Getting ethnographic “wrongs” right: Continuity, reflexivity, and possibility in fieldwork dilemmas

Abstract When the hypotheses and presumptions underlying an ethnographic fieldwork project are found to be “wrong,” why can this be productive for research? By tying my autoethnographic narrative of having my doctoral research seemingly fall apart to anthropological conversations about reflexivity, this essay explores how the continuity of ethnography and its object demands a critical engagement with what it means to get things “wrong.” Grounded in my ethnographic research on the Japanese lifestyle and philosophy of healthy living known as “macrobiotics ( makurobiotikkusu ),” I detail how my discovery of antisemitic texts by macrobiotics' founder led to ethical dilemmas and shifting interpersonal relationships that curtailed my intended dissertation fieldwork. Placing my fieldwork into dialogue both with anthropology's well‐worn textual strategy of defamiliarization and Russian writer Viktor Shklovsky's idea of “enstrangement (Berlina, 2017),” I illuminate how the contingency of being “wrong” indexes the very possibility of ethnographic insight: ethnographers' relationships with others and embeddedness in a shared cultural context.