I visit my good friend Pato Caruso in Buenos Aires. We meet up in a old cool space where you can take a beer and eat something and see a show. With him is his wife and several of her cousins, as well as a british journalist that wrote on Yemen before and now is looking at the tango and politics scene.
Once the show began I realize that most of us are there just to enjoy but that she in fact is working on her fieldwork. The insight is that she was writing notes in her cell and this might, or not, distract the musicians in midst of the dark. Shall it be an interference or not?
What kind of things do we do as researchers that are not common place in fieldwork and that may affect the way the social world functions, being us as an obstacle, or rather as a colorful note, or no influence at all, or affecting in other unexpected ways?