Researcher's body relationship to the fieldwork

I am reading “Paris chic, Tehran Thrill: aesthetic bodies, political objects” by Alexandru Balasescu for this week.

What I would like to investigate is that how anthropologists explain their own bodies’ reactions to different locations and circumstances in the fieldwork. I am also interested in examining how they illustrate and depict embodiment and especially female bodies in their anthropological reports.

This book is about fashion industry in Paris and Tehran and a sort of comparison of Paris, as a center of world’s fashion and Tehran, as a capital of a radical Islamic country. Obviously, in this book fashion and consequently body are the focus of anthropologist’s gaze. (p.1) so, discussion about female body is a key concept throughout the book.

Balasescu in the introduction of the book compares generally the status of body in Paris and Tehran. Since he has done urban fieldwork for his research, he pays especial attention to the location and space for body flexibility in the society. “In Paris, considering the density of population and scarcity of space, the body has to be more restrained; in the metro, one has to sit straight, often with legs crossed in order to leave more space for others.” (p. 14)

By exploring the body and embodiment as sites of knowledge and knowledge production, he engages cultural norms determining the relationship of bodies to specific sites, behaviors and destinies. In the following of the previous quotation, he adds: “People from Tehran have much more space at their disposition. However, gender distinction prescribes bodily postures in Iran: men do not have any social restrictions concerning their body postures, at least in public spaces. Thus, in Tehran, even if men and women share a small space, e.g. a common taxi, men tend to occupy the entire seat, and leave little space for their female seatmates.”

In his first sojourn in Tehran, he tries to order a suit of clothes. The result turns out to be a large dress, floating around his body “in the normal way”. Interestingly, the anthropologist reacts to the situation: “I felt that my body had lost its shape!” He mentions this event as a “first hand experience” and adds: “it made me think about the architecture and the environment. Contours and shapes create our field of visibility, and obviously I experienced a major change between Paris and Tehran.