‘At the Entrance of the Kidney Transplantation Ward’: Narrating Ethnographic Anxieties and Negotiations

Abstract

The self or subjective experiences of the ethnographer are essential components of the ethnographic text. Ethnographic studies of disease, aliment and bodily suffering, and the fear of imminent death, resulting from any chronic disease like kidney failure cannot rule out the fact that the ethnographer is deeply implicated in the experiences narrated and represented in the ethnographic text. In the process of gaining knowledge, the ethnographer is subject to experiences which generate personal and ethical anxieties as result of encounter with the characteristic experiences of the ailing person and the immediate nexus of inter-personal relations, including family and kinship relations, surrounding the person. The personality of the ethnographer in such studies is very crucial for such fields of experience throw up challenges for documenting the unique nuances of the experiences characteristic to it. In this paper I ruminate as an ethnographer on my experiences of encountering the field of kidney failure, dialysis and transplantation and the anxieties I had to encounter during my fieldwork and how I sought to negotiate or resolve them. This paper is a reflexive engagement with the suffering of people with kidney failure and those immediately responsible as care-givers as much as it is a narrative about my personal negotiations with the anxieties such study generates.