1 Such carework is central to the maintenance of life and sociality and yet, as many feminist scholars have noted, often goes unseen and undervalued (Buch, 2015; Rosenbaum & Talmor, 2022). The challenge of balancing care responsibilities with the demands of academic careers can negatively impact progression through key career stages such as hiring, tenure, and promotion (Greer et al., 2018;Han et al., 2021;Margolies, 2010). The gendered nature of caregiving means that this impact is felt unevenly-a dynamic that the COVID-19 pandemic laid bare (Crook, 2020;Hoggarth et al., 2021). While there are many forms of carework, we focus here on parenting, a care that has a temporality, its intensity varying over time as the need for physical and emotional presence shifts over a child's life course. For many anthropologists, the most intense demands of parenting correspond with critical points in careers.We look at the intersections between parenting and one facet of anthropological life-fieldwork. While anthropologists have long troubled the "lone ethnographer" model of ethnographic data collection in which single researchers spend extended periods in far-removed fieldsites (Gottlieb, 1995;Gupta & Ferguson, 1997;Hannerz, 2006;Marcus, 2009), long-term, individual work "in the field" remains the hallmark of ethnography. Indeed, the experience of anthropologists conducting research in their own communities being told that their work is not "anthropological enough," despite a strong tradition of anthropology "at home," underscores the ongoing valorization of fieldwork elsewhere (Logan et al., 2023). Immersion in a fieldsite over an extended period of time remains an approach taught in methods classes, often used as an arbiter of methodological rigor in funding agencies' reviews, and deployed as a marker of anthropological legitimacy. Understanding more about how researchers with children manage fieldwork is thus critical.The scholarship on children and fieldwork dates back several decades (Butler & Turner, 1987;Cassell, 1987a;Flinn & Marshall, 1998), but these discussions have remained on the sidelines-largely confined to edited volumes and not featured in the discipline's flagship journals (Braukmann