Understanding Others through Oneself

On a Sunday morning of August 2010, in the field of a camping site, I was having breakfast with the participants from the home group. In the middle of mundane chat, Nicholas looked at me and asked “So, what do you make of us?” Put on the spot, my mind scrambled for an answer which turned out to be a light-hearted, banal and clumsy “You are normal”. It was met with laughter, which got me out of the spotlight. In that moment, I felt very ‘visible’. I felt the researcher with white cloak, spectacles, clipboard and pen observing coolly an animal in its natural habitat. All this time, I’ve been trying to take the ‘scientific spectacles’

off, to leave behind the white cloak of my identity, and keep ‘clipboard and pen’ confined to my mind. After a whole year, I was, at least in Nicholas’ eyes, a researcher studying them.

All that ‘building rapport’ and ‘fitting in’ crumbled with just one question. As I walked back to my tent I mumbled ‘Malinowski I ain’t’. Yet, I had to come to terms with the fact that one never stops being a researcher no matter how close one gets and that there might always be participants who would think, and rightly so, that one is always on duty even during a camping weekend.

My answer did not raise any further questions, except from me. In one sentence, I ended my ethnographic aspirations. If I saw them as ‘normal’, what was I missing? If they were

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‘normal’, what could I learn from them? The first question worried me the most and it was the starting point to answer the second one. How could I make the familiar strange? How could I see patterns of behaviour and meaning-making if the ‘natives’ were the dominant group of the culture of which I was part? The answer was staring at me in the mirror: I was the ‘exotic exhibit’ to observe and talk about, the Italian Jew among Christian evangelicals in Wales, rather than a professional ethnographer looking at ‘natives’. Nicholas’ question underlined my role of researcher and outsider. I thus considered more carefully how they saw me, how they behaved towards me to identify their own ‘markers’ of identity. During the camping trip I had been looked after by the two couples as if I were a student. Indeed, I was a student, an Italian Jewish student, and also a single female renting a room in a shared house, who found herself among couples, who worked and owned a home. The whole

‘blending in’ and establishing rapport went out of the window. Or better, I realised that I was as ‘inside’ as I could be, well ‘immersed’, but still with my head outside the water. It is in this liminal state that I could make sense of my fieldwork.

I had to observe myself to see what they saw in me and, in turn, how they saw themselves.

By focusing on who I was in their eyes, I could see their identity a little more clearly. By reflecting on what made me an ‘outsider’ to the group, I could make visible the social boundary defining the ‘in group’. Amidst British Christian married couples, often with children, my self was and is in a liminal state for being a foreigner, Jewish, single and with no fixed residence. I realised that I had always lacked a religious community where I could feel ‘at home’, where I could participate actively and express my religiosity. Indeed, lacking a community, in which to ground my identity of place, language and relationships, my

96 religiosity had very few certainties. Without a country, a religious community, a family and a home of my own, I was the Simmelian stranger (Fremde), the one who has a fluid identity that is constantly being challenged and re-shaped.

The stranger, as described by Simmel, is always “the potential wanderer: although he has not moved on, he has not quite overcome the freedom of coming and going.” (Simmel 1908/1950, p. 402). The Simmelian stranger is not just an identity, but an epistemological category (Merton 1972). Thus, the identity of the stranger also sheds light onto the invisible lines of connections between the people making up the group, the culture and unwritten rules of the group. The stranger is not simply outside, but “an element of the group itself. His position as a full-fledged member involves both being outside it and confronting it” (Simmel 1908/1950, p. 402). To be a stranger, affirmed Simmel, “is a specific form of interaction” (Simmel 1908/1950, p. 402), which endows the stranger of

‘objectivity’, not in the sense of passivity or detachment, but a participation that is composed of “distance and nearness, indifference and involvement” (Simmel 1908/1950, p.

403). Thus, being a stranger is not to be taken as ‘value-free’ (wertfrei) objectivity, but as a complex relation with the research environment and research participants. Being ‘outside’, the stranger sheds light on the ‘inside’ and how that ‘inside’ is constructed. Being a single Italian student with no fixed residence and community, for instance, marked the construction of community that needs to respond to the aspirations and needs of middle class, relatively young couples with children, who are settled in a specific geographical location. These are generalisations, mental constructs, which reveal patterns of socialisation, which impact on the construction of religious identity and community.

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