Waiting to Write /Not to Write: Fieldwork on Suffering and Vulnerability

My fieldwork for the last 20 years has been with Tamil refugees, displaced persons, migrants, dissidents and people who were affected by war and violence within the context of the Sri Lankan long-term war. Doing fieldwork in the context of war, violence and migration over a long time creates emotional attachments with interlocutors, establishes long term relationships, creates conflict of emotions of once’s positionality, doubt of conducting research with vulnerable people, the fear and burden of carrying sensitive information and changes in the researcher’s decision of writing and not writing. The lived body of the researcher also embodied the experiences of the field and his interlocutors’ life, emotions, pain, and voices. Further, the body becomes the site of collection, storying, acting, failing, even losing interlocutors’ stories. But at the same time, these lived and embodied experiences cannot be easily translated into academic writing or sometimes become incommensurable to different audience or the world. In this paper, I draw from these bodily embodiments, lived experiences, conflicted emotions, sensorial feelings that emerged from a long-term fieldwork as a way of thinking about “not writing,” the uncertainty of writing or waiting to write as modes of sensorial feelings intersecting with ethnographic fieldwork, research and academic writing. I ask: How do we bring not writing, uncertainty, waiting as conceptual and methodological tools to think about sensorial fieldwork? How do feelings/emotions shape the fieldwork and academic writing and vice versa?