Article

Ethnographer as creation: A
Whiteheadian interpretation of Qualitative Research
2024, Vol. 24(2) 26947–286
© The Author(s) 2022
the ethnographic subject Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/14687941221138411
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Elina Paju 
University of Helsinki, Finland

Abstract
This article examines the dynamic process constituting the researcher-subject in eth-
nographic fieldwork. Applying the theoretical framework of AN Whitehead AN (1964)
The Concept of Nature: The Tarnell Lectures Delivered in Trinity College in 1919.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Whitehead AN (1929/1985) Process and Re-
ality: An Essay in Cosmology. New York: Free Press, I argue that the ethnographical
researching subject is the outcome of fieldwork. I analyse field encounters and illustrate
how the ethnographer is constituted differently depending on the field. The field en-
counter consists of multiple, sometimes overlapping, entities. The entities present in the
field encounter may stem from the past illuminating how endurance and change si-
multaneously operate in the constitution of the ethnographer. Following Whitehead’s
thinking, there is no separation between experience and datum. This emphasises how
even in the process of knowing the subject and object of research are entwined. This
article is a conceptual analysis of selected empirical cases illustrating the emergence of the
researcher-subject in fieldwork encounters. I base my analysis on cases from four
ethnographic fieldworks I have conducted.

Keywords
ethnography, subject, AN Whitehead, fieldwork, participant observation

Introduction
In this article, I ask how the ethnographer as the subject is constituted in the research
process, particularly in fieldwork encounters. That the subjectivity of the researcher is a

Corresponding author:
Elina Paju, Department of Social Sciences (Sociology), University of Helsinki, P.O. Box 18 (Unioninkatu 35),
Helsinki 00014, Finland.
Email: Elina.paju@helsinki.fi
270 Qualitative Research 24(2)

cornerstone of ethnographic research is evident. Katz (2019), for instance, observes that
the outcome of the research is dependent on the personality of the ethnographer since it is
the personality, which steers the decisions made through the research process. Denzin
(2017: 12) argues that the ethnographer’s self consists of shifting identities. Thus, the self
can be regarded as multiple and changing (cf. Davies, 2000). Despite the decentring of the
subject in knowledge production, the researching self remains, according to Hayden
(2009: 87), agentive and isolable. I step aside from this agentive positioning by analysing
how different elements impact the constitution and creation of the ethnographic subject.
To this aim, I focus particularly on two sides of the formation of the ethnographer: first,
how the self and subjectivity of the ethnographer is constituted from multiple entities and
is subject to change depending on the field and fieldwork encounters and, second, how not
only continuous change and becoming but also endurance plays a part in the formation of
the ethnographer. The entities constituting the ethnographer may also stem from the past.
Through these empirical analyses, I argue that the ethnographer is the outcome of the
research. In exploring the formation of the ethnographic subject, I employ the process
ontology of Alfred North Whitehead (e.g. 1964, 1985).
How a researcher’s self is constituted and how the researcher is affected by the research
process could be analysed in any kind of research setting. Here, my focus is on eth-
nography. The choice stems from my experience in conducting ethnographic research. In
my analysis, I concentrate on events and encounters between myself and the research
participants during fieldwork. Fieldwork provides ethnographers with recorded material
of different encounters and experiences stemming from them. As Gemignani (2011: 703)
remarks, the relation between the researcher and the research participants creates
emotional reactions that affect the research rapport, the ways the researcher is able to
interpret the data and the view of the researcher of themselves. However, while fieldwork
constitutes a crucial part of an ethnographer’s work, the subjectivity of the ethnographer is
formed not only in fieldwork but also in the process of the whole research (cf. Coffey,
1999; Luvaas, 2019).
This article proceeds as follows. First, I present the discussion I am taking part of,
namely, how the ethnographer is formed in the research process. I also introduce the
thinking of Whitehead, concentrating on his view of the world as constituted by a
multiplicity of simultaneously dynamic and enduring entities. I then turn to describe the
data my analysis is based upon as well as the ways I worked in analysis for this article. In
the empirical sections, I particularly examine two sides affecting the way the researcher is
constituted in the research process: first, how the constitution of the ethnographer is based
on multiple elements that differ from one field to another resulting in the changing
positionality of the ethnographer. I illustrate how different attributes come to define the
ethnographer, and, hence, affect the knowledge produced. Second, I analyse how not only
change but also endurance has a part in the formation of the subject in ethnographic
research. Both empirical analyses touch upon the division between the subject and object
of knowledge, which has direct impact on the basic practice of ethnographic fieldwork,
participant observation. I explore the multiplicity involved in research encounters further
in the concluding section of this article and argue that according to such an interpretation,
the researcher is created through the research process.
Paju 271

