Between the Emics and the Etics: Methodology for Studying Uncertainty in the Russian Arctic

In ethnographic fieldwork, one often encounters situations when emic concepts picked up by an anthropologists from his/her informants do not coincide with the etic concepts he/she used when formulated his/her research project. Since any ethnography should aim at describing emic reality, situations like these can create significant difficulties. This is particularly true if the very object of research either does not exist in the emic reality at all or takes a very different meaning there. In this paper, we share our experience of dealing with such a problem, which we encountered studying uncertainty in the framework of the project “"The Land of the Brave": Coping with Uncertainty of the Social and Natural Environment in the Russian Arctic”. Having reviewed theoretical approaches to the etic/emic dichotomy, we came out with three “tools” that we could use in our field: 1) re-defining of our etic notion of uncertainty in emic terms; 2) searching for emic meaning of uncertainty and relating it to the etic one; 3) co-constructing the notion – provoking our informants to engage with the word “uncertainty” and to construct his/her own understanding of it. By the means of these tools, we could establish not only that the uncertainty in our sense could be perceived by our informants as unproblematic, but also that those informants, who did have their own (emic) understanding of the concept, understood it on two levels: global and personal. Their active sense of the uncertainty was related to the personal level: their uncertainty referred not to the situation per se, but to their personal feelings in that situation. The emic uncertainty could include a moral assessment (and corresponding emotional reaction) to that feeling as experienced by the informant him/herself or by other people. The questions about uncertainty turned out to be a tool capable of uncovering a new layer of beliefs about human subjectivity and agency, which would be difficult to discover otherwise. It can be suggested that the co-constructing a notion (research object) with an informant – something that, in our opinion, happens rather often in a field – problematizes the emic/etic dichotomy itself. The fieldwork “tools” we have designed to work with the notion of uncertainty have a wider significance and can be allied to study other complex notions in the field. Besides that, the concept of uncertainty is currently in active use in sociology and economics: in these disciplines, the phenomenon of uncertainty is taken into account in analysis and influences its results. Anthropology can contribute to this analysis its description of how uncertainty is understood or not understood, felt, taken or not taken into consideration by people “on the ground”. This can potentially clarify how and why uncertainty influences (or does not influence) human behaviour.