The dilemma of researching home; controversies of researching Basarwa and the shifting positionalities

Qualitative researchers are increasingly expected to reflect on how their positionality influences their research experience and how it affects access to information and research participants. In this article, I reflect on the methodological, ethical and practical dilemmas experienced during fieldwork in my own ‘backyard’ for my doctoral degree. I focus on the politics of doing research on the relocation of Basarwa, an indigenous community in Botswana, from their ancestral land, the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, in 2001. Drawing on insights from the wider politics of Basarwa in Botswana, I reflectively consider a series of interwoven issues tied to my positionality as a student affiliated with a university in the United Kingdom, a Motswana from the mainstream society (non-indigenous) researching an indigenous group in an African state. Situating my reflections within the broader literature of researching sensitive topics, positionality, reflexivity and fieldwork, as well as within the specific context of the politics of indigeneity in Botswana, I show how researchers may be caught up in the crossfire of inter-ethnic politics and the wider politics of indigeneity in their home country. I reflect specifically on how I navigated the field in light of the contradictory positionalities emerging from my status as a researcher from the dominant group (embodying power), researching an indigenous, marginalised and politicised group and how these shaped my relationships with participants (elite and non-elites), securing interviews, accessing information and building rapport during interviews. Demonstrating my fluid, unstable and contradicting positionality, my analysis complicates the existing scholarship on positionality, which posits the insider/outsider category in binary and oppositional terms. I argue that any strict classification simplifies intersubjective relations and overlooks the flexible, non-static and complex nature of positionality.