Conceptualising the researcher in ethnography and in

Whitehead’s thinking
Ethnography offers a special way to explore the subjectivity of the researcher because of
its particular, often temporally long, fieldwork and field encounters with research par-
ticipants. Ever since the reflexive turn of the 1980s, reflection has been an integral part of
ethnographic work (Marcus, 2009: 1). Reflexivity places the subjectivity of the researcher
at the centre of both knowledge-production and representation (Pink, 2009: 36). Central to
contemporary ethnography is the claim that the researcher’s subjectivity plays a sig-
nificant part in knowledge-production: it informs the way the researcher understands what
they are researching and what they see as important topics to research. Katz (2019: 16)
argues that what is at stake in the ways ethnographers conduct their research is their
personality as a whole. The personality of the ethnographer may be put into conscious
action in data generation, as proposed by Reyes (2020), when she analyses what she calls
the visible (e.g. race, ethnicity) and invisible (e.g. social capital) ‘tools’ ethnographers use
strategically to their advantage. Subjectivity also informs the ways in which the relations
between the participants of the research and the researcher are formed. Hence, con-
temporary ethnography sees the data generated in the research as something that is not just
collected from the site of the research, but as produced by the research participants and the
researcher. Thus, the researcher is integrally situated in the field they study (Denzin, 2017:
12; Pink, 2009).
In this article, I take part in the discussion on the subjectivity and self of the eth-
nographer (e.g. Coffey, 1999; Hayden, 2009; Luvaas, 2019). The tension between
subjectivity and objectivity has always been an issue to deal with in ethnography
(Clifford, 1986: 13). Here, I aim to go beyond the agentive level in researcher/researched
relations. As Hayden (2009: 97) notes, emphasis is usually placed on the agentive action
of the researcher ‘to the near exclusion of anyone else’ in methodological explorations
concentrating on the actions of the researcher. However, the subject and object of research
may also be understood to be mutually constituted (Hayden, 2009: 86). Hayden (2009)
argues that the contemporary understanding of the nature of knowledge as situated has
resulted in the view of the self as intersubjective and dialogical and proposes that re-
searchers act as signs to research participants, which the participants interpret and react to.
Challenging the idea of an agentive researcher relates to discussions and developments
around the concept of self. The self has been interpreted to be a historically evolving
notion (Taylor, 1989) and dynamic and changing even during an individual’s life (e.g.
Bhavnani and Phoenix, 1994; Davies, 2000). Writing from a feminist poststructuralist
perspective Davies (2000: 26) argues that the self is not a thing, but ‘an interactive,
discursive process’. In that vein, Coffey (1999: 22) suggests that the fieldworker self is
situated with and connected to the other selves in the field. Research participants affect the
ethnographer’s self; the self is not static but is negotiable and fluid (cf. Coffey, 1999: 28).
Gemignani (2011: 703) observes that the positioning in the field affects not only how the
researcher constructs the participants and the data but also how the researcher’s sub-
jectivity is shaped in the field. Planning for fieldwork is made challenging by the fact that
the way the self is enacted in fieldwork is hard to control, as Katz (2019: 26) observes.
272 Qualitative Research 24(2)

Denzin (2017: 10) notes aptly that ‘a certain identity is never possible’. However, the
shifting and dynamic self is known to have a history that influences the research done in
the present (Denzin, 2017: 12).
Michael’s (2016) programmatic proposition for a speculative method in studying
everyday life also encompasses an understanding of the ethnographer and the research
participants as co-constitutive. His proposition, where the analytical unit is a ‘research
event’ where different elements in a given everyday situation coalesce, ‘intra-act’ (cf.
Barad, 2007) or emerge in ‘concrescence’ (cf. Whitehead, 1985), resembles the analysis I
undertake in this article. However, my exploration concentrates analytically on the issue
of the constitution of the ethnographer, something that is not the focus of Michael’s
proposition.
The understanding that it is not only the human researcher and the human research
participants that take part in the research and fieldwork is illustrated through the de-
velopment of sensory ethnography (e.g. Geurts, 2002; Howes, 2005; Pink, 2009). The
centrality of the ethnographer’s body to the fieldwork process and the generated data (cf.
Coffey, 1999) is crucial to sensory ethnography since the senses operate through the body;
thus, the body is the agent of sensory knowledge (Low, 2015; Pink, 2009). The scope in
sensory ethnography is, however, widened to the place, situation and environment where
the researching body is located (Geurts, 2002; Howes, 2019). As Pink (2009: 23) argues,
sensory ethnography ‘recognizes the emplaced ethnographer as her or himself part of the
social, sensory and material environment’. For Howes (2019: 18), this transforms the craft
of participant observation into participant sensing which is ‘an active social, rather than
passive or purely psychophysical process’.
In this article, I provide a conceptual account for the constitution of the ethnographer in
fieldwork encounters with the aid of Whitehead’s thinking. His philosophy of organism is
a cosmological theory, and, as such, not meant to be applied to social scientific meth-
odology. However, as I illustrate throughout the article, Whitehead’s thinking also
provides ethnographic methodology for conceptual fuel. For Whitehead, the world is
constantly in process: it is dynamic and evolving. This is the basic matter of existence. As
Roberts (2014: 972) puts it, for Whitehead, ‘things are, only in so far as they are taking
place’. Here, I shall briefly outline key components of Whitehead’s thinking that are
essential for my analysis of the constitution of the ethnographer. These are the propo-
sitions that the world consists of actual entities, the processuality of his concept of the
subject, the nature of actual entities and their ‘life-span’ and the effects the life of actual
entities have on the understanding of change and endurance. Much of Whitehead’s work,
however, remains out of scope for this article.
Whitehead’s overriding critique towards modern Western thought is that it rests on the
bifurcation of nature. By this concept, he refers to the tendency of modern thinking to
divide the world into two separate sets of things. On a fundamental basis, this separation
concerns nature and our minds, that is, the separation between the entities natural sciences
deal with, such as molecules, and our common sense, ‘psychic’ experiences of them (cf.
Latour, 2011: xii). Whitehead (1964) illustrates this with the example of a sunset and
maintains that the sunset incorporates the molecules, electrons and so on, as well as our
emotional response in experiencing it. Consequently, Whitehead’s philosophy challenges
Paju 273

many dualisms that our thinking is based on. Among these, Tamboukou (2016: 152) lists
dualisms such as facts/values, individual/society, reason/experience and subject/object.
Whitehead’s thinking is essentially a cosmological theory where the basic building block
of the world is an actual entity. In his words:

