‘Listen to your mother’: negotiating gender-based safe space during fieldwork ,

摘要

'Where is the man (cadê o homem).' an indigenous Canela man 1 asked me one morning in April 2012 as I was walking back to my mother's thatched-roof house after taking my early- dawn bath in the stream. He was asking about my partner, who was from the United States like myself, and who had been visiting me in the Canela indigenous village of Escalvado in northeast Brazil where I was conducting my fieldwork. My partner had left for the major city of Teresina, where he had been working a few days earlier, yet community members continued to ask after him because, as this was the beginning of my fieldwork, they assumed that 'the man' was the anthropological fieldworker. By my second month there, I had successfully convinced most people (and, importantly, my research assistants) that I was in fact the anthropologist, yet my gender identity as a female and the local socio-cultural assumptions with which it was imbued continued to play a significant role throughout my fieldwork in myriad ways. It is important to note that my gender often worked to my advantage, since a major part of my research focused on understanding women's gardening knowledge and experiences, and that I had many positive and safe experiences that shaped my fieldwork as a whole. At the same time, however, I experienced gender-based threats to my personal safety that will be the focus of this article, in accordance with the special issue's focus on sexuality and danger in anthropological fieldwork.