Sade—‘By your side’

Authors

• Joy Natalie Owen University of the Free State, Anthropology

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.30676/jfas.v43i2.77652

Abstract

With a reference to Sade's song, ‘By your side’, I work through the unexpected intimacies of fieldwork.  I detail the subtle progression of my relationship with my primary interlocutors, and our morphing circumstances during fieldwork and beyond.  Writing against the normative understanding of the 'omniscient, omnipotent, lone, white, male anthropologist' that caricatured my initial training in the discipline, Sade's song situates fieldwork moments, and life beyond fieldwork, squarely in the messy, turbulent nature of life.