‘Actual entities’—also termed ‘actual occasions’—are the final real things of which the world
is made up. There is no going behind actual entities to find anything more real. (Whitehead,
1985: 18)

The formation of elements into a new existent is what Whitehead refers to as con-
crescence. (Halewood and Michael, 2008: 39). Thus, the formation of actual entities takes
place in concrescence with other entities (Whitehead, 1985: 7). What is produced in
concrescence is always something new: a new form of assemblage or a unity of different
elements (Whitehead, 1985: 21–22), it is the becoming of a particular existent
(Tamboukou, 2016: 153). The unity achieved in concrescence may involve various
entities on various scales (e.g. a cell, an arm, an overhead projector and an entire lecture).
Thus, actual entities emerge on different scales, but they also overlap one another.
Importantly, actual entities are not only physical entities but may as well be experiences.
The processuality in Whitehead’s thinking also affects his view of the subject. For
Whitehead, the static individual remains, as aptly formulated by Roberts (2014: 975), ‘a
limited abstraction’. Moreover, as Halewood and Michael (2008: 35) observe, there is no
‘ongoing mind or identity’ that would sustain the subject. In Whitehead’s philosophy, the
starting point is not the subject, but ‘a datum which is met with feelings, and progressively
attains the unity of a subject’ (Whitehead, 1985: 155). The world is not constituted by the
subject but ‘the subject emerges from the world’ (Whitehead, 1985: 88). To emphasise the
difference between the more traditional concept of subject that rests on an understanding
of the world as composed of dualisms and his version of it, Whitehead named his version
of subject a superject. A superject is the outcome of the acts, feelings, thoughts and so on
directed towards the ‘subject’; hence, the ‘subject’ is not the source of them. Since the
superject emerges as the outcome of concrescence, it is not static. Whitehead defines the
superject:

The philosophy of organism […] conceives the thought as a constituent operation in the
creation of the occasional thinker. The thinker is the final end whereby there is the thought. In
this inversion we have the final contrast between a philosophy of substance and a philosophy
of organism. The operations of an organism are directed towards the organism as a ‘su-
perject’, and are not directed from the organism as a ‘subject’. (Whitehead, 1985: 151.)

Whitehead’s formulation of the superject means that this kind of subject is born in each
new concrescence. His refusal of dualisms affects the subject as well as how we should
understand knowledge. The world and the subject are entwined and cannot be separated,
and this also concerns the subjects and objects of research practice and, in general,
knowing. Stengers (2011: 298) points out that knowing, for Whitehead, is a form of
274 Qualitative Research 24(2)

creation, where there is no separation in the act of knowing between the knower and the
known.
Ingold and Simonetti (2022: 17–18) have recently argued that, for Whitehead, process
and stability are also a matter of perspective. Our Western perspective is one where we
look at things from the outside and often, too, in hindsight. This makes things seem
stabile. However, an insider’s perspective would mean to step into the middle of things
occurring. Ingold and Simonetti (2018: 17) describe the process of concrescense when
they point out that from the inside ‘every thing turns out to be none other than the process
of its own self-creation, a process that, at each and every moment, enfolds an entire
universe into a singular nexus’. However, while Whitehead emphasises the ongoing
processuality of the world and critiques the Aristotelian primary substances, he does not
see the answer in the emphasis of all-encompassing processuality. As Halewood (2011:
24) puts it, ‘postmodern emphases on irreality and flows and flights are not the answer’.
Stengers (2011: 199) claims that ‘endurance is the key term for the philosophy of the
organism. […] A new idea burgeons, lived continuity is prolonged, but drop by drop’.
Whitehead is able to tackle change and endurance simultaneously with the con-
ceptualisation of an actual entity’s ‘life-span’, which involves its ‘satisfaction’. Satis-
faction marks the high point of an actual entity: it is where it comes to be, but at that point,
it also dies. The past entities do not, however, vanish altogether, but become objects that
may influence new and upcoming actual entities (cf. Stengers 2011: 306; Halewood and
Michael, 2008: 35). Consequently, actual entities are part of the constitution of each other
(Whitehead, 1985: 48). As Whitehead (1985: 22) states, ‘it belongs to the nature of
“beings” to be a potential for each “becoming”’. Actual entities do not themselves change,
but their effects can be influential on new creations in different ways. This is an important
definition in Whitehead’s philosophy, since it captures the simultaneous endurance and
change (cf. Michael, 2016: 18–19; Stengers, 2011: 306). It is also important to my
definition of the ethnographic subject in the conclusions to this article.

Fieldwork cases and process of analysis

This article is based on my ethnographic research in four research projects and has been
born out of wonder, and perhaps frustration, during those projects. I tried to find a way to
grasp what I felt was the mutual becoming of myself and the knowledge I gained. What I
am as a researcher and as a participant in the field I study seemed to change from one
occasion to another. In my PhD field of children’s day care, a child compared me, in one
instance, to his father, while on another occasion, I was mistaken as a student by the staff.
In my ongoing research, I have been assumed to be an employee for the UN and a reporter
for CNN. What is the relationship between the changing positions I felt I have been put in
(or that I put myself in) and the endurance I have felt I was expected to have while
conducting research systematically and with an enduring ethical disposition?
For this article, I have selected examples from four research projects on which I base
my analysis concerning the creation of the ethnographer in fieldwork. All of the data
excerpts presented in this article originate from my field notes during each study and are
based on participant observation. The studies referenced in the article are as follows: first,
Paju 275

