Ethnographic fieldwork is a balancing act between distancing and
immersing. Fieldworkers need to come close to meaningfully grasp the
sense-making efforts of the researched. In methodological textbooks on
ethnography, immersion tends to be emphasized at the expense of its
counterpart. In fact, ‘distancing’ is often ignored as a central tenet of good
ethnographic conduct. In this article we redirect attention away from
familiarization and towards ‘defamiliarization’ by suggesting six
estrangement strategies (three theoretical and three methodological) that
allow the researcher to develop a more detached viewpoint from which to
interpret data. We demonstrate the workings of these strategies by giving
illustrations from Machteld de Jong’s field- and text-work, conducted
among Moroccan-Dutch students in an institution of higher vocational
education.
