Introduction

When I started my PhD in social anthropology my fellow students had pinned a cartoon to the wall with the title ‘The Post-Modern Anthropologist’. It was a picture of an old-school anthropologist, in a pith-helmet, talking to an informant. Under the title there was a speech bubble coming out of his mouth, which read ‘That’s enough about you, let’s talk about me.’ It rather neatly encapsulated some of the dilemmas of doing fieldwork at that time. On the one hand there was a welcome reflexive turn within the discipline where the role and the responsibilities of the researcher were called into question, yet, on the other, a worry that this sort of reflection could lead to insularity and navel gazing and a greater concern with the anthropologist’s own feelings and experiences than those of informants.

I had chosen to do my PhD research on child prostitutes in Thailand, a topic which, with the naiveté and sense of invincibility that comes with beginning a project in your early 20s, I thought I could ‘sort out’. I believed that with the right methods, and indeed the right attitude, I could shed new light on the problem, change perceptions of how to intervene, and influence national and international policy. Backed up with an interest, and sincerely held belief, in children’s rights, what could go wrong? And indeed, in many ways it was a success. I found a small group of children relatively easily who were happy to let me spend time with them. I moved in with a wonderful NGO led by inspirational leaders who gave the children practical and emotional support and looked after me as well. Four years later I received my PhD and, as I got older, got scholarships, jobs, and promotions based, in part, on this initial work and my analyses of it.

Yet there was much I left unsaid and unexplored and which only now, with the benefit of long hindsight (and cynics might say with the benefit of a secure university post) that I have started to rethink and explore.