my PhD ethnography research, during which I spent a year conducting fieldwork in a

children’s day care in southern Finland and focussed on the materiality of everyday life in
day care (cf. Paju, 2018). The second was a study concentrating on different aspects of the
making of citizens in youth activation workshops (located in the metropolitan area of
Helsinki, Finland) intended for youths who had completed compulsory education, but had
afterward been left outside of employment, education and further training (cf. Paju,
2020)1. The third example stems from my study on the home-making practices and
everyday lives of young refugee children (cf. Paju et al. forthcoming)2. For this study I
have conducted fieldwork in Finnish reception centres and private family homes of
children that have recently gained asylum in Finland and in Istanbul, Turkey, where
families with young children are seeking a way to proceed on their journey towards the
EU. The data excerpt for this article is from my field notes while I was in Istanbul. The
fourth and last example is based on a study focussing on young children’s use of
technology and consumption of media culture3. For this, I conducted short-term fieldwork
in a day care centre and also in children’s homes in the metropolitan area of Helsinki,
Finland. The case presented in this article is from the home study.
The tools for the analysis of this article are theoretical and based on the thinking of
Whitehead. Moreover, the interpretation is not one I began with when starting my first
fieldwork during my PhD, but has evolved during the process of conducting research
among different field sites and encounters with research participants. The interpretation
presented in this article has required me to go back to my previous experiences of
conducting research and, thus, reflect on and interpret them anew. As Whitehead’s
ontology is quite abstract and theoretical, I have decided to use four examples to illustrate
how the ethnographer is created in field encounters. I have selected these four cases for
this article because they illustrate the themes that emerge in my field experiences more
widely. Rather than being an empirical analysis on the practices of knowing, this article
consists of a reflective, theoretical conceptualisation of the becoming and constitution of
the ethnographer. From Whitehead’s wide vocabulary of concepts, I have picked only
some to work with in the analysis, that is, the actual entities, concrescence and the
superject. All of these concepts incorporate Whitehead’s basic assumption of an all-
encompassing processuality and his refusal of the dualisms inherent in modern Western
thinking.
Whitehead’s conceptualisation of the world as a result of the concrescence of actual
entities poses a challenge for analysis. Any example I have chosen to present could be
analysed from multiple angles. I am aware that by presenting the extracts and analysing
myself as an ethnographer, I am myself taking part of the concrescence of the research
subjectivity that I am aiming to analyse in a particular way. Moreover, language and the
process of writing also include the subject/object-division inherent in Western episte-
mology (Clifford, 1986: 5; Davies, 2000; Halewood, 2011: 13). Thus, the field notes on
which I base my analysis also repeat such implicit understandings. Nonetheless, with
these restrictions in mind, I illustrate how the constitution of the ethnographer takes place
according to Whitehead’s concepts.
276 Qualitative Research 24(2)

Actual entities in the positioning of the ethnographer

How is it that the same ethnographer can be constituted in a multitude of ways in the fields
they are studying? Katz (2019: 43) observes that it is the whole personality of the
ethnographer that is at stake in fieldwork, while Denzin (2017) writes about the shifting
identities of the researcher. How is the combination of these arguments possible? In this
section, I analyse how the ethnographer becomes constituted differently depending on the
field. In ethnographic literature, this is usually referred to as positioning. Davies (2000:
70) explains how positioning refers to the ways individuals are constituted in relation to
different social and cultural discourses. Drawing on Whitehead’s conceptualisations I
illustrate in my analysis how positioning can be interpreted as incorporating multiple
actual entities that might overlap. I present three cases from my studies where different
attributes of myself have become decisive factors of my constitution. For the sake of
analytical clarity, I have illustrated in this section how I am being positioned differently in
different research settings by adopting some of the most observable attributes in each case.
Reyes (2020) warns that limiting reflexivity to just a few attributes of the researcher can
risk making a stereotype of the researcher themselves. Moreover, following Whitehead’s
(1985) thinking on concrescence, there are obviously more entities affecting how the
ethnographer becomes in every research situation other than those I have listed. Thus, the
analysis of this section is analytical and leaves out many of the elements at work in each
case.
The first case illustrates how the body defines the ethnographer. In this example, I was
conducting ethnographic fieldwork in a children’s day care with 3–7-year-old children.
The difference between my and the children’s bodies was apparent when I tried to squeeze
into the child-sized chairs and play nooks to be closer to my research participants. Coffey
(1999: 68) observes that ‘what our body looks like, how it is perceived and used can
impact upon access, field roles and field relationships’. In the following excerpt from my
field notes, a group of children were coming in from outdoor play. Milla, then a 5-year-old
girl, and I happened to be in the hallway at the same time.

I am taking my shoes off in the hallway. Milla looks at me and says: ‘Show me how big your
boobs are.’ At first, I can’t really make up what she’s saying so I respond something vague.
Milla repeats: ‘Show how big your boobs are.’ I say: ‘Well, maybe you can see them through
the shirt.’ Milla looks annoyed: ‘Show!’ I have managed to take my shoes off and leave the
hallway feeling somewhat anxious and embarrassed.

