Chapter 2. Gender-based Research Methodology: International Development Research Centre
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Chapter 2. Genderbased Research Methodology
Document(s) 5 of 15 Books written by anthropologists, including the present one, are 'always already' ... suspicious. And so they should be, necessarily and immediately; for they are not evoking eternal truth, but localized, situated, partial, special, little, ephemeral realities, which would lose their entire content if deprived of the contexts from which they emerge. If, as usually the case, anthropologists 'speak' through ethnography, all too often they mask the conditions of emergence of their text for the sake of a wishful and fallacious coherence. (Dumont 1992, p. 2) Placing the complex experiences of women and men at the centre of analysis requires reconceptualizing soils and agricultural issues as gender issues. It entails recognizing that local people are not passive, powerless, unknowledgeable, gender-neutral objects, but actors who can institute change, create and perpetuate knowledge, and play a hand in shaping and transforming the social and physical worlds around them — sometimes in ways 'development' practitioners don't anticipate or even like. Most importantly, it 13
that operationalizes alternative requires an appropriate cross-cultural methodology theoretical approaches into gender-sensitive practice, and recognizes research as a dynamic and social encounter, complete with dilemmas, subjective interpretations, multiple meanings and human agency. Within this study, these objectives were achieved primarily through ethnographic accounts that provided a rich medium for exploring the dynamics of local soil management and farming, and investigating the complexity of local women's and men's everyday lives.
People Bill Carman ID: 41483 Added: 2003-07-31 12:54 Modified: 2005-03-04 15:50 Refreshed: 2007-08-02 02:40
An awareness of the attitudes, opinions, priorities, and knowledge of local actors is central to understanding the impacts of broader political-economic and historical processes on local people and their environments. It is through the "elucidation of actors' interpretations and strategies, and how these interlock through processes of negotiation and accommodation" (Long 1992, p. 5) — along with a conscientious commitment to listening to the participants themselves and taking seriously what they have to say (Gupta and Ferguson 1997, p. 36) — that perspectives which emphasize people's realities can be achieved. Such perspectives recognize the multiple realities and shifting identities of various actors, including the researcher herself. This entails viewing research and 'development' projects as subjects in themselves — not just as ethnographies in 'development', but as ethnographies of 'development' (Ferguson 1994; Pottier 1993). This chapter highlights the manner in which alternative theoretical conceptualizations were incorporated into my research design. In order to make transparent the manner in which the data and the evidence were obtained and interpreted, this chapter recounts how the research was lived and experienced. It begins by exploring the central themes of cross-cultural gender research, drawing on recent literature within critical feminist, anthropological, and participatory approaches to 'development' that are relevant to this study. The second section recounts the research journey as a series of processes, making transparent the manner and context in which the data were
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