Negotiating the boundaries within
an anthropologist at home in a multiethnic neighborhood in urban Japan
pp. 579-597
in: Paul Smeyers, David Bridges, Nicholas C. Burbules, Morwenna Griffiths (eds), International handbook of interpretation in educational research, Berlin, Springer, 2015Abstract
The author revisits her field experience of living in a multiethnic neighborhood in urban Japan, where people of different historical, socio-cultural, and political backgrounds reside, taking an autoethnographic approach. The neighborhood was becoming multiethnic with an arrival of new immigrants at the time of her fieldwork. The purpose of this exploration is to re-examine her interaction with her research participants and research findings, and to add another layer of analysis to understand the role of interpretation and her role as a "native" anthropologist doing research "at home." Through this examination, she clarifies many shades of "insider" and "outsider" status and how they depend on particular relationships in particular situations. She also shows how her positionality of being an "insider" led to a specific kind of "positioned" knowledge and "partial" perspectives in her interpretation of school and community. At the end, she discusses what role interpretation played in this study and why her analysis produced a critical assessment of educational programs in the field site.