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Europe now has a shared standard for measuring pharmaceutical emissions and evidence that healthier patients mean lower healthcare carbon – making 2026 procurement reform the moment to act

As a social-anthropologist researching perceptions of remoteness in rural Romania, the object of my research concerns remote villages which have been described as places where people still live like a hundred years ago. They can certainly give that impression as I have also experienced in some of my early encounters. In the following, I want to focus on how anthropologists balance personal experience and background within the main method of ethnographic fieldwork, participant observation.

Some of us grow up on folk tales featuring kind grandpas and grandmas (or on the contrary), of magical beings appearing in the guise of older folk in the woods, or of another type of magical childhood, not involving spells and other realms, but the unrestricted freedom of a youngster left to their own devices in a rural landscape. Via such means, as well as later schooling and experiences, the rural itself can become an otherworld (see Williams’ The Country and the City, or Brass’ Peasants, populism and postmodernism…) not the anthropological other (though it includes it, analytically), but a different ‘world’, which we perceive as having distinct rhythms, rules and atmosphere. As adults, we read, listen, and more recently, consume video blogs and short form videos on tech-free retreats, places where people live like ‘100 years ago’, ‘traditional’ lives on farms, and, on the other end of the spectrum, of the backwards, underdeveloped and uneducated rural. Our early experiences, our education, our readings and the media we consume influence how we perceive the rural and are layers that anthropologists must recognise and see beyond.

*

In the mid 2010s, I was hiking up a mountain, with a couple of colleagues. In need of a hot cup of tea, we ended up knocking on the door of one of the local houses. The owners welcomed us warmly, took us to a room with a lit fire and made the best mint tea we ever had. We ended up spending New Year with them and marvelled at the ‘traditional’ building materials and layout, at the hand embroidered tea towels, the wood burning stove’s warm glow, and enjoyed the extremely flavourful home made food. It felt like we were experiencing a living village museum and reliving our childhoods in our grandparents’ houses, at the same time.

Many years later, countless other hikers, walkers, tourists and visitors, and I, are still in awe and in love with the sights, sounds and feeling of the place. But as an anthropologist, I had to learn how to see beyond what one experiences through affect, through the practices of reflexivity and positionality.

In my case, as a city dweller, I yearned for the nature, the quiet, the seemingly tight knit and ‘simple’ living of a village. And I thought I found the quintessential place on my hikes. Upon returning as a researcher, I learned to put to one side the awe struck walker and ground myself in another type of seeing. I had to be a listener and participant observer first. The myth of the impassive, objective and detached anthropologist-observer and recorder-of-facts has long been dismantled. Since, we have become aware how our own experiences, impressions, wants and education shape how we perceive the world and how all of that can influence our ethnographic work, which is why positionality and reflexivity are such important parts of our work.

Even so, it’s not an easy feat and it is a conscious effort we must make continuously, throughout our research. On one occasion, after a few hours climb, with a full backpack, in the heat, I was greeted by a distant whirring, which I had trouble identifying. A few moments later I met my host and after the usual greetings, I asked about the noise. She laughed and said that it was the neighbours’ lawn mower, which took me by absolute surprise, though it shouldn’t have. At that time I had not encountered a lawn mower so high up before, and focused my questions on the difficulty of access. As a result, I had assumed such items were out of reach. My trained gaze faltered in the face of the idyllic landscape, and I briefly succumbed to an idealised vision of the hamlet. The noise broke the spell and reminded me of synchronicity, access, opportunity and the importance of not making assumptions. Such moments are not necessarily rare, nor are they completely avoidable, which is why taking time to sit and think about the views and ideas we bring into our research can prevent personal experience showing up as unproved certainty.

*

The above example illustrates that despite learning to put aside elements that influence perception, the tourist-me and the amazed-but-slightly-essentialising-me never made fully went away, as became apparent when I was confronted with a new situation. New fieldsites, other circumstances and perceptions will come into play at different times. Consequently, catching oneself sliding into preconceived ideas and unverified conclusions is part and parcel of the fieldwork, precisely because reflecting on how one’s presence, background, and assumptions actively influence data supports ethical practice and responsible data collection in the field.

The post People Who Live Like a Hundred Years Ago: Unlearning (?) a Borrowed Gaze appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

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Source : © European Union, 2026 - EP

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Source : © European Union, 2026 - EP

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Source : © European Union, 2026 - EP

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Source : © European Union, 2026 - EP

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Source : © European Union, 2026 - EP

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Source : © European Union, 2026 - EP

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Source : © European Union, 2026 - EP

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Source : © European Union, 2026 - EP

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Source : © European Union, 2026 - EP

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