Escaping the house of secrets: Auto-ethnographic reflections on the complexities of field exit

The gift: Establishing a relationship

The first time I visited my interlocutor, Hasiba, was on a cold winter day in February. Hasiba is a self-appointed helper in her late 50s who took care of her father. Her apartment was relatively large, typical of an apartment in Gellerup. It was cozy, warm and neat, as is the case of the many Arab homes I visited during my fieldwork. Despite the daylight outside, the chandeliers lit up the entire living room furnished with brown-leathered sofas and multi-coloured Persian rugs that covered the floor. The large, fancy TV was on but muted. The ornamentation on the many vases was beautiful and detailed. I promptly thought about the gift I had for her, “I wonder if she’ll like it”.

On the coffee table, there was a plate of biscuits, a bowl of fruit, and coffee, ready to be served to me. Serving coffee, tea and snacks is a custom that has always been part of my childhood. I grew up knowing the importance of that custom: it is a way of showing hospitality and generosity. For Arabs, hospitality (ḥusn alDiyāfa) and generosity (karam) are values closely related in meaning; whether culturally bound or religiously inspired, they are deeply rooted in Arab cultures (Harb, 2015). While Danes might ask guests if they would like something to drink, guests never leave an Arabic home without being offered something to drink and eat (Nobles and Sciarra, 2000).

I relied on these specific customs as I knew it would ease my access every time when approaching a new family. Being the person I am, the Arab Muslim woman, familiar with the guest-host tradition, I (as a researcher) could not exploit my host’s hospitality and generosity. Inhospitable behaviour is not only a source of shame, but it could also be marginalizing (Harb, 2015). The guest-host tradition in many of the Arab families I worked with imposes a moral responsibility and reciprocity (Amer, 2016), and, as an Arab guest, I felt obliged to behave with good manners to honour and respect the host. The good guest is the one who leaves a good impression, among other things. By ‘good’, I mean the one who knows how to reciprocate the hospitality and generosity received by showing appreciation. A proper way of showing appreciation is to bring a ‘gift’ to the host on the first visit (Moufahim, 2013). Every time I visited a new family, I brought a gift. In that way, I displayed my familiarity with the ‘gift giving’ tradition.

When I was a little girl, I always wondered why visitors placed their gifts on the hall floor once entering the home of the host; thus far, I never figured it out. I assumed it was something people just did. However, I still remember how fun and exciting it was to receive a gift when people came to visit. I remember one time when my parents’ friends came from far away to visit. They brought us a large gift that they placed on the floor. My little sister and I were curious and wanted to tear off the package, but our mother came out, took us aside and said gently, “you never open the gift in front of the guests. It’s ‘ayb’ [shameful]. We wait until they leave, okay?”

When I entered the hall of Hasiba’s apartment, I placed my nicely wrapped gift on her hall floor. Witnessing the smile that appeared on her face once she saw the gift, I felt satisfaction. “Oh, why bother, you shouldn’t have. We are, if God permits, family and friends”. Downplaying the obligations and expectations to show appreciation by emphasizing that it is special that I brought a gift is part of the custom.

Although growing up knowing the tradition of gift giving, I did not fully understand the importance of it until I practiced it with my interlocutors. Their reactions enriched my sense of pride and made me feel good about myself. As Alfred Schutz (1976) points out, “[t]he member of the in-group looks in one single glance through the normal social situations occurring to him and [...] he catches immediately the ready-made recipe appropriate to its solution [...] For those who have grown up within the cultural pattern, not only the recipes and their efficiency but also the typical and anonymous attitudes required by them are an unquestioned ‘matter of course’ which gives them both security and assurance.”

I felt that I at last succeeded with making a good impression of myself as a researcher by embracing my familiarity with the tradition.

