Anthropology that warms your heart : on being a bride in the field

It often seems that significant moments in anthropological fieldwork are relegated to the margins of the eventual texts in which ethnographies appear. In prefaces, epilogues and acknowledgments, friendships are made, grants are awarded, and babies are born--all of which for many anthropologists were perhaps as crucial in the direction of an ethnographic study as any theoretical disposition or discovery. In doing doctoral fieldwork in Cuba, one such significant moment was to fall in love, and later to many, in the city (although not the specific community) where my research was based. By the time of my wedding, my research interests had largely been formed. However, the process of planning my wedding and the emotions I experienced in shifting between my identity as an anthropologist with a network of informants and colleagues and my identity as a bride with a newly acquired family, prompted some important reflections around my position as a field worker. Although I found some of these reflections acutely uncomfortable, they were ultimately productive in shaping my doctoral research and added new understanding to decisions I made about theory, literatllte, methodology and the personal politics of anthropological research.