What happens when the field is not entirely foreign but you might be? Dispatches from the Field

I first went there years ago as a volunteer, right after my Bachelor’s degree. Growing up, I spent a lot of time in my grandmother’s Catholic household, surrounded by the aesthetics of humanitarianism: television advertisements showing African children in need, charity networks linked to priests, subscription magazines with foldable donation boxes printed with images of poverty. I was proud, at nine years old, of owning a UNICEF book explaining that all children in the world are the same.

I did not grow up religious, but I grew up immersed in religion in its social service form. That does something to your imagination. It exposes you to global inequality while flattening it into sameness; it makes you see everything while simultaneously blinding you.

Driven by this background, I simply imagined that at some point in my life, I would “go to Africa.” And I did. I lived in a village in the Iringa region, at the center of Mainland Tanzania. I taught in a Vocational Training Center. I stayed longer than planned. I moved from classrooms into offices, wanting to understand institutions from within. Fascinated by the wider dynamic of international cooperation, I had faith in them. I became deeply involved, and eventually deeply critical: of the aid sector, of its narratives, of myself.

When I decided to pursue anthropology and return to Tanzania as a researcher, I thought I was changing roles.

But roles are not costumes you can simply swap.

The first time I went after completing my Bachelor’s degree, it was relatively simple. The roles were given to me: I was a mzungu (foreigner), a teacher, a volunteer. Those labels were clear, socially legible. They structured relationships in unequal but recognizable ways.

Returning years later to explore doctoral research, everything felt familiar, but I felt destabilized. How do you approach a place that you once let shape you, with an open heart, when you are now supposed to analyze it, with even more critical eyes? Who are you there, when the previous version of yourself that was so warmly welcomed might no longer exist?

I decided to begin in Zanzibar, a place I knew less well, imagining it would be easier to start there. But immediately another tension emerged. Should I now allow myself to be framed as a tourist? A researcher? A former volunteer? Or should it be something else?

We all try to escape the definition of a tourist, even though Michel (1998, cited in Simoni and McCabe 2008). reminds us that an ethnologist, unless they deny their identity to be accepted under another, is always first and most visibly a visitor.

Yet every day I tried to demonstrate I was more. I engaged in the extended ritual of Swahili greetings, where people test how far you can go, smiling when you surprise them. I was told I was “more African than European,” that even my name proved it. I was called dada (sister) and mwalimu (teacher). Tanzanians, with their mindset grounded in hospitality, were ready to give me some reassurance of belonging.

And I loved it. I loved being absorbed into these relational categories.

But loving them did not make them uncomplicated.

I was there to research transnational charity networks, yet I found myself unable to simply observe. I repeatedly offered to volunteer. Slipping back into that role was easy, expected, and welcomed. It required no long explanations. Just work.

“No time for philosophizing,” someone told me during my first experience. “We have to be goal-oriented.”

That sentence still echoes. It represents a world of action, urgency, and measurable outcomes. I respect it, but it is also the world I wanted to re-examine. Returning as a researcher for me meant having the possibility  of insisting on the legitimacy of reflection, yet I kept collapsing back into doing.

What happens when the field is not entirely foreign but you might be?

Foreignness is not just about nationality or skin colour; it arises because your relationship to a place has shifted. Because the version of you that once fit easily can no longer simply exist.

The Image on the Wall

Photography made these tensions visible. I wanted to engage with visual anthropology in a way that distanced itself from the humanitarian imagery of my childhood. I avoided photographing faces, thinking about dignity and privacy. I questioned every frame: was I essentializing? Was my “white lens” reproducing the hierarchies I sought to critique?

At the same time, the organization I collaborated with needed images, images that donors would recognize, images that resembled the very aesthetic I was trying to unlearn.

The photographs on my camera became negotiations. Between analysis and expectation. Between who I wanted to be and who others needed me to be.

Then I went home for the Christmas holidays.

My family asked me to print a photograph someone had taken of me, surrounded by the children I worked with. They wanted to give it to my grandmother as a gift, “you know she loves to see this kind of picture of you.” After I tried my best to not even have such a picture, and definitely to not share it, I had to print it. The photo brought her immense joy. It now hangs framed in her house, where I imagine visitors see it and smile approvingly.

In that frame, all my critical reflections seem to collapse. The image resembles the very humanitarian aesthetic I once promised myself to resist. And yet it is also an image of affection  and real relationships. It allows me to maintain a dialogue with an impulse that my research constantly challenges me to transcend.

Sometimes it is frightening to think that research could alienate you from the ones you love, and from your old self. It makes you so self-conscious that you even hesitate to write certain things in your field notes. But in the end, this is what field notes are for: not to conceal contradictions, but to acknowledge them. Critical anthropology does not erase biography. Discomfort is not a by-product of fieldwork; it is constitutive of it.

The discomfort expressed in those pages was not a distraction from the field. Each hesitation altered relationships, and each internal conflict reshaped access, intimacy, and collaboration. It revealed something fundamental: research is never only about entering someone else’s world. It is also about confronting the instability of your own.