Gift giving is an important part of the social life of the families I worked with. As we know from the anthropological literature, gift-giving plays an important role far beyond the specific customs that my interlocutors consider to originate in Arab Muslim traditions. Gift giving and the emphasis on reciprocity appears to be a universal human phenomenon (Komter, 2007). Social scientists have defined gift giving as a form of reciprocity or exchange process that integrates a society, but also as a rhetorical gesture in social communication (Banks, 1979; Godelier and Scott, 2000; Lévi-Strauss, 2013; Mauss, 2002). In particular, the work of sociologist Marcel Mauss (2002) is recognized as fundamental to contemporary interpretations of gift giving. Mauss viewed gift giving as a form of optimizing behaviour and as an ideal contract. In line with Bronislaw Malinowski (1932), who argued that reciprocity, in the sense of calculated ‘give and take’, was the central principle underpinning all social life, Mauss pointed out that gifts create a network of social obligations, consisting of a three-fold reciprocity: giving, taking, and returning. The imperative nature of this three-fold obligation derives from its cultural embeddedness. Mauss understood the gift as a total social fact (Mauss, 2002).

While gift giving has previously attracted the attention of scholars from different social disciplines, the religious dimension of gift giving still seems to be neglected. Gifts in the form of charitable donations, zakāt and Sadaqa, are highlighted in Islamic theology (Mittermaier, 2014), whereas gift giving, al-muhādāt, between friends and family is a recommended practice. It is specifically encouraged amongst family members, friends and community members as gifts offer affection, reinforce brotherhood, and remove grudges, as stated in the following Islamic hadith, ³ “Abu Hurayra reported that the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, said, ‘Give gifts and you will love one another’”(Al-Bukhari, 2018). Since the advent of Islam, Muslim communities have used objects and artefacts as means of expressing their faith, identity and status and to reinforce social bonds (Moufahim, 2013).

Choosing a gift is not an easy job. How do we decide which gifts to give to people we do not know in advance. How can we know if the gift is “appropriate”, not too big, not too small, not too silly, not too serious, etc. In my case, choosing what gift to give my interlocutors was not that challenging, as I already had a guideline to follow. As I grew up, I learned that the gift should always reflect the purpose of the visit. For instance, if the visit is about congratulating a childbirth, then the gift should be something to be used by the new-born or the mother. If the visit is about a sick person, then the gift should be something to be worn or eaten by that person. Because I was visiting my interlocutors in their homes, it made perfect sense to give a gift that would add something to their homes. This could be a vase, a set of cups, kitchen tools etc.

While choosing the gift was the easy part, deciding the price of the gift was not. On the one hand, I worried about giving an inexpensive gift; on the other hand, I had to be careful not to give an expensive gift and risk coming across as arrogant or haughty. Therefore, I relied on a much more experienced gift-giver, my mother, who gave me sound advice, “remember that you are still a ‘stranger’ without any prior knowledge of their living standard or what they would prefer in a gift. Let your gift reflect that you are a down to earth person.”

Giving the gift had the purpose of showing respect and appreciation for accepting my visit and allowing me into their homes to visit them over a longer period of time, yet, at the same time, the gift somehow objectified a willingness to bond and engage in a friendship relation with them. In the beginning, I had no idea about how bonding and engaging in a friendship relation would influence my personal life. As I should have known from reading Marcel Mauss, the gift giving relationship is not a one-way-process that you can simply get out of; rather, it is a reciprocal practice and ‘total social fact’(Mauss, 2002).

In my case, I assumed that my social obligation of giving back was fulfilled when I gave the gift to my interlocutors on my first visit. However, I realized that even if we, as individuals, share gender and religious and ethnic backgrounds, we do not necessarily understand reciprocity and gift giving in the same way.

Some of my interlocutors expressed a need to reciprocate my gift by visiting me in my private home in accordance with their customs. The fact that they opened their homes to me did not seem to be considered as something to be reciprocated. Their action of ‘giving’ access is presumably a natural part of their practice of hospitality, and, therefore, they did not expect to be reciprocated (Othman et al. 2015). Their ‘obligation’ to reciprocate was first activated when they received my gift. While for me the ‘reciprocal circle’ was fulfilled by giving a gift to say ‘thank for your hospitability’, for them to be ‘good people’ or ‘good Muslims’ their ‘reciprocal circle’ could only be fulfilled by ‘returning’ the visit and buying me a gift.

Although I entered the field relying on my knowledge about gift giving and some readings on hospitality and generosity (Amer, 2016; Harb, 2015; Mauss, 2002; Mittermaier, 2014; Moufahim, 2013), my interlocutors wish to visit me in my private home took me by surprise. I became aware that I had given too little thought to my unique circumstances and what kind of insider researcher I was and had set out to be.

