My Apprenticeship: An Intellectual Journey

A tragi-comic journey of fieldwork rooted in Sartre's existential philosophy in which the person of the researcher - by which is meant her past, her body, her emotional repertoire, as well as the priorities of reason and common sense - plays the main role in organizing and executing the research process.The book sits on ego-documents, like letters, diary entries, and notes of casual conversations in which the curiosity, temperament, and thought of the people harmonize or clash freely with that of the researcher. Rather than cutting us off from understanding what is strange and past, this bias is a window that initially opens it up to us, making visible the fascinating Christian, Political Party, and Kinship dynamic.The last chapter returns the reader to the ancient notion that rhetoric imitates life and nature, because nature has assigned to every emotion a look, tone of voice, and bearing of its own. It thereby invites readers to free themselves from the ideological lock-in of postmodern discursivity and, like the ethnographer, heed happenings while doing research.