Reflections on identity

It has already been noted that the social and cultural background of the individual conducting research is likely to influence the process (Hammersley and Atkinson, 2007; Burgess, 2006; Padgett, 2008). Given my age and background, I could have been a participant in a similar research project and it is on this issue that I wish to focus in this section. For this reason I am making a distinction between the roles of researcher and participant, although this is purely an artificial separation.

Shulamit Reinharz identifies three identities any ethnographer has whilst in the field: ‘research selves, personal selves, and situational selves’ (2010: 5,

original emphasis). Rather than glossing over the complexity of the various layers of identity one has during the research process, I would argue that Reinharz’s

typology has precisely the role of bringing this issue to light; each individual brings with her- or himself a specific baggage of characteristics that shape the research process. In my case, the personal self Reinharz identifies becomes more than that: the participant self. In other words, it is I the researcher guided by a

certain agenda, and it is I the individual whose experience influences the way the

research is going through reflexive work.

Fostering this symbiotic relationship between identities - that, again, are actually overlapping and only artificially separated, as a result of reflexivity - gave me, as a researcher, the opportunity to take advantage of insights into the subject matter. This resulted from reflexive work on my relationship as an individual with the recent past. My experience as a young person living in a postsocialist society guided me throughout the whole process: from deciding what areas to focus on, to choosing appropriate research methods to tackle those issues.

Before attempting to understand how others make sense of the past, I had to delve into introspection. What did I know about the past? Where from? How did the communist past influence present day Romanian society, in my view? The answers not only informed my research, but also helped me to achieve a better understanding of where I stood in terms of how the communist era is remembered and foster a stronger sense of identity. Ultimately, they helped me understand myself and the society I grew up in, as Reinharz (2010) notes that all research does: it is not only that researchers influence the research process and the setting, but they are also shaped in turn by the research process. Hence, deciding to do research on the ways in which memories are transmitted to young people like myself made me engage in an introspective process, as a potential participant,

which then fed into the way the research was conducted; the discussions I had with participants brought new elements and perspectives which made me think further about my personal understanding of the past. Moreover, this cycle repeated itself several times, helping me to better understand myself, postsocialist Romanian society and also shape the research.

Thus far I have argued that I was both a researcher and a potential participant. My positionality as an insider/outsider further complicates issues. Having lived most of my life in Romanian society, I considered myself an insider. Whether doing research in one’s own culture is desirable or not has long been a topic of debate. Whilst traditionally ethnographers in the anthropological tradition were studying remote communities with the aim of gaining insider knowledge, and thus providing emic interpretations (Gregory and Ruby, 2011), The Chicago School with its focus on urban communities signaled a shift in approach which was then pursued by adepts of the postmodernist turn in ethnography. Researchers started to engage in studies as insiders, as members of researched communities or as having common characteristics with existing members. So, they faced the challenge of defamiliarizing the familiar, which was mainly achieved through reflection, so that they could produce reliable knowledge. Researching as an insider has the advantage of gaining access more easily to a research setting and being invested with the trust of participants. However, Gregory and Ruby (2011) argue that the very role of the researcher represents a point of differentiation, which participants tend to focus on more than on issues of commonality, and so one could hardly be perceived as an insider. As for the disadvantages of the ‘insider’ role, there is a danger of the researcher overly focusing on his or her

experience, during research encounters and analysis, at the expense of the experience of participants (Corbin Dwyer and Buckle, 2009). Furthermore, sharing too many of the experiences of participants might obscure the meanings they attach

to their actions. A way of dealing with this danger is through ‘[d]isciplined bracketing and detailed reflection on the subjective research process, with a close awareness of one’s own personal biases and perspectives’ (Corbin Dwyer and Buckle, 2009: 59). By engaging in a continuous reflexive process I hopefully managed to defamiliarize myself with their experience, at the same time letting participants know that there was common ground between us. It seems that providing emic interpretations in accordance with the perspectives of participants is an easier task for outsider researchers, who benefit from the offset from a distancing from the experiences of group members.

If ethnographers run the risk of going native, it could be argued that from the very start I was native in that I belonged to the broad research setting; it took me 18 years and a further four on-and-off to achieve this status. Those last four years, in which I was exposed to a different culture, the British one, together with constant reflection made me able to distance myself from the field and critically scrutinize what I was experiencing – both during discussions with participants and in society in general. Furthermore, the bottom-up approach I utilised to tackle analysis placed more emphasis on empirical data than on pre-existing theories and/or personal judgments, which countered the risk of having my own insider perspective on engaging with the communist era overly influence data analysis, as argued by Coar and Sim (2006). As already mentioned, and echoing the proposed solution of Corbin Dwyer and Buckle (2009), being an insider coupled with constant reflecxive

work added towards the on-going adaptation and improvement of the research design. In the end, Corbin Dwyer and Buckle (2009) note, the binary distinction of the roles of researchers is purely artificial, and researchers occupy a position somewhere on the continuum between the two points of reference.