One day during March 2018, Hasiba’s granddaughter Aya told me they were planning to visit me, “We are planning to visit you soon. In fact, we have already bought you a gift, but I can’t say what it is.”

My presence in the lives of my interlocutors most likely placed a responsibility on them; a responsibility that was manifested in the fact that although living in a different settings they still valued their traditions and also had to live up to certain ethics, moral standards and expectations, a premise I have no right to ignore. It definitely plays a role – but other than that, I think they were curious and wanted to visit me and thus expand the relationship. In other words, it was probably not just pure duty from their side.

Engaging in friendly relations was a natural and often crucial part of the form of research I wished to carry out; however, in addition to the specific responsibilities and norms of hospitality that came along with being a friend and researcher engaging in a friendship with my interlocutors, I found myself having to negotiate these along with the various ideals of being an anthropologist, a Dane, an Arab, a woman, a mother, a daughter etc.

The situation gave rise to a complication of my different professional, private, social, and religious identities. Perhaps my eagerness to collect rich anthropological “data” blinded me from reflecting upon how the chains of relationships established by gift giving would influence my private life. I could probably have done it differently by acting ignorant about the gift giving tradition and not taking part in it, but engaging in that particular tradition gave me access to a particular part of my interlocutors culture and created a fuller view of it.

Also, by not engaging in the gift giving I would run the risk of harming my family’s reputation and my own reputation as an Arab-Danish Muslim woman from Gellerup who is supposed to know and be familiar with the traditions. By not practicing gift giving, I would not have been the insider who had ‘become a stranger’; I was already that insider with a stranger’s ignorance about the chain of relationships created by the gift giving.

By giving the gift, I displayed my familiarity as a ‘native’ and learned that I acted as a ‘matter of course’. According to J. Hockey (1993), there are always costs involved in insider research. These costs may concern the position of the researcher in relation to the group being investigated. What determines the price to be paid is, among other things, the level of the engagement of the insider researcher. Another determinant is the way the group responds to the insider in the role as a researcher, either positively or negatively (Hockey, 1993). In my case, by giving gifts, I showed engagement and dedication to my interlocutors and embraced our perceived commonalties. In return, they responded positively by accepting me and allowing me into their homes. The line between my role as insider researcher and my role as the Arab-Danish Muslim woman became ambiguous, resulting in no other option but to open my home to some of my interlocutors. Once I did, I was overwhelmingly complimented by my interlocutors.

“My mother (Hasiba) kept talking about how much she liked visiting you. You are such a good host; generous and hospitable with such a clean home. We had such a good time” (Sana, 32)

My interlocutors expected me to perform as a daughter in a family, as someone who is supposed to be familiar with customs; however, because I have distanced myself from the community – or at least parts of it – I was no longer completely familiar with their customs. I was someone’s daughter and an Arab-Muslim mother, but, at the same time, I was also a researcher and a stranger: simultaneously both insider and outsider.

My father’s daughter

Doing fieldwork in Aarhus, and in Gellerup specifically, I at once felt at home and in some ways estranged from my home. I was free from worrying about the problems of ‘settling in’ that many anthropologists face when entering the field.

The people I interviewed and followed saw me as ‘one of them’. They all opened their homes to me, not only out of hospitality and generosity but also out of appreciation of me being one of them, studying my own community and aiming to present what they labelled a ‘positive’ picture of the Arab Muslim families and their approach to the elderly care tradition.

“You project is good because you focus on a tradition that we are so proud of as Arab Muslims families” (Hasiba). They expected me to present a positive story about Muslim Arabs in Gellerup; a story that was supposed to counter the generally negative and prejudiced media representations of Gellerup (Corlin et al., 2017; Johansen, 2013) and Muslims in Denmark in general (Andreassen, 2019; Rytter and Pedersen, 2014).

