A practical and theoretical guide for field researchers struggling with access
Resistance is the bane of all field researchers, who are often viewed as interlopers when they enter a community and start asking questions. People obstruct investigations and hide evidence. They shelve complaints, silence dissent, and even forget their own past and deny having done so. How can we learn about a community when its members resist so strongly? The answer is that the resistance itself is sometimes the key.
Michel Anteby explains how community members often disclose more than intended when they close ranks and create obstacles. He draws insights from diverse stories of resistance by uncooperative participants—from Nazi rocket scientists and Harvard professors to Disney union busters and people who secure cadavers for medical school dissection—to reveal how field resistance manifests itself and how researchers can learn from it. He argues that many forms of resistance are retrospectively telling, and that these forms are the routine products, not by-products, of the field. That means that resistance mechanisms are not only indicative of something else happening; instead, they often are the very data points that can shed light on how participants make sense of their worlds.
An essential guide for ethnographers, sociologists, and all field researchers seeking access, The Interloper shares practical and theoretical insights into the value of having the door slammed in your face.
"A stranger enters your world, and starts asking questions you would prefer not to answer. What do you do? Mostly, when an interloper appears, communities find ways to resist: they obstruct investigations and hide evidence, shelve complaints and silence dissent, even forget their own past and deny having done so. Such resistance-that is, the social mechanisms deployed by social groups to maintain the status quo-is the bane of field researchers everywhere, for it often seems to slam the door in their face. How can one learn about a community when they resist so very strongly? The answer is that, sometimes, the resistance is itself the key. By closing ranks and creating obstacles, community members often disclose more than they meant. This book shows how such resistance manifests itself, how researchers can respond to it, and, most importantly, what it all reveals. To do so, The Interloper draws insights from diverse stories of resistance and research inquiries-everything from Nazi rocket scientists to Disney union-busters, Harvard professors to those securing cadavers for medical school dissection-to draw attention to field resistance and help analyze it. Offering a window into such research for readers of many disciplines, this book, ultimately, is intended both as a practical and theoretical guide for field researchers. All these stories and more reveal a common truth: When any field researcher tries to gain access to a field, they are sure to meet resistance to their investigations. The Interloper brings together all these instances of resistance that he encountered or witnessed, alongside accounts from other published work. The book organizes them around ideal forms of resistance and details their unique implications. Ultimately, The Interloper argues that such resistance contains way more analytical possibilities than most interlopers (including field researchers) envision"--
"Anteby is a great storyteller. . . . He offers many lively examples of his trials and tribulations in accessing various fields in his ethnographic projects, punctuated by self-deprecating comments and humor. . . . Exemplifying this move between a personal, local, historically bound experience and the general insights it may yield, Anteby’s [
The Interloper] attests to the ethnographic tradition at its best."
---Tammar B. Zilber, Administrative Science Quarterly
