mmh Blog

Before, during and after fieldwork I was often told that I was doing “anthropology at home.” I gave a lot of thought to whether this was true or not. My fieldwork was as much stranger, as it was familiar. To begin with, I am not fully convinced of the geographical-bounded foundation of the idea of an anthropology at home. The paradigm goes as follows: if an anthropologist is conducting anthropology in a familiar place, and with people with whom the anthropological self shares a cultural, religious, national background and a geographical location, then the anthropologist is not a “regular” one, but a “native” one. Then you are doing “anthropology at home.” The notion is also evidently a colonial one, from the time when anthropology meant studying "the exotic far away." If we are really committed to move from that past, then this consideration alone is a reason to reject the home-non-home binary.

On top of that, since the 1980s, second generation, mixed, and feminist anthropologists demonstrated how the anthropologist too, like their interlocutors, often has multiple, at times concurrent and contradictory, at times complementary, homes and belongings. I’m thinking here of the work of Kondo (1986), Abu-Lughod (1991), Narayan (1993), Fadzillah (2004), just to name a few. The division between home and field, insider and outsider, native and non-native crumbled. In writing my thesis I look at these authors and find comfort in their writing. Yet "far away" is still often how we think of our field sites. When I applied for a fieldwork grant in my institution, I was told that precedence was given to my colleagues travelling abroad. Even though 80% of them was actually travelling to their home countries, and would have had no accommodation costs (which I had in London). Beyond scholarly concepts, I keep thinking that in an ethnography of “mixedness,” as it is mine, trying to say with certainty where and what is “home” to me (and to my interlocutors) feels a bit reductive, if not useless.

My research took place in London, which has been my home for the past five years. London is where I moved, fresh out of my undergraduate degree, and in the middle of a pandemic. It’s the (only) city where I lived on my own, where I learnt (very poorly) to do my own laundry, and cook my own meals. London is where I graduated from my masters, found my first job, got admitted into the PhD program, moved out of a student accommodation, rented my first flat, and started teaching. I cannot genuinely think of “home” without thinking of London. Yet London has not always been my home, nor is it my only home. My home in the sense that anthropologists often mean when talking about "anthropology at home” is Italy, and specifically, Milan. This is where I was born, in 1998, in a bricked hospital in the neighbourhood where my parents studied at university, lived as newlyweds, and fresh parents, and where they still live. It is in Milan that I grew up and formed the adult that would have then taken the decision to move to London. It is Milan where my family is, where I travel to when I say “I’m going home,” and whose accent I carry on my tongue wherever I go to. It is Milan and not London that I know like the palm of my hand, and that I could navigate with my eyes shut. As much as London feels a home to me, it also feels a stranger city: English is not my mother tongue, I don’t know how to make a good pun, and I don’t know how to be “quick” with my words like I do in Italian; I also don’t know all the cultural clues of Londoners, and Brits in general. I couldn’t take for granted any knowledge in my fieldwork: I didn’t know how interfaith dialogue works in London, I didn’t know what RE looks like because I was never educated here, nor I knew about the role of monarchy and that of parliament. These are just few of the many things I didn’t know because I’m not a Londoner, nor British, and that, instead, I would have known in Milan if my fieldwork had taken place there.

London will also remain a home for the foreseeable future. This meant that I didn't have a physical end to my fieldwork. I couldn't physically remove myself from it. “The end” of my fieldwork had to be established through ceremonies: booking my key interlocutors for a “last interview” or being welcomed in one of my field-site as myself rather than a research through a little party. Many of my participants (luckily and thankfully) remained in my life, as did many places I had discovered through fieldwork. I continued to go to interfaith events and to an Anglican church I spent most of my time researching in. What changed was not really the places but my mode of engagement with them, and the frequency of my interactions. These things marked where home and field started and ended rather than spaces. Nor was I alone during my fieldwork. I stayed in my London flat. I kept seeing friends during the weekends, though I often had to drop out last minute because of fieldwork commitments. Some friendships were temporarily lost because they couldn’t manage what seemed a quite erratic behaviour. I kept travelling back home, as well as visiting my other homes, that is my relatives in Cairo, Alexandria, and Viterbo. When my parents both a house on Lake Garda, that too became a home. The more I write, the more “homes” appear.

If I narrow the lenses on fieldwork, I can see that the biggest “home” of all wasn’t a location, but the shared lived experience I had with my interlocutors. Though not one single person shared my exact heritage, the quality of our experiences was very close, when not the same. One of my participants, and a dear friend now, once told me that listening to me was like listening to his own story, just in a different context. Interviews with my interlocutors felt like conversations where we both chipped in with thoughts and comments, and where I was sharing my experience as much as they were sharing theirs. “Reciprocal exposure” (Bolognani 2007) in my fieldwork came naturally rather than being a strategy to put my participants at ease. This shared experience was the part of my fieldwork where I truly felt and lived through the challenges of having to distance myself from my own knowledge, and where I struggled to wear my ethnographic lenses. I often felt this similarity was too much, and perhaps I had too much (positive) bias to analyse my interlocutors’ lives. I often felt that all I wanted to do was telling their stories rather than place them under scrutiny. This may be the reason why it took me quite a long time to look at my data, or better, to treat these stories as data. But perhaps the contrary is also true: that these stories have been entrusted to me because of the shared experience, because I could often “get” what my interlocutors were sharing without the need for too many words.