Not only did I speak the same language and share the same ethnic and religious background, but some of them also had ties of kinship and friendship to my family. Others knew several of my family members. My father’s name in particular caught their attention, making me quickly the daughter of my father. Prior to my fieldwork, I had considered the possibility of meeting interlocutors who knew my family, but I had not imagined that I was already fitted into existing categories, in this case as my father’s daughter. Nor had I considered that the person of my father, like Abu-Lughod among the Bedouins in Egypt (Abu-Lughod, 1988), would be an important and in some cases a decisive factor in my relatively ‘easy’ access to most of my interlocutors. I realized that the idea of a simple ‘insider’ position is not simple at all because we are not even 'insiders' in relation to the most close and intimate relationships in our own lives; there are always aspects of them – and of ourselves – that escape us.

My father shared the same ethnic, religious, refugee status and migration background as my interlocutors, but he also shared more than that. During my fieldwork, I came to know my father through the eyes of my interlocutors and their families. For them, he was known as the man who served in different positions back in t Lebanon. I had not grasped the importance of his position until I learned more about the story from my interlocutors. My father was born in the camp with refugee status like all the Palestinians who lived there. He was the only one of five siblings who managed to acquire an education despite his family’s poor socio-economic condition. After several stays abroad funded by different humanitarian organizations, my father achieved a degree in Medicine specializing in microbiology. When he returned from his stays abroad, the political and economic situation in Lebanon was in severe crisis. During the years of the Lebanese civil war, the refugee camps suffered less structural damage, but the living conditions were particularly severe. The non-existing infrastructure combined with poverty resulted in a number of social problems (Schiocchet, 2011).

I came to learn that during these difficult times, my father together with other voluteers helped in establishing different social initiatives aimed at providing economic help, work options and education to the camp inhabitants. During the war, he worked in the local clinic and provided free healt services and assistance to those in need. To some of my interlocutors, he was a man who served and helped people during crisis. Um Mahmoud (59, self-appointed helper) said the following:

“I remember the time where the camp was sieged by the militants for a couple of weeks.

I think I was 16 or 17 years old then. The food ran out and people were starving, even your grandparents had nothing left to eat. Together with several of the young people in the camp, your father found a way to leave the camp. They managed to collect food and necessary medicine and smuggled it all through a hole that they had excavated some days before. My father was very sick, I remember, and without the medicine your father had brought he would have died.”

To others, he was primarily a leading figure who fought for the Palestinians and their right to return to occupied Palestine. Although my father used to share the stories from his past with us, his children, what I learned about him from my interlocutors was different and extraordinary and exceeded what he had told us. An interlocutor of mine, Abu Ali (68), described him in the following way:

“He was a good leader with high morals and values. Very patriotic, like many of us who believed in the Palestinian cause. He was very good at handling crises and was a good negotiator as well. I remember once, the militants caught a very young man from the camp. No one could get him out but your father – a very persuasive man.”

In the auto-ethnographic contribution ‘Fieldwork of a dutiful daughter’ (1988), the Palestinian-American anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod recounts how by being introduced into her field by her father she came to learn about his attributes such as being a well-articulated fellow tribesman with noble roots (‘asl). This provided her status, protection and immeasurable access to the Bedouins in Egypt who formed the basis of her study.

As was the case for Abu Lughod, I was initially pleased with the way people welcomed me into their homes and lives due to my status of being my father’s daughter. They treated me respectfully, not as a guest but as an insider who came from a good family. I quickly became one of them; we shared meals, I participated in their gatherings, and sometimes I was present when intimate and awkward situations occurred. My interlocutors would then say, “You are not a stranger anymore” or “our home is yours”; with these and similar phrases, I was constantly reminded about my privileged position as an “insider”, “native” or “one of them” – a position that afforded me a large amount of “impression management” to maintain rapport and identity.

This again points to the multiplicity of roles and complicities I was constantly entwined in. According to Stern M. Kita (2017), the fact that one is a ‘native’ does not automatically mean that people will consider the anthropologist as an insider. Kita further cautions “that attributes such as race, education, gender or ethnicity do not in themselves ascribe one as insider or outsider. Instead, the political circumstances, relationships between researcher and those being studied and research practices are what determine whether one can be an insider or outsider” (Kita, 2017).