In the second case, the attributes that define me are less visible but still exist and divide
me and the participants, namely, my education, profession and social class. This case
stems from my fieldwork in the youth activation workshops. What became defining
factors were my work as an academic and the difference between what the participants
considered proper work and my, to them, quite peculiar work. The latter came up
particularly with the youth who attended an activating workshop on small engine rep-
aration (e.g. motor cycles and lawn movers). Their aspirations for the future consisted in
having a job either in the metal industry or with car mechanics. The fact that my
Paju 277

workplace was the university, and that it did not belong to the sphere of possibility for
them, came up when they talked about possible further education, which, for them,
consisted of vocational schools or hands-on apprenticeships. For them, my job as a
researcher, and, in particular, an ethnographer, was a mystery. This came up in different
ways; for instance, they asked me if it really was my job ‘to hang around in the different
workshops’. It could also gain a more condescending tone as in the following excerpt
from my fieldwork diary:

I’m watching as they’re building the car in the metal group. I ask what they are doing. Aapo
says: We don’t do anything. We’re watching as the instructor does.
I stand nearby. After a while Aapo adds: We should be paid more of this ‘cause there’s that
researcher. […]
The instructor leaves the room. There’s only me, Jesse and Aapo next to the car. Aapo says:
Sure, I’d feel clever if I just stood… Sure, I’d feel clever if I had a job where I’d just stand.
[…]

I walk away from the situation and go to the coffee room.

In the third case, my defining attribute stems from my nationality and the privileges
that come with it. This case is part of my research involving refugee children and their
families. In the example presented, my colleagues and I were visiting a family living on
the street in Istanbul. They were trying to figure out the means to proceed on their journey
that had taken them from Afghanistan via Iran to Turkey. Their wish was to travel to the
EU and possibly beyond. We had received their contact information from another research
participant. Sitting in the street nook that families had organised their temporary homes in,
we attracted the attention of other migrants in the same area inquiring how they would be
able to get to Sweden or Canada. The case illustrates not just my positioning as a person
(Katz, 2019), but the power I was expected by the participants to possess. Katz (2019: 23)
notes how the research participants form an image of the researcher, detailing the person
the researcher is (cf. also Hayden, 2009). The clues are taken from the researcher’s
appearance and questions they pose, as well as their general behaviour in the field. Even
though my colleagues and I tried our best to make it explicit that we were researchers and
did not have the power to arrange their journey out of Istanbul, we were still believed by
the participants as potentially able to help. After the encounter, I wrote in my field notes:

A woman approaches us and asks our interpreter how it is possible to get to Sweden. She tells
us that she has a son living in Sweden and asks us to help his son to get a lawyer who would
help his son to get her to Finland. (…)
As we are on our way to the hotel, our interpreter gets a call from one of the fathers of the
families we met today. He says he is sorry for not being there when we visited his wife and
children and that he has just learned of our visit. He asks which news outlet we were from:
“Were you from CNN?” It feels so insignificant to be a researcher from the university rather
than a reporter and always state that hopefully our research will have an impact one day.
278 Qualitative Research 24(2)

What can be gathered from these excerpts presented in relation to the constitution of
the ethnographer in fieldwork encounters? The short answer is that they illustrate how the
same individual comes to be positioned differently in different contexts and field sites.
What the decisive factors are according to how the researcher is positioned depends, not
just on the persons the research participants are, but, more importantly, the research field
itself and what the important aspects in it are. Moreover, positioning is, in part, based on
cultural discourses and categories (Davies, 2000: 23). The way I am positioned illustrates
the different divisions that are decisive to each field. To be positioned in a particular
manner does not mean that I become the person the position refers to. From a white-
headian perspective, a position is one of the entities included in the concrescence taking
place in a fieldwork encounter. A position is made of different entities.
In the first case, it was my adult-sized body that was the medium of how I was
positioned. In the second case, it was my odd profession and social class that defined me
as different from the youth. The last case illustrates a difference on a global scale, with me
as a privileged Westerner with a secure home and a passport to facilitate easy travel across
borders. Davies (2000: 23) observes aptly that the categories, according to which an
individual is positioned, are often elements of an oppositional binary pair. Thus, I was
positioned as someone different from – or even opposed to – the participants themselves.
Even though my field diary examples concentrate on my experiences and feelings of the
ways the research participants apprehended and defined me, in those events, I also defined
them, and the participants defined themselves. By emphasising my physical difference
from them, the children also defined themselves as physically distinct from me. In the act
of defining me according to my odd profession, a distinction was made between me and
the youth in the workshops who sought future professions that would hold clearer purpose
and value for them. Consequently, as the researcher is defined and positioned, so are the
participants and the very phenomena being studied (cf. Coffey, 1999: 23). This is exactly
the point Whitehead (1985) emphasises: the subject, object and datum all emerge in
concrescence.
In Whiteheadian terms, what happened in the encounters presented above is that I
became a different actual entity. Different attributes of me were emphasised in these fields,
and this affected my encounters as well as the possibilities for encounters with the
participants. The definition of me as a particular kind of person affected the ways I felt
and, consequently, dealt with situations. As Katz (2019: 42–43) points out, such be-
haviour is often decided in the moment without premeditated planning. This is exem-
plified by the case from the youth activation workshops, where the positioning of myself,
in a way I felt uncomfortable with, resulted in my almost fleeing to the coffee room to
write my field notes. This had a direct impact on my data: I stopped observing the situation
with the youth altogether. In the last case, my positioning as someone with perceived
power to help my research participants possibly had the opposite effect: participants might
have been willing to share their stories because of the hint of hope I presented. Em-
phasising particular attributes or entities of an individual in each field also made these
stand out and affected the ways I myself felt different from my research participants.
The social and physical environments with all their sensory incentives also take part in
the formation of the ethnographer. Whitehead’s (1985) term, concrescence, highlights the
Paju 279

process of something evolving and emerging in relation to other things emerging. A

flower does not just appear and grow from the soil; in doing so, the soil is affected as well
as the oxygen in the air. The same goes for the constitution of the ethnographer. The
concept of actual entity incorporates both human and non-human entities. The con-
crescences forming me as an ethnographer involved, among other things, the small
furniture in the day care centre that emphasised the size difference between children and
adults, the class hierarchies that exist in society that the youth recognised and the global
inequalities illustrated in owning a certain kind of passport. The entities involved in
concrescence need not be physical objects either. The hope the families in Istanbul carried
with them and directed towards me also entered the concrescence constituting me in the
encounter in a particular manner.

