The Interloper

"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 and research inquiries-everything from Nazi rocket scientists to Disney union-busters, Harvard professors to those securing cadavers for medical school dissection-to draw attention to field resistance and help analyze it. Offering a window into such research for readers of many disciplines, this book, ultimately, is intended both as a practical and theoretical guide for field researchers. All these stories and more reveal a common truth: When any field researcher tries to gain access to a field, they are sure to meet resistance to their investigations. The Interloper brings together all these instances of resistance that he encountered or witnessed, alongside accounts from other published work. The book organizes them around ideal forms of resistance and details their unique implications. Ultimately, The Interloper argues that such resistance contains way more analytical possibilities than most interlopers (including field researchers) envision"--