Constructive engagement, estrangement and contextualisation: Conducting field research on an alternative community in South Korea

While conducting field research on Bin-Zib, a communal living experiment in South Korea, I faced a problem of positioning myself in the community. This was mainly because I realized my own misconception of my insider status. While I had always felt I was a part of the community, I realized in fact that I had always been an outsider in the course of my fieldwork. Having difficulties in finding a balance between participation and observation, while trying to hear the different voices of the past through an archival research, I started to consider the balance between “participation” and “observation,” not as being poised between two extremes but as being an active part of the community while analyzing myself as part of the research. From this perspective, I adopted three methodological strategies; constructive engagement, estrangement, and contextualisation. These strategies were conducive in understanding Bin-Zib, where members themselves actively engaged in the act of ‘learning’ collectively and analyzed their own situations reflexively to deal with their problems. Research on Bin-Zib inevitably had characteristics of public anthropology, which aims to engage social issues and the public beyond distinctions between politics, actions, and intellectual work, writes Didi Han.