Geography
Myriam Houssay-Holzschuch, Univ. Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, Sciences Po Grenoble, PACTE, 38000 Grenoble, France
It is precisely the desire to conduct fieldwork far away or overseas that, from as early as my undergraduate career, lead me toward the discipline of geography: the desire to travel far away, to discover places and people, to really spend time in a given place and to see who I would become when ‘over there.’ This is how I set off first to Madagascar for my first research project, then to South Africa and particularly Cape Town, which has become my privileged site of fieldwork. With this in mind, I surrendered to the disciplinary mythology, both effective and problematic, of the exotic – an integral part of the city’s colonial heritage – and of the specific scientific legitimation process, where the presence of the geographer within the research site in order to observe, take notes, measure, and listen is what produces and validates his results. (I specify ‘he’ since the idealized model is male, even masculinist.) This mythology has remained unreflective for quite some time.
My ‘field’ from then on was a portion of space to which I return regularly to harvest empirical data, a portion of space that, in turn, both delimits and is delimited by my expertise. This first definition, extending from my experience and seemingly simple, already requires nuancing; it functions on multiple dimensions, like a set of Russian dolls. Having conducted research in Cape Town’s predominantly black neighborhoods – or, rather, thanks to this specific terrain – my expertise is considered legitimate for the rest of the city, for the country as a whole, even the entire continent. As such, I am considered an ‘Africanist’ or, alternatively, an ‘urban geographer’ whose expertise lies with cities of the Global South more largely. My scientific identity changes with the geometries of the differing fields in which I am recognized as legitimate. The field, understood in this classical and limited sense as a portion of studied space, reflects a discipline that has long been inclined to cut the world into regions, to seek entry through sites rather than flows, whereas it could be considered as multi-situated or even in movement, in order to follow the circulations that shape the space. Ultimately, fieldwork is the authoritative ground where disciplinary legitimacy is constructed. Historically, the longer and further away, the more dangerous it is – and we must recognize that South Africa holds its own on this criterion – and the more it ‘counts’ in legitimizing a researcher as a ‘real geographer’ and their research as valid.
Today, critical reflexivity has finally taken over fieldwork, in order to assemble the genealogy of this canonical and normative disciplinary practice, to sketch an epistemology of it; to take seriously the emotions that it arouses and the sensory and bodily experiences fieldwork puts the researching subject through; to construct it in a more ethical manner, less voyeuristic and predatory of those who find themselves under examination and with whom and no longer on whom we should be working.
More from this author:
Myriam Houssay-Holzschuch, “Géographies de la distance : terrains sud-africains”, Carnets de terrain. Pratiques géographiques et aires culturelles, Thierry Sanjuan ed., Paris : L'Harmattan, 2008, pp.181-195 [online] : https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00326234 (03/11/21)
Anne Volvey, Yann Calbérac, Myriam Houssay-Holzschuch, “Terrains de je. (Du) sujet (au) géographique”, Annales de géographie, 687-688, 2012, pp.441-461 [online]: https://doi.org/10.3917/ag.687.0441 (03/11/21)
Cite this item: Myriam Houssay-Holzschuch, “Field”, translated by Lauren Fabrizio, Performascope: Interdisciplinary Lexicon of Performance and Research-Creation, Grenoble: Université Grenoble Alpes, 2021, [online]: http://performascope.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/en/detail/177903