Endurance in the making of the ethnographer

The emphasis in the previous section was on the temporally present encounter during
fieldwork and the analysis accounting for the changes that occurred in the constitution of
the ethnographer. In this section, I discuss concrescence consisting of not only the entities
of the present encounter. In concrescence, the past and the present entwine. I illustrate this
with a case, where the past and memories play a significant role in the encounter between
myself and a research participant. The basic assumption in current ethnographic
methodology is that the past indeed informs the way in which the ethnographer un-
derstands the field and what they perceive to be important or interesting. Denzin (2017:
12), for instance, points out that not only is the researcher historically situated within the
processes they study but the researcher’s self also has a history of its own. Whitehead’s
thinking does not contradict this assumption. What it adds, though, is conceptualising
dynamic possibilities of how the past comes to be incorporated in the present. It also opens
up the possibility for endurance in the constitution of the ethnographer.
As already touched upon in the last section, it is not only physical objects that are the
actual entities taking part in concrescence. The hopes of the refugee families can also be
seen as actual entities that took part in the formation of myself as a particular kind of
ethnographer. Here, I continue to discuss an entity that is not a physical object, that is, a
memory. The excerpt I have chosen from my field diary stems from the fieldwork I
conducted in children’s homes while studying their use of technology and consumption of
media culture. Analysing this case also illustrates how multi-layered the encounters in
fieldwork are and how they consist of multiple overlapping actual entities.
Private homes are multisensory environments (Pink, 2004), which also affected the
situation and my experience, described below. The extract is from a visit to the home of a
6-year-old boy, Filip. When entering Filip’s home, I was immediately struck with a sense
of familiarity. The furnishings of the home included bookshelves of a type of Finnish
design that were immediately noticeable upon entering the home. This particular type of
bookshelf had been popular among students and young adults of my parents’ generation,
and its popularity was passed later on to my own generation. Consequently, I had seen the
same bookshelves filled with books and covering the walls in my relatives’ homes when
growing up and, as an adult, in many of my friends’ homes. Seeing the bookshelves from
280 Qualitative Research 24(2)

the front door resulted in my feeling instantly at home. When I entered their home, Filip’s
parents handed me a cup of tea that had an image of Queen Elisabeth II on it. The
encounter with Filip, then, included not just Filip and me but also the environment. This is
the point sensory ethnographers make: sensing places the ethnographer in the material
reality (cf. Geurts, 2002: 10). As Pink (2009: 25) would conceptualise, I was an ‘emplaced
ethnographer’ and my body, mind and the environment all took part in knowledge
generation. Besides the people, physical objects and environment, entities such as
memories and affects were part of the encounter as presented in the next excerpt.

There’s a catalogue of Lego-products on Filip’s bed, [and] he is showing [me] from it what
kind of Legos he’d wish for. […] We are sitting on Filip’s bed side by side and start to look at
the catalogue from the beginning. I suspect this situation is made easier since I’m truly
interested in the catalogue. It feels so natural to go through the catalogue and look at the
Legos together. And it feels the same way as it did with my son, at the time when it was so
important to him to get the newest catalogue. I remember how devotedly the catalogues were
examined. And how much my son knew about Star Wars because of the catalogues and Lego
packages. And at the same time, I realize that a phase in my own life is over, and it makes me a
little sad, since nowadays he’s not rushing to get the newest catalogue. So that maybe the
natural and even comfortable feeling I have when looking at the catalogue with Filip stems
precisely from this: that the Legos and the knowledge relating to them and wider issues relate
so heavily to my own experiences and memories of my own little son.

In the excerpt, my previous experiences emerge in the interaction with Filip. What is
experienced in the present carries with it some aspects of the past (cf. Tamboukou, 2016:
161). Thus, the instant whirlwind of feelings I experienced did not resonate only with the
present’s sitting side by side with Filip but also with sitting side by side with my son years
ago. Following Whitehead (1985), the situation above consists, then, of a multitude of
actual entities: the material surroundings, their meanings to me, such as the bookshelf
reminding me of friends’ homes and the tea cup hinting at a similar sense of humour, and
any possible class and national positioning. Besides these, the situation also consists of the
memories that presented in the moment and the affects emerging from the situation. The
memory can be interpreted as an actual entity stemming from the past, one that is already
dead or ‘satisfied’ according to Whitehead’s (1985) terminology. As a satisfied entity, it
has a possibility to appear in the concrescence in the present. Thus, the concrescence
forms new actual entities, one of which is me as a researcher at that moment. Conse-
quently, the event of knowledge generation consists not only of the researcher, the
research participants, the devices being used and the environment but also of the pasts of
each.
Although Whitehead’s thinking seems to emphasise the process of concrescence
taking place constantly, the memories in the above extract can be analysed in reference to
things that endure. The entities already formed and passed may have an effect on new
entities that appear (Stengers, 2011: 307), such as the experience with my son that
penetrated my encounter with Filip in the form of a memory. Past entities do not, however,
affect new entities in a pre-determined fashion. Stengers (2011: 297) illustrates
Paju 281

