At the Boundary of Roles: Role Duality and Liminal Knowledge in Field Ethnography

This article reinterprets the ethnographer’s role duality not as an ethical or methodological problem but as an epistemological condition of knowledge production. Drawing on Erving Goffman’s concept of the “interaction order”, I argue that the researcher is inevitably involved in sustaining a shared “scene,” where their position is co-constructed with other participants. This perspective allows us to reassemble the classic opposition between the “natural” and the “provoked”: in field everydayness, the “natural” is the outcome of continuous mutual adjustments, while the researcher’s presence is part of the normal course of events rather than its distortion. On this basis, the article introduces the concept of liminal knowledge that is knowledge emerging in the transitions between participation and observation, where shifting role boundaries and the very act of moving between them become sources of analytical sensitivity. I propose three interrelated levels of reflexivity as forms of presence: first, methodological reflexivity (reaction and adjustment of participation strategies during fieldwork); second, structural reflexivity (participant objectivation of the social conditions of knowledge, following P. Bourdieu); and third, analytical reflexivity (use of the researcher’s bodily, affective, and practical experiences as empirical material). Empirically, the argument draws on an ethnographic study of factory labor (the author’s experience as a candy packer/operator) and shows how norm fulfillment, creativity around equipment breakdowns, and local forms of solidarity become visible only from within participation — when the researcher simultaneously acts and analyzes action. The conclusion offers a working typology of participation modes (participant by experience; participant in role; participant by default; participant in role by experience), illustrating the spectrum of intermediate positions between “insider” and “outsider.” The theoretical contribution lies in operationalizing liminal knowledge through systematic reflexivity and redefining ethnographic validity as the transparency and interpretive awareness of transitions between roles.