I continuously moved between fluctuating positions of being an outsider and an insider what resembles the discussion around “halfie” anthropologists caught between two cultural boundaries (Abu -Lughod, 1990) and working in communities in which I have ambivalent claims of commonality, a positionality where “the Other is in certain ways the self” (ibid). This implicates my researcher position in particular ways with the world of my interlocutors, where I speak not only as an ‘outsider’ but also as an ‘insider’. This, in turn, shaped the responsibilities, expectations and stakes I faced. My positionality of being both self and other to my research interlocutors varied from situation to situation.During most of the encounters and interviews, I was there as a researcher but also as a person whose background and identity was an essential part of the interview. I was always personally included in the accounts of my interlocutors: “your father raised you well”, “In those days, you were not born yet”, “you speak very well, like your father…”

I was constantly reminded that they knew me personally by knowing my father. By referring to his good morals, they were also implicitly requesting the same standards from me. There was an expectation of me as someone who should ideally continue his legacy of protecting people and struggling for them.

“You don’t know how much we appreciate what you are doing. We are really proud to be part of your project and know that we will help you as much as we can because you are helping us by writing about us and what we do for our elderly” (Sana, 32)

Furthermore, as acquaintances, my interlocutors usually asked and told me about my relatives as well as their relationships with them. Some older interlocutors knew my family tree better than I ever had.

“How is your aunt ⁴ doing? We used to be friends back in Lebanon you know. We went to the same school and grew up together, but then life happened. She moved to Germany and Imoved to Denmark. Say hello from me when you see her or speak to her” (Hasiba)

Despite emphasizing the undetectable influence her father had on accessing fieldwork, in an interview with anthropologist Sindre Bangstad (2017), Abu-Lughod argues that we should not overstate the importance of being introduced to our field and interlocutors because “doing fieldwork is intense and interpersonally complicated for everyone and no matter how introduced, it is you as a person who develops the relationships you do, even as you never escape your locatedness.”

Abu-Lughod lived and worked with her interlocutors who were primarily women, a sphere where her father was not well known and did not have much impact. He ‘gave’ her access through the Bedouin leader by displaying his Arabic ‘qualities’. My case is slightly different; my father did not personally introduce me to my interlocutors. But he was always in the background like a shadow, present in his absence.

I put effort and energy into the many relationships I established during my fieldwork, but would I have achieved the same insights if I had not been my father’s daughter?

“If I didn’t know who you are, I wouldn’t welcome you into my family so easily. Your grandparents were our upstairs neighbours in the camp in Lebanon. Your father used to be my late brother’s best friend … he is a good man with a good reputation. If I didn’t know who you are, I wouldn’t let you into my family. You know what we say, houses have secrets.…” (Um Ali, 61, self-appointed helper)

From the outset, I was framed as the daughter of my father. I knew that I was accepted on this premise and it never escaped my mind. My access was perhaps special, but not necessarily easy, as people were not only talking with me when they related to me; they were also talking to my father through me. I was at once partly a stranger, partly an insider, yet I did not enjoy the privilege of being a complete stranger – i.e. the person to whom they can tell everything because I am not part of the social fabric – nor did I enjoy the privilege of being a complete insider – i.e. if they felt a need to say to me that I was ‘not a stranger’, it was because there was a distance as this is not something one would say to an insider.

Researchers who have conducted research at home in their own community report similar experiences. Soraya Altorki (1994), who conducted her research among relatives and friends in Jiddah in Saudi Arabia, states that one advantage associated with conducting insider research is that she was treated as a daughter. Nevertheless, a number of problems also had to be confronted such as the requirement of abiding by the norms expected of her as a native; overcoming the reluctance of interlocutors to provide her with direct answers to her questions concerning personal matters such as marriage and intra-familial conflicts. Similar to Altorki, Abu-Lughod (1988), who conducted fieldwork among the Bedouins in Egypt, recounts her fictitious and temporary role as the dutiful daughter of the community and how being in this role granted her intimate access to her interlocutors and helped uncover the Bedouin ideology of modesty and honour. However, it was a role in which she was placed in a position of ‘powerlessness’ and in which she had to live up to the role of a modest daughter.

