“I'm not in love, so don't forget it; it's just a silly phase I'm going through”: On (not) falling in love during fieldwork in Southwest China

During fieldwork, anthropologists engage in emotional, social and economic exchanges with interlocutors, through which to better understand one's own positionality and that of others. When such exchanges occur with an interlocutor who becomes a romantic lover, these exchanges are filtered through desire, amplifying their psychological, emotional, and biological stakes. Within its intimacy, exchanges can become uneven, fostering emotional manipulation and diminishing one's sense of agency and self‐care. As a non‐Chinese woman economically positioned to undertake transnational mobility and conduct long‐term ethnographic fieldwork in one of China's most impoverished regions, in this article, I trace the experiences that unfolded in a romantic, sexual relationship with an interlocutor to consider how uneven stakes of exchange came to the fore. I adopt a feminist approach by refusing to flatten my positionality, and foreground eroticism and sex in the field—not as fleeting or silly phases—but as events that lead to unforeseen consequences that can lead to manipulative power dynamics. Sexual attraction, desire, longing, love, eroticism, and romance shapes the anthropologist's positionality in fieldwork, and structures our productions of knowledge. Analyzing the dynamics of desire throws additional light on the everyday workings of alterity within broader power dynamics, while examining both the shortcomings and opportunities of forging solidarity in fieldwork.