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Reflections on unheroic fieldwork: My kidnapping, vulnerability, and privilege in Dar es Salaam
Journal article   Peer reviewed

Reflections on unheroic fieldwork: My kidnapping, vulnerability, and privilege in Dar es Salaam

Meredith G. Marten
American ethnologist: journal of the American ethnological society, Vol.52(1), pp.79-89
02/2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.13383
Web of Science ID: WOS:001385115200001

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Abstract

More than a decade ago, at the beginning of my doctoral fieldwork, I was kidnapped and robbed one morning in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. As I negotiated the logistical and emotional aftermath of this traumatic event, I took refuge in elite, privileged spaces. In doing so, I grappled with difficult problems: my privilege, my fear and feelings of vulnerability, and my broader moral concerns about Tanzania's poverty, gross wealth inequities, and the impacts these have on public health. Here, using Harrison's framing of multiple consciousness, I reflect on my vulnerability and privilege, and how they illuminate the impact the kidnapping had on my research and my perspectives on knowledge production. I call for our discipline to continue dismantling narratives of heroic fieldwork and to make more compassionate space for honest stories of our mistakes and privileges. Doing so would allow anthropologists to more faithfully account for fieldwork's messy unpredictabilities and tangled relations.

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