Chapter 4 - From Mobility to “Liminality” and Blockage

Summary

There is strong case that social scientists ought to keep diaries. The keeping of a field diary is an intrinsic part of the ethnographic craft. It is where and how ethnographers have long captured the steady stream of events and impressions they encounter and experience in the course of their fieldwork; further, field diaries enable reflexive accounts of how the field impacts the ethnographer as well as, vice versa, of how the ethnographer—as a participant observer with a background and history of their own—impacts back on the people and settings around them. Diaries can also serve other purposes. C. Wright Mills famously demanded that sociologists “keep a journal” as a core part of their intellectual craftsmanship: in the sociologist's journal, “personal experience and professional activities, studies under way and studies planned” join; it is there that we reflect upon both what we “are doing intellectually” and what we are “experiencing as a person”; we give ourselves space to relate our quotidian to our “work in progress” and to “capture ‘fringe thoughts’ […] [or] ideas which may be by-products of everyday life, snatches of conversation overheard […] or […] dreams. Once noted, these may lead to more systematic thinking” (Mills 2000: 196). More recently, in advice directed primarily at PhD students but relevant to all social scientists, Les Back (2002: 3.5) has made a similar case for our ongoing recording of life around us and our reflections on “it.” Often in the “the middle of a creative drought,” Back (2002: 3.5) argues, “you will be doing something else […] and an idea will come into focus. My advice is be ready for this unexpected visitor. Carry a notebook all the time, keep a record of these ideas. You need to devise a system to record how your thinking evolves over time.”

In this spirit, and in continuation of a long-tradition of sociological journalkeeping, let me set the scene for this chapter with an extract from my own diary recorded in March 2020:

For years, I have been thinking and writing about our era as a time of multiple crises. Yet, how unprepared this still left me for what is happening now!? I am writing this against the backdrop of several crises that are already pushing local and regional communities as well as national, transnational and global structures to the brink.