The position of the researcher: How I shrank in the aikido community

A researcher’s positionality affects how the research is conducted and the findings interpreted. For my doctoral research project on aikido-embodied intercultural business communication training, it was important to keep my positions as an aikidoist and an intercultural business communication trainer in mind. Putting the advice of Blommaert and Dong in simple words, reflecting on positionality helps to gain clarity and awareness on the one hand and understand what I can do better and worse on the other hand (2020, p. vii). In the following, I will share my reflections on the insider-outsider positions, or more precisely, on the emic and etic positions of the research respondents and myself.

If research needs to be conducted in such a way that it can be replicated: how would a researcher who is not an aikidoist go about it? How would another martial artist turned researcher proceed? How would another aikidoist turned researcher go about it? Interviewing experts from around the world was a crucial step for me as a researcher to strike a balance between subjectivity and objectivity, between the emic (insider) and etic (outsider) perspectives (Agar, 1996, p. 238). I learnt to understand that the interviews pulled me out of my emic view of aikido into an etic position and allowed me to immerse myself in the emic world of each expert (Gibbs & Flick, 2018, pp. 128–139; Haskell et al., 1992, p. 131). The process was mutually enhancing: the more I heard experts talk about their aikido, the more I became an outsider who merely spoke the native aikido language and listened deeply. One day, in the middle of the interviewing period, I was on a video conference call with an international group of aikidoists. When they asked, “So Greet, what are the core principles of aikido?” I could not answer, much to my surprise. My mind was blank; I had no words, just the feeling of being an observer, not an aikidoist. Apparently, I had put myself so much in the observer’s position that my personal ideas about aikido had vanished temporarily. It was the embodiment of what Blommaert and Dong wrote (2020, p. 27): once I turned into a researcher and entered the field for research, I stopped being an aikidoist. It was a necessary position to call into question much of what I understood and took for granted (Blommaert & Dong, 2020, p. 27). The position shifts were a process of identity construction. The interviews with experts constructed an identity that did not reside in me as an individual but in “intersubjective relations of sameness and difference, realness and fakeness, power and disempowerment” (Bucholtz & Hall, 2005, p. 608). While identity emerges in interaction, it draws on resources developed in earlier interactions and in larger contexts (Bucholtz & Hall, 2005, p. 588). The way I came into the interviews consciously and unconsciously produced new identities of the interviewing researcher and the interviewed expert. The way I left the interviews led to new identities in the following interactions.

Indeed, the researcher position and identity influenced me greatly during the first three years of my research. When I attended aikido gatherings all over Belgium and in neighbouring countries, I shrank myself on and off the mat. I wanted to keep a low profile and avoid situations where I had to show my understanding of aikido or talk about aikido and research. Alice Goffman calls it social shrinkage, to become so small a presence as possible (A. Goffman, 2015, p. 235). I needed to avoid people who easily declared themselves experts in aikido, experts in research, experts in applied aikido, and gatekeepers. I needed to gain access to knowledge and people on my own terms and safeguard the conditions of research design, access, and dissemination of research findings (Maryns & Jacobs, 2021, p. 150). Everyone I met was surely an asset and I enjoyed being around them, observing and absorbing whatever they did. However, they were not the researcher in this project. The balancing act between the emic and etic perspectives had many conscious — and surely also unconscious — moments and impact. I learnt to appreciate that a blend of emic and etic is always present in the research process (Agar, 1996, p. 238). Shrinking made me see my horizon and look beyond it to discover the horizons of others. In the last part of my doctoral project, I outgrew shrinking and found out how balance helped me navigate the opportunities and constraints of research.

||| Slightly adapted excerpt from the author’s doctoral dissertation. Originally published on the MULTIPLES Research Centre's Blog. |||

References

Agar, M. (1996). The professional stranger: An informal introduction to ethnography, 2nd edition. Academic Press.

Blommaert, J., & Dong, J. (2020). Ethnographic fieldwork: A beginner’s guide (2nd edition). Multilingual Matters.

Bucholtz, M., & Hall, K. (2005). Identity and interaction: A sociocultural linguistic approach. Discourse Studies, 7(4–5), 585–614. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445605054407

Gibbs, G., & Flick, U. (2018). Analyzing qualitative data (2nd edn.). SAGE.

Goffman, A. (2015). On the run: Fugitive life in an American city (First Picador edition). Picador/Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Haskell, G. H., Headland, T. N., Pike, K. L., & Harris, M. (1992). Emics and Etics: The Insider/Outsider Debate. The Journal of American Folklore, 105(418), 489. https://doi.org/10.2307/541632

Maryns, K., & Jacobs, M. (2021). Data constitution and engagement with the field of asylum and migration. Journal of Pragmatics, 178, 146–158. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2021.03.008