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The Sorrow of Parting: Ethnographic Depth and the Role of Emotions

Literature on emotions and the ethnographic method has focused more on ethnographers’ emotions than the importance of informants’ emotions. This essay aims to analytically clarify the undertheorized role of informants’ emotions in fieldwork and to reflect on the consequences of the ethnographer’s need to invite and elicit their informants’ emotional vulnerabilities. Drawing on the anthropology of/from the body, it argues that in “revelatory moments,” when informants express vulnerability, ethnographers perceive the “dual nature of emotions” as particular and biographical as well as universal. Revelatory moments sharpen the analysis of the field and produce emotional intimacy. They can be crucial to achieving ethnographic depth, or thick description, which remains the gold standard of the method. Yet revelatory moments also have unintended consequences such as romanticizing informants and presenting ethical dilemmas. Three examples of emotional intimacy from fieldwork conducted in France and India illustrate the argument.