The Interloper: What Field Resistance Tells Us About What We Study

"A stranger enters your world, and starts asking questions you would prefer not to answer.

What do you do? Mostly, when an interloper appears, communities find ways to resist: they obstruct investigations and hide evidence, shelve complaints and silence dissent, even forget their own past and deny having done so.

Such resistance-that is, the social mechanisms deployed by social groups to maintain the status quo-is the bane of field researchers everywhere, for it often seems to slam the door in their face.

How can one learn about a community when they resist so very strongly?

The answer is that, sometimes, the resistance is itself the key.

By closing ranks and creating obstacles, community members often disclose more than they meant.

This book shows how such resistance manifests itself, how researchers can respond to it, and, most importantly, what it all reveals.

To do so, The Interloper draws insights from diverse stories of resistance