Fieldwork as a personal experience: analyzing women's fieldwork diaries

The article traces the academic biographies and fates of three researchers in the field of sociocultural anthropology: Dina Jochelson-Brodsky, Varvara Kuznetsova, and Ulyana Popova. The author uses the constructivist approach to make visible the social and personal conditionality of knowledge in humanities. Direct sensory perception of cultural boundaries is proved to be one of the main conditions for the cognition of ethnographic reality. This optics sensible to differences reveals the implicit attitudes of disciplinary epistemology and determines descriptive and classifying strategies of researchers. The analysis shows that the field diaries of these women reflect the individual emotionally felt field experience, which is absent in their academic texts.