Living within a community whilst simultaneously researching it creates a huge and complex variety of emotions. The research subject becomes a friend, neighbour and confidant to someone who is also the object of the research, creating a contradictory, schizophrenic and thoroughly uncomfortable situation. This is always compounded by the claustrophobia that is an unavoidable part of living in a small, remote, close knit mountain village. Today I have been feeling mainly guilt.

Of course, I am in close contact with the population of the village I live, and this means that I share friendships, conversations, jokes and secrets with them. At the same time as participating in this, I also listen with a professional ear to these conversations, jokes and secrets as a way of understanding how life in the village works. This is not a problem when one is discussing agricultural seasons or other light subjects, but when one comes to investigate social relations and divisions, it becomes a more painful matter. People tell me all sorts of negative things about other people in the village that I don’t want to hear on a personal level, yet are a central part of my professional project. I begin to see the cracks in the community, the dark sides to everyone that I know here, their scandal ridden past, their controversial and hypocritical acts, and their crimes. Of course, when one knows someone for long enough then their more human side becomes apparent, and one must deal with this, but the problem that I am currently grappling with is that whilst I am learning all this I am taking notes.

In any other walk of life, I could ignore, purposefully forget or skirt round these areas. I have always believed the vast majority of people are fundamentally good at heart, and so in everyday life I can justify underplaying the negative aspects of people’s character in favour of the parts that I like. However I find myself pushed by my research objectives to delve deeper into the dark side of people’s characters, because from this perspective they are more important that the positive elements. As a sign of how cynical social researchers are about human nature, we are always far more interested in discord, divisions and conflict than in friendships, closeness and harmony. A book on why and how people disagree and fight will always be better received than one exploring the nature of cooperation and understanding. Many universities, my own department included, teach courses on conflict, but much rarer is the class that studies peace. Ostensibly we are more interested in the negative side of life because we would like to solve the world’s problems, but I am not sure there isn’t an aspect of schadenfreude to our curiousity.

I am not sure how easy it would be to justify my actions to these people if they were to truly discover what I was doing. I have long since abandoned any notion that my research will have a significant direct impact on the life of anyone but myself, and that the best I can hope for is that the community I work in, and others like it, feel a subtle change for the better in the distant future, but nothing earth-shattering. I feel that I am spying on an innocent group for my own personal benefit. Many people are critical of the depths that gutter journalists plumb in order to rake up dirt on the private lives of politicians and the mildly famous, yet when an academic does the same thing but in more lengthy and less comprehensible prose, it becomes an important and masterly work of scholarship. There is very little difference between those nosy people who pry at the secrets of unsuspecting members of the public, and social researchers. I feel part spy, actor, tabloid investigative journalist, liar, mud-raker, hypocrite, and only partly like an academic researcher.

Today I stumbled across the skeletons in the cupboards of people I know, like and respect. I now look at them in a new light, but tomorrow I will have attempt to deal with them in the same friendly way, making me feel guilty and schizophrenic