Whitehead’s thinking of this matter aptly: ‘Like a book as soon as it is published, however,
it is incapable of stipulating how it should be felt; it is a potentiality for feeling’.
Past entities influencing upcoming ones (e.g. old memories of situations affecting a
present encounter) counts towards the possibility for endurance in Whitehead’s thinking.
For Whitehead, the already-passed entities influence the upcoming ones by either en-
abling them or restricting them. The possibilities for endurance and a lasting effect
depend, for Whitehead, on how an actual entity is taken up by others (cf. Stengers, 2011:
306). This is what Whitehead calls the objectivity of an actual entity; the entity has become
an object for other actual entities (cf. Stengers, 2011: 307). Translating this thought into
the excerpt above, the physical environment of the home and interaction with both Filip
and his parents afford particular memories and understandings to emerge. The situation
evokes entities already passed from my history and binds Filip, his parents, their home
with the bookshelf and the LEGO catalogue to a continuum producing an understanding
of what might be at stake in Filip’s interest in the Star Wars LEGOS.
The interplay between change and endurance is manifested also in the becoming of the
ethnographer. Becoming an ethnographer, and a particular kind, takes place in the field
encounters, but continues in the process of analysis and documenting the research. Luvaas
(2019) analyses in detail how this becoming does not necessarily end, even when the
research project has ended. He emphasises the changes that being an ethnographer causes,
noting that ‘[w]e cannot go back to the people we were before we did our fieldwork’
(Luvaas, 2019: 248). Luvaas’s argument emphasises the processual nature of becoming.
However, according to Whitehead’s thinking, nothing completely new can emerge, since
the new things emerging are formed from things that already are or that have been. As
Whitehead (1985: 244) explains: ‘According to the ontological principle there is nothing
that floats into the world from nowhere. Everything in the actual world is referable to some
actual entity’. What is new is the way a new actual entity is formed.

Conclusions: The ethnographer as a creation of research

In this article, I have analysed the constitution of the ethnographer in research encounters
during fieldwork. I have attempted to step aside from the view of the ethnographer as
agentive and isolable (Hayden, 2009) using the basic ideas presented in Whitehead’s (e.g.
1964, 1985) cosmology. Whitehead’s theory gives us little practical guidance on how to
manoeuvre ourselves in fieldwork or other phases of the research process. Nevertheless, it
helps us understand why the processes of knowing, the relation between research subjects
and objects, and the evolvement of the ethnographer might be tricky and full of com-
plexities that make them difficult to explore analytically. In this concluding section, I will
elaborate on the outcomes Whitehead’s overall critique of the bifurcation of nature have
on ethnographic practice and the constitution of the researcher as superject. I will
highlight how Whitehead’s thinking illustrates the multiplicity involved in ethnographic
knowledge generation and in participant observation, in particular. This will lead me to
discuss questions around the subject and object of knowledge and the way the knowing is
both a constant process of novelty and a site for endurance.
282 Qualitative Research 24(2)

The researcher’s subjectivity has been regarded as pivotal to knowledge generation in

ethnographic research. Discussions around the identity, personality and self of the
ethnographer (e.g. Coffey, 1999; Denzin, 2017; Katz, 2019) as well as the nature of and
composition of the self in general (e.g. Davies, 2000; Taylor, 1989) have illustrated the
processuality of these concepts. The subject and the self have been understood as being
produced in the interplay and tension between social and cultural forces, discourses, and
the subjective experience (e.g. Davies, 2000). The discussions focussing on the self,
subjectivity and the embodiment of the ethnographer have come more recently to in-
corporate the environment as a site for knowledge generation. For instance, sensory
ethnography has conceptualised the role environment plays in ethnographic knowledge
generation (Geurts, 2002; Howes, 2005).
What Whitehead brings to this discussion is the attempt to surpass the dualisms
inherent in our thinking. His refusal of dualisms allows for an exploration on the different
elements participating in the ethnographic encounter that does not make judgements on
the nature of the elements involved. The overriding idea of Whitehead’s theorizing, the
critique of the bifurcation of nature, permeates also the ethnographic process of knowing.
Whitehead (1964) recognises the separation between the (natural) objects and our ex-
perience of them as a fundamental feature of Western thought. To be able to account for
diverse entities constituting the world, Whitehead maintains that the world consists of
actual entities, ‘final real things of which the world is made up’ (Whitehead, 1985: 18).
This has the benefit of avoiding separating entities based on scale (small/large, temporary/
enduring) and making divisions between subjects and objects or between experiences and
datum. An ethnographic encounter in the field is constituted of a multitude of entities,
ranging from physical objects of the environment and the people involved to conceptual
or technical devices for research (cf. Tamboukou, 2016: 152). The entities come in
different scales and might overlap one another. Thus, a human being is made, for instance,
of layers of physical entities (body parts, skin, molecules etc.). Importantly, the entities are
not ‘purely’ physical but may also be experiences, attitudes and memories. Consequently,
the ethnographic field and the research encounter consist of all kinds of actual entities.
When analysing the basic ethnographic method of participant observation from this
perspective, the complex web of participants in the field encounter becomes apparent.
From a whiteheadian point of view, it is not that interesting to pinpoint to a division
between social and natural forces or experiences involved in ethnographic knowledge
generation but to account for these various entities having an impact. For instance, one
key feature of the ethnographic subjecthood, positionality, is often interpreted to be
produced as a constitution of the self in relation to cultural and social discourses (Davies,
2000). In whiteheadian vocabulary, positionality could perhaps be interpreted better as an
assemblage of multiple actual entities some overlapping one another, without differ-
entiating cultural and social discourses from natural forces. Such positioning, then, would
be part of the concrescence taking place in the fieldwork encounter.
The refusal of dualisms inherent in the critique towards the bifurcation of nature can
also be applied to the separation between subjects and objects of ethnographical research.
As Halewood (2011: 12) points out, when the existence is split into primary substances
and subjects that experience it, this also creates a gap between the knower and the known,
Paju 283