Seteney Shami (1988), in her study of the Circassian population in Jordan, explores her position as the ‘daughter’ of her own community. Shami recounts how common ethnicity granted her access and how being the daughter and granddaughter of people whom her interlocutors knew or could remember would immediately establish an atmosphere of trust. Conversely, along with the trust, Shami felt a burden of responsibility as she was concerned that her research should represent her community in a way that confirmed its ‘specialness’ and the reality of its cultural distinctiveness. Yet, even though the three respective scholars were ‘at home’ in a general sense, each had some distance with their subjects, stemming from residence abroad, post graduate training, or even class, urban residence and mixed parenting. These differences gave each of them a different perspective from which to conduct their analysis. Their presence in the field was temporary, while mine was already ‘my home’: the area I grew up in and where my family still lives. However, this home is more complex than just a home; I was both at home and away from home when conducting research. Therefore, escaping the field would be like escaping home and family – and this was not an option.

The trustful, the trustworthy and the in-between

Before entering the field, I believed – perhaps naively – that anthropologists could decide which aspects of their personal lives to reveal and include in the interactions with research participants. However, fieldwork is necessarily based on interaction, dialogue and reciprocal relations. In many instances, we were living a piece of life together, sharing and participating in each other’s lives. However, sometimes I became ambivalent about my position, especially when things became intense and personal during my fieldwork, causing me unintentionally to reveal my more private side:

“Today, Kamleh (57, self-appointed helper) was very upset. She received a call from her daughter in Sweden telling her that her 9-year-old daughter had just been diagnosed with a very rare allergy that could be dangerous. In an attempt to comfort her, I told her about my son’s chronic illness and how difficult it is to live with it as a mother. I became very emotional while doing so. Without realizing, I involved my mother-self and shared emotions with her.”

The example with my interlocutor Kamleh shows that my fieldwork not only brought me close to Kamleh’s life, but she was brought into mine too, confirming the uniqueness of the relationship between the researcher and the researched in ethnography (Spradley, 2016). The point of anthropological fieldwork as argued by Glifford Geertz is to “bring us into touch with the lives of strangers” (Geertz, 1973); however, the very nature of such practice not only requires permission from others to carry it out, but also requires being constantly involved in a form of “impression management” (Goffman, 1978). In my case, I was being sincerely present to another person. By embodying my mother role, I was involved in and revealed a fragile side of myself where I unintentionally displayed my motherhood as one more thing we had in common. Impression management plays a role, but my experience appears to transcend it.

On many occasions, I found my researcher identity blurred and sometimes overshadowed by the many roles I sometimes intentionally and sometimes unintentionally embodied during my encounter with my interlocutors. My ethnography emerged through a process of research, which at the same time was also the establishment of friendship. Both parties exchanged private details about our lives, thus facilitating the feeling of trust.

Scholars have highlighted the importance of developing trust during fieldwork. Trust is essential for building rapport between researchers and the researched (see Russell, 2005; Taylor, 2011). Philosopher Jodie Taylor (2011) explores how one goes about negotiating friendships and intimate relationships, and discusses the benefits and dilemmas engendered by such negotiations. “As an insider researcher, but particularly as an intimate insider”, Taylor managed to build what, according to her, was a close friendship based on mutual exchange and trust, which further engendered a variety of qualities including honesty, empathy, respect, loyalty, affection, esteem, altruism and love. The field was not only her site of work and learning but became her “personal belonging”. However, Taylor stresses that “the fragmentations of self in this instance are multiple and the ethical negotiations are complex […] Friendship (like research) has rules of engagement and being an ethical friend may mean not betraying confidence imparted.” However, being a so-called ethical friend, Taylor writes “may also at times compromise one’s research, particularly what you allow yourself to see as a researcher and what you choose to communicate with outsiders; that is, what you say and what you do not say.“(Taylor, 2011)

I can certainly relate to some but not all the emotions Taylor describes. Taylor’s experience indicates mutual feelings and efforts; however, in my case, the purpose was never to be an ‘intimate insider’. The extent to which I shared my life differed according to the interlocutor, and the extent to which the interlocutors disclosed information about their lives varied. Trust undoubtedly played an important role in the relationship with my interlocutors, but as the below example shows, it sometimes led to awkward and unpleasant situations where I was left with a feeling of uncertainty:

“Today Naima asked me to come with her to the doctor, and I agreed. The visit was about an intimate matter and I felt overwhelmed and embarrassed by the experience, but I guess she felt the same way. When we left the clinic, the first thing Naima said to me was that she trusted me, ‘We are both women, and we understand each other’, she said. Am I supposed to understand her because we both are women? She made me promise not to mention the intimate matter to anyone. I told her that I already assured her anonymity and confidentiality ⁵ ; however, she seemed not to care much about my research and then said, ‘it will bring shame on me if you mention it, you know what I mean right.’ I guess it is our secret now”.

