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51 3 This chapter explores my experience with what Rabinow calls the central conundrum of ethnography: how ethnographers negotiate fieldwork relationships among people with whom they do not share a common set of assumptions , experiences, or traditions (, ). These negotiations were complex for me, for they operated simultaneously on a number of levels and were constantly fluctuating. I was not simply observing people with anorexia; I was interacting with them, continually finding common ground and difference, and challenging my own assumptions about food and eating. I was not only entering into new relationships with people, but also entering into a new relationship with my own sense of embodiment. Here I depict the interwoven nature of fieldwork relationships and experiences . Clear demarcations signal important themes of negotiation: structures of time and space (of where and when I met participants) and the practices of bodily knowledge and experience (how we came to know). This textual strategy is a heuristic device that I use to convey various levels of negotiation , which is a flexible and moving process that continually returns to the spaces between parameters of difference and common ground. My starting point with participants was on a somewhat tenuous common ground—an interest in bodies and food, and the minutiae of experience that accompanied everyday practices. It was through this convergence that we were able to explore the meanings of anorexia. People with anorexia were often entirely preoccupied with the characteristics and effects of food, with the exact caloric and fat content of every fluid and food. Some meticulously recorded every bodily consumption and expenditure, twenty-four hours a day. They did not take food practices for granted; these were the central focus of their worlds. I, however, came to this fieldwork with an entirely different understanding of food: it posed no threat of contamination, I did not know the Knowing through the Body bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb 52 ABJECT RELATIONS caloric value of every item in my pantry, and I could eat almost anything, at any location and time. In Heidegger’s terms, foods and all their associated “trimmings” were familiar and “ready-to-hand” to me, mostly overlooked in my day-to-day routines. Our differences in the “readiness-to-hand” of food practices had direct effects on the establishment and maintenance of fieldwork relationships between participants and me. Participants had very particular routines around food and eating, often eating alone and in private spaces. These spatiotemporal constraints determined the nature of my research, as where and when I met people was continually shaped by their day-to-day routines. Negotiating relationships was not simply concerned with the pragmatics of time-tabling, however. Although Heidegger did not use his concept of readyto -hand to focus on embodiment (a task taken up by Merleau-Ponty), by extension it provides a useful framework to explore visceral, embodied experiences of being. As well as participants’ different routines around food from mine, I was simultaneously challenged with their embodied and visceral experiences , which were also different from mine. Unlike people with anorexia, I was not aware of bodily sensations, such as food traveling through my body beyond an initial register of taste and smell, or the sheer exhaustion that alerts you to the heaviness of your feet as your legs wearily lift them up each step of a staircase. I had never smelled death on my body as I stepped out of a shower, or felt my parched body to be, as one participant had, “desiccating like a juiceless , bloodless desert . . . [in which I might simply] stop being.” Observations and language could convey such experiences only in part, so how could I come to know or glean any sense of what it felt like to have anorexia? The turning point was unplanned and fortuitous: I became pregnant six months into my fieldwork, a state that built analogous bridges of embodiment with many participants. Suddenly my body changed, and my sense of home— of bodily dwelling—began shifting between familiarity and strangeness. My changing body became one focus of interplay between participants and myself and helped to establish intersubjectivity on an entirely different level. Of course, no one can ever replicate another’s experience (and replication was not my aim), but my embodied presence in the field was acutely heightened because of my own transformation through pregnancy. It was in this analogous space—in the negotiated, intersubjective realm—that I was able to explore what anorexia, the state of a body in process, could mean for each of us...

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