that is, the subject and object of knowledge. Hayden (2009: 85) observes that in the
anthropological practice of observation, the Self and the Other are separated from each
other and the Other is converted into an object. As this article rests on my ethnographic
work, it also rests on this separation and, consequently, the data extracts chosen for the
article also carry with them the basic division inherent in the method. Nevertheless, I have
found it productive to work with the data to trouble and challenge this basic division in
ethnographic methodology. The idea of co-creation of data is one attempt to overcome the
division between a knowing subject and an object in ethnographic practice (Gemignani,
2011; Michael, 2016). Gemignani (2011: 702) asserts that the resolving of the distance
between the researcher and the researched, and the co-creation of data and knowledge, is
evident in research that engages the researcher on a very intimate and subjective level.
Similarly, Howes’ suggestion for a replacement of participatory observation – partici-
patory sensing – is not an individual psychophysical endeavour, but an active social
process (Howes, 2019: 18). Translated into the ethnographic encounter, Whitehead’s
thinking and critique of dualisms challenge the division between a researching ethno-
graphic subject and the research participants as objects of research. Although Whitehead’s
theorising is not meant to be applied straightforwardly into methodological choices,
possible ways towards a whiteheadian methodology might be reached by following the
ideas of co-creation of data (e.g. Gemingnani, 2011), participatory sensing (Howes, 2019)
and, particularly, Michael’s (2016) proposition for a speculative methodology. The idea of
different entities participating in and evolving in an ethnographic encounter disassembles
the dualistic view in ethnographic knowledge generation.
Viewing the world through this kind of lens could result in an experience of total chaos.
If the world is indeed emerging constantly, how is it possible in practice to accomplish
anything? Is the ethnographic encounter just a haphazard collection of entities emerging?
Apart from the multiplicity in the becoming of the world, its’ process, what the
Whiteheadian conceptualisation of the world helps to grasp is accounting for endurance
and stability as well. By conceptualising a world that is simultaneously in process and
endures, Whitehead differs from postmodern emphasis on a continuous flow (Halewood
2011: 204). When thinking about ethnographic fieldwork the pasts of entities in every
situation also take part in the generation of knowledge. Hence, when analysing the
fieldwork encounters, it is not enough to focus solely on the present moment, but un-
derstand the encounters as constituted of different temporal layers.
The entwinement of process and endurance can be detected also in the constitution of
the ethnographer in fieldwork. The endurance of a sense of self as a researcher is based on
the previous actual entities resonating to the new ones. On the one hand, then, the
ethnographer is constructed anew in every research, in every encounter with the research
participants or with the data when analysing it after leaving the field. On the other hand,
however, nothing completely new emerges. Rather, a new mixture, a new assemblage, a
new composition of actual entities already existed is created. This is what takes place all
the time, everywhere, not just in research. I argue, however, that ethnographic knowledge
generation offers an excellent example of overcoming the separation between process and
endurance or stability. If the separation is a matter of perspective (Ingold and Simonetti,
2022: 17–18) we do, indeed, as ethnographers unite those perspectives by capturing
284 Qualitative Research 24(2)

things both as stabile and in the middle of their becoming. The dualism of change and
endurance can, thus, be overcome in ethnographic fieldwork. To be able to capture both
the stability and the process we need to pay attention to entangled web of entities
participating in our field encounters that challenge the division between past and present
When interpreted through Whitehead’s conceptualisations, the ethnographer emerges
from the research encounters as an actual entity through the intermingling of different
non-human and human entities. Whitehead (1985: 234) illustrates this idea by referring to
the listening of music: the auditor only emerges in the process of listening to the tune. For
Whitehead, then, it is not the hearing subject who captures the object, that is, the melody
or the tunes. The subject is turned into a superject that comes to be in the process of
listening to the music. Similarly, the ethnographer as a superject comes to be in con-
crescence of the field encounter. The ethnographer as superject is not independent of the
process, action or quest they are in (cf. also Stengers, 2011: 384). The process of re-
searching is what makes the researcher.
Formation of knowledge is the result of concrescence. According to Whitehead, we
cannot know an individual, an entity or a subject in advance (Roberts, 2014: 978). The
point is that these are happening, occurring, becoming. We do not enter the field as static
selves. Rather, our selves, such as we are in the field, are activated there, with the
particular encounters we face. What Whitehead encourages us to consider is that we are
born with our researches. We are created through them: not creators, but creations.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article: This work was supported by the Koneen Säätiö, 4705839.

ORCID iD
Elina Paju  https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3295-2925

Notes
1. The study was part of the research project ’Migrant Youth Unemployment: Politics of Rec-
ognition and Boundaries of Belonging’ (University of Helsinki).
2. The study was part of the research project ’Struggles over Home and Citizenship – Neigh-
bourhood Solidarity as a Response to the Asylum ‘Crisis’ (University of Helsinki).
3. The study was part of the research project ’Young children’s media cultures’ (Finnish Youth
Research Society).
Paju 285

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Author biography
Elina Paju is a university Lecturer in sociology at the Department of Social Sciences
(University of Helsinki, Finland).