Emotions and the Gift in the Ethnographic Encounter: Fieldwork in the German Sex Industry

• In Event: 105 - Section on Body and Embodiment Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 03. Identity, Cognition, and Emotions in Embodiment

Abstract

This paper traces the ethnographer’s emotions emerging in encounters with three research participants in the German sex industry: a trans-gender street walker, a madam and owner of an upscale apartment brothel, and an owner of a large-scale mega brothel. Starting from the Maussian notion that gift giving is rooted in the desire to establish relationships, I ask what are the moral implications for the fieldworker who experiences particular ethnographic encounters as gifts? Research on the sex industry is a particularly important arena for exploring the ethnographer’s emotions, as it is a life world with unstable moral contours and a deeply polarized public image. I show how acknowledging and exploring the haunting feelings of unfulfilled return obligations and the resulting moral turmoil such encounters leave behind provides a window into backstories and intersubjective negotiations and brings to the fore two parallel but contradictory processes: the ethnographer’s gradual immersion into the world of commercial sex -- including altered states of perception and new ‘states of being’ -- as well as a changing assessment with the industry at large. This research shows how unpacking the emotional fallout of ethnographic exchanges experienced as gifts provides a critical dimension for reflection and for the researcher’s formation of moral positions.

Author

• Annegret D. Staiger, Clarkson University