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FA 11(1):110-121 (2004)

Fieldwork and Power: The Psychoanalytical Concept of Transference as a Means to Understand Processes of Intersubjectivity

Author: Brigit Allenbach

Introduction

This Paper will Focus on the question whether psychoanalytical conceptions could be an aid for coping with power relations during fieldwork. The cases that will be mentioned are based on my fieldwork in Burkina Faso in West Africa (Allenbach von Moos, 1997; Allenbach, 2002). For seven months I lived in a common area in Koudougou, an urban centre with about 50,000 inhabitants. I'll begin with an extract from a conversation with a neighbour who later became one of my regular informant.

She asked me if a black person would be invited in my country at all. I answered: ‘Yes, in my country there are nice people too, who are interested in people from abroad’. She replied: ‘Here we try hard to entertain a nasara, a white person. If this person refuses what we offer, we think, that our offer isn't good enough. We are happy, if a nasara stays with us. Have you seen the delightful reaction when the children can shake hands with a nasara? For a lot of children here, this is the first time they encounter a white person at close range. Normally the nasara are priests or nuns. Or the children see the Chinese doctors in the hospital. (…) The white people come to show us, the poor, how we can better our lives’.
Page 110
I said: ‘I think it would be better, if white people came to learn something from you’.
She immediately replied with passion: ‘Yes, I also would like to come to your country. I would like to learn something about your life there. The whites come here and show us a little bit. However, the essential, the true formula of achieving wealth and power, they keep that for themselves. It's said that there isn't any black person who possesses knowledge. And if there would be one, the whites would immediately kill him’.

This example illustrates that power is an aspect of every social relation. Even if we are conscious of it, we cannot suspend this fact. Rather, the fieldworker arrives in a field where power relationships are already established.

Katherine P. Ewing (1992) sugg

FA 11(1):110-121 (2004)

Fieldwork and Power: The Psychoanalytical Concept of Transference as a Means to Understand Processes of Intersubjectivity

Author: Brigit Allenbach

Introduction

She asked me if a black person would be invited in my country at all. I answered: ‘Yes, in my country there are nice people too, who are interested in people from abroad’. She replied: ‘Here we try hard to entertain a nasara, a white person. If this person refuses what we offer, we think, that our offer isn't good enough. We are happy, if a nasara stays with us. Have you seen the delightful reaction when the children can shake hands with a nasara? For a lot of children here, this is the first time they encounter a white person at close range. Normally the nasara are priests or nuns. Or the children see the Chinese doctors in the hospital. (…) The white people come to show us, the poor, how we can better our lives’.
Page 110
I said: ‘I think it would be better, if white people came to learn something from you’.
She immediately replied with passion: ‘Yes, I also would like to come to your country. I would like to learn something about your life there. The whites come here and show us a little bit. However, the essential, the true formula of achieving wealth and power, they keep that for themselves. It's said that there isn't any black person who possesses knowledge. And if there would be one, the whites would immediately kill him’.

Katherine P. Ewing (1992) sugg