Fifteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

Sociological and anthropological ethnographic researchers, especially those adopting a phenomenologically-attuned perspective, are frequently exhorted to engage in the bracketing of pre-existing assumptions and presuppositions in researching the lifeworlds of participants. The challenges of engaging in the ‘epochē’ and bracketing are considerable, however, and particularly acute for ethnographic ‘insiders’ and autoethnographic researchers, who are familiar with the field under study, including the embodied experiences of inhabiting that field. In this paper, we delineate the key elements of a sociological- phenomenological approach to the study of physical-cultural embodiment in general, before portraying the specific bracketing practices in which we engaged in two recent studies of competitive swimming and distance running, respectively; both domains with which we were highly familiar. Drawing on our own experiences, we then propose some practical ways in which ethnographic and qualitative researchers more generally might consider approaching the challenges of epochē and bracketing, in order to question our often tacit and long-held assumptions regarding participation in familiar physical cultures and lifeworlds. These include the role of critical, ‘outsider’ colleagues, and re-immersion in the physical culture under study but under different conditions, so as to ‘refresh’ embodied ways of knowing, together with the use of video and audio self-recordings.