My interlocutor Naima, who is in her 40s and is a self-appointed helper for her older husband, confided to me something personal and intimate, which reflects that I was immersed in the field and had entered into close and prolonged interaction with her, thus making the connection a personal one.

Besides studying my interlocutors, they shared parts of their lives and I revealed information concerning mine. Naima appealed to me as a private person, which made me think that she must be a trustful person to reveal something so intimate with me, or perhaps I could have given her the impression of being trustworthy. Apparently, she did not care about my researcher position, caring more about keeping the incident secret. Sharing a secret was perhaps her way of building a relationship.

Trust was there, yet the construction of trust is more complex than the use of the word itself. Trust and the reciprocity hereof vary and change depending on the situation and the context. Sometimes we ‘go all in’ and reveal intimate details about our private lives, and at other times we “control” ourselves and ‘hold back’ – not involving ourselves too much in order not to ‘loose it’.

“You cannot exit a field you never really left”

Being trustworthy motivated my interlocutors and local community to allow me into their intimate family lives. When embracing familiarity, I was framed in specific roles as the good guest, the friend, my father’s daughter, the mother and as the married woman; all roles which constructed me in a way more complex than the insider-outsider dichotomy. In some ways, my ethnography was benefitting from their trust, but I was simultaneously confronted with how as insider researchers and daughters of the community we study, we are constantly reminded of that part of identity we share in common with our interlocutors (Altorki, 1988). This may impose a sense of responsibility towards the communities we study and towards our family in particular. In my case, I felt responsible to act in accordance with the Arab Muslim customs I was raised with by cherishing and practicing them, with my father’s good deeds by honouring his name and sustaining his good reputation, and by nourishing and caring for my relationship with my interlocutors by reciprocating their hospitality and courtesy. My position as an insider had a dual effect: I was positioned as the subject and the object of my study, causing me to question whether I would be able to exit the very same interlocutors and families who trusted me and opened their lives and homes to me without violating their trust and without bringing shame on my father and my family.

I decided to share my frustration about my exit from my fieldwork with my father; after all, he was the one who unintentionally contributed to and was present in my fieldwork. I recall a conversation I had with him even before initiating my fieldwork, where he reminded me about my ethical responsibility towards the community and the families I was about to study. Back then, I did not really pay attention to what he meant; however, following a second conversation with him, I learned an important lesson.

“Today, I finally gathered myself together and revealed to my father ⁶ my frustration about how to exit my field. He was not calm like the first time we talked about fieldwork. I think he was emotionally affected by my discomfort and uncertainty, but that did not hold him back from saying things straight into my face. ‘Let me ask you first, what did you expect? You build relationships with these families and they revealed their secrets to you just by letting you in their houses and lives, and, like it or not, they also invested in you. I met some of your interlocutors on several occasions, and they told me how much they like and appreciate your friendship. Some of them even remember when you were a child. I can’t tell you how to cut your relationship with them, but I can ask you to think about how you want to be remembered when and if you find a way to escape your field’.”

What did I really expect? When I returned to Gellerup and encountered people who had lived there continuously, I was met with open doors and open arms, not as the researcher but as ‘one of them’ who never really left. I realized that I might have chosen a different lifestyle by moving away from my childhood area, but the things I have learned, ogether with the experiences and the rediscoveries, indicate that while I can perhaps escape my field or disentangle myself from it, I cannot entirely exit it. The conversation with my father helped me recall those times when I tried to remind my interlocutors that my fieldwork will end as some point and that I will not be able to visit them in the same extent. However, for them, it was the end of my project and not the end of our relationship as my interlocutor Um Ali hints to

“Your project will come to an end, but you know that you are more than a researcher to us. You will continue visiting whenever you like. Our home is your home now”.