This article discusses the potentials and challenges of psychoanalytically oriented supervision groups for ethnographic fieldwork: interpretive, collective spaces that address ethnographic fieldwork’s subconscious, emotional, and experiential aspects. While notions of scientific objectivity and epistemic violence towards interlocutors in anthropology have faced ample critiques, applied methodological tools for doing otherwise still seem scarce. Supervision groups offer a collectively entangled alternative to disembodied, patriarchal, and ultimately violent notions of anthropological knowing. Based on a reflection of my participation in a supervision group for ethnographic fieldwork, I discuss how reciprocal vulnerabilities were addressed in ethically and epistemologically relevant ways in this context.
Anna Hänni (Wed,) studied this question.