Defamiliarization, as a constitutive element of reflexivity, played an important part in this process, especially considering my prior immersion into the Romanian society and culture. My research setting represented a familiar environment, my experience of growing up in postsocialist Romania partly reflected the experiences participants had. As a researcher, and especially as an ethnographer, I had to distance myself from the social environment I was working in by taking a step back and trying to comprehend the whole picture in the social setting (O’Reilly, 2009). As Hammersley and Atkinson note, ‘in researching settings that are more familiar, it can be much more difficult to suspend one’s preconceptions, whether these derive from social science or from everyday knowledge’ (2007: 81). Failing was indeed a danger; the danger that my ‘very familiarity with the environment blinds [me] […] to perspicacity’ (Sanger, 1996: 8). I worked towards evading this pitfall by adopting a constantly reflexive approach throughout the research process regarding my role, the research practices I used, and the data that were co-created by participants and researcher during interviews and walking tours.

There are also drawbacks to being too much of an insider. Being a young person and doing research on the process of how memories are transmitted, appropriated and reworked by other young people implies talking to peers about a period neither of us have any first hand memories of, thus being difficult to identify a reference point, a common ground, except for the experience of

reconstructing the past. One advantage of this situation was that I was able to better comprehend the processes through which young people make sense of those times. I had no first-hand memories to make it difficult to isolate information I obtained from external sources/stimuli. Unlike the people who had first-hand memories from the communist era, I shared the same experience with participants, young people, knowing what it is like to interpret, appropriate and rework memories as the only way to make sense of the past.

Regardless of the amount of information they accumulated about the communist period, all participants were reconstructing, through different techniques, an image of the same society. But the end result was invariably - and rightly so - a highly personal take on that period. However, if ‘anything goes’, how can one identify instances of silence and forgetting, two processes that go hand-in- hand with remembering? Acknowledging the value of the variety of constructions of the past should not overshadow the fact that something happened at some point in time. Every single person perceived that reality in a different way, but still, there was such a reality. Not having first hand memories of the past makes it impossible to discern those facts, as few and dry as they are. The only ways to identify instances of forgetting and silencing were by trying to form an image of the past based on the accounts of other participants - including myself - and compare that with each account, and by conducting intergenerational interviews and then confronting the stories of parents/grandparents, potential sources of information, with those of the young members of the family. Ultimately, I engaged in the same practices as participants in order to make sense of second-hand memories (see: Chapter 5, on mnemonic socialisation).

Sharing the same experience with the young participants in the research had both its advantages and disadvantages. Not having an anchorage in the reality of the past was counterbalanced by sharing the same type of experience in creating second-hand memories. In the end, the aim of the research project was precisely to understand how young people make sense of the past; and having common ground with participants in this process proved to be beneficial.

3.8. Conclusion

Conducting in-depth interviews and participant-tailored ethnographic work, coupled with constant reflection on the research experience and my own personal and professional identities, has led to building knowledge on the process of memory construction and transmission. Through the research practices that were carried out as part of this project, knowledge was constructed by both participants and researcher, in a collaborative process. Participants were encouraged to be reflexive about their engagement with the past and to adopt as open an approach as possible and take into account any possible vehicles of memory transmission that might have influenced the second-hand memories they created over time. This leads on to the issue of power relationships within the research. In the context of the current research, the researcher was an insider of sorts of the Romanian society, if one can at any point be an insider and thus share understandings with participants. This positionality of the researcher and the underpinnings of the project both lead to a sense of auto- exploration regarding the process of mnemonic socialisation. However, instead of turning into an auto-ethnography per se or damaging the research in the sense of

diminishing awareness due to taking for granted personal motivations, explanations and experiences, these particular circumstances have been made use of through constant reflexive practices that informed the research design – and facilitated the arrival at emic understandings of the phenomena under study. Action was taken to minimize power imbalances, inherent to any research, so that participants would feel comfortable and share their experiences in an open discussion. Nevertheless, each research encounter required a different approach, since power relations are never the same between researcher and any two participants.