Insights from an ethnographer: processes of immersion and self-reflection in the fieldwork

Being an ethnographer is not a simple task. Fieldworkers engage in processes of
developing new relations, asking people for information and almost inevitably experience
anxiety, insecurity, depression, embarrassment or discomfort. Besides the emotional
roller-coaster encountered in fieldwork, it is also an immense process of self-reflection,
learning, negotiation and adaptation. In this brief, I present the methods that I used in
my research studying Mexican migrants engaging in homeland politics from Brussels and
Paris. In the first section I discuss the immersion in the fieldwork as a process of
negotiation between the ethnographer and the participants. The second section of this
paper focuses on matters of reflexivity and positionality. Emphasis is put on the fluid
identity and the different roles and memberships that ethnographers adopt during their
fieldwork. Indeed, I was not only a researcher but also a photographer, a cook, an event
organiser, a cashier, a text editor, an embroiderer, a painter, a musician, and an improvised
graphic designer.