Beyond here,beyond now,beyond human: reflecting on ghostly presences in field research

Beyond here, beyond now, beyond human

Rain drives into my face as I step out of the car. I pull the drawstring on my cagoule tight, the slit mouth of the red hood revealing only my eyes, and set off towards the caravan. Skidding on greasy mud, my arm flies back, seeking support from the car door. I lean into the back seat to retrieve walking boots bought decades ago to facilitate walking in similarly wet conditions in the Yorkshire Dales. The rain, the mud, the steep terrain are all as familiar to me as the boots I’m donning, but the crystal clear call of a bell bird rings through the eucalypts to remind me that I’m not in my homeland. Here, in northern New South Wales, I am not one of/with the ‘people, animals, plants, water and land . . . laws, custom, movement, song, knowledges, relationships, histories, presents, futures and spirit beings . . .’ ¹ Here, I am an alien and my understanding of how landholders know, experience and practise landscape fire in this place will come not through many years of dwelling together, of co-becoming with(in) this astonishing Country, but through a formal process of time-limited, carefully crafted, subjectively reported ‘research’.

Introduction

The research encounter can be understood as an interaction between an individuated researcher positioned inside or outside a community or culture, a more fluid researcher testing, and sometimes crossing the permeable boundaries of a shifting community, or a brief, fragile entanglement of dynamic, more-than-human trajectories – a ‘simultaneity of stories so far’. ² In this article, I contribute to efforts to describe the processes, and challenges, involved in developing a dynamic, relational understanding of field research through an exploration of relationships between the researcher, researched, research context and absent (bio)physical, geographical, artefactual and other entities or entanglements. ³

The research interaction is commonly seen as a social process. In a traditional social science perspective, this process is viewed as the coming together of two or more humans to think about and discuss issues of mutual interest; however, the relational perspective I adopt in this article questions the meaning of both ‘social’ and ‘process’. Here, ‘social’ is not restricted to interactions between humans, but challenges the separation between humans and others to encompass a co-mingling of human minds and bodies with (bio)physical, geographical and artefactual entities and forces. ⁴ Similarly, ‘process’ stretches the temporal boundaries of the research ‘event’ to consider how it emerges, together with the researcher, researched and research environment, through the gathering together of threads which extend backwards and forwards in time. Thus, as Ingold suggests, rather than maintaining a ‘particulate view of individual entities each of which is linked through external contact but leaves its basic nature unaffected’ (Ingold online), this relational view explores some of the multiple pathways that interact in dynamic creation to lead to the becoming of the research encounter. ⁵

Previous work on understandings of the research process which might be described as relational identifies the agency of multiple human relationships in the co-construction and storying of research encounters. These relationships include those between the researcher and research ‘participants’, other humans present during research, such as family, ⁶ and absent humans, who may be characters from the researcher’s past, ⁷ present or future, such as family, epistemic and epistemological communities ⁸ or future readers and reviewers of research outputs. ⁹ Recent work has shown a turn towards recognition of the agency of the (bio)physical, geographical and artefactual environment local to the area in which the research is being conducted, for example, Burarrwanga et al. describe the agency of Bawaka Country in the co-construction of knowledge during the research process. ¹⁰ I add to this discussion by suggesting that research interviews and ethnography are also co-constructed by entanglements which extend not only beyond the human but also temporally beyond the present, and spatially, beyond the field location. These (bio)physical, geographical and artefactual entanglements distantly removed in space and time and thus referred to in this article as ‘ghosts’, guide the observations and decisions made during the research process and motivate researcher choices around theoretical paradigms and research subjects. ¹¹ As the number of relationships existing within any specific research encounter is effectively infinite, however, it is impossible for any researcher to process all but a tiny proportion of these relationships, still less to know enough to comment authoritatively on them. These issues are often overlooked in reports on research, hence I explicitly draw attention to them through a creative non-fiction report on a single research encounter.

Understanding relational research encounters

Research encounters have been a subject of reflection within qualitative research for many years, at times driving methodological and disciplinary innovation. For example, provoked at least in part by the ‘crisis of representation’ ¹² in anthropology, reflexivity has been important to the development of feminist and post-colonial critiques which question the neutrality and universality of research and move towards an understanding of knowledge as partial, specific and situated. ¹³ Much of the focus within reflexivity has fallen on the identity and positioning of the researcher as ‘Inside’ or ‘Outside’ the community or culture she/he is researching, and this continues to be a topic of interest across a range of disciplines. ¹⁴ For many years, researcher positionality was largely seen as being dependent on a priori fixed characteristics such as the citizenship, ethnicity, language, religion or gender of the researcher. ¹⁵ However, many scholars question the relevance, value and accuracy of these characteristics. Observing that ‘individuals have not a single status but a status set’, ¹⁶ Merton suggests that ‘all of us are both Insiders and Outsiders in various social situations’. ¹⁷ Thus, many qualitative researchers abandon the Insider/Outsider binary and position themselves on a spectrum, allowing for fluidity and movement within the spectrum. For example, feminist researchers such as Madge promote the idea of ‘multiple selves’, ¹⁸ presenting a dynamic view of research identities which can be ‘manipulated, promoted, resisted, negotiated and accepted’ ¹⁹ through the research process. More recently, Eppley ‘re-conceptualizes’ researcher identity ‘not as a fixed and binary positioning, but an unsettled, tenuous positionality situated within a continuum’. ²⁰ In these understandings, the emphasis is on the permeability or shifting of boundaries, border crossing and hybridisation. ²¹

Understanding researcher positionality as constantly fluctuating has encouraged greater scrutiny of the complex relationships influencing research encounters. ²² Embedded within the conceptualisation of researchers as Insiders or Outsiders, lies a belief that there is an entity (culture or community) inside or outside which it is possible for another entity (the researcher) to sit. Moreover, positioning a researcher in relation to another individual, culture or community suggests that it is possible to have full knowledge of the researcher, researched and research context, thereby risking the very understanding of knowledge as partial, specific and situated that reflexivity is designed to question. ²³ Thus, much feminist, post-colonial and other research has moved towards a relational perspective which encourages us to abandon even fluid and changeable boundaries or borders. Instead, each entity or entanglement in the research interaction is viewed as being ever-open to negotiation. ²⁴ As noted by Hart, ‘Instead of starting with a presumption of pre-existing bounded entities – whether spatial, social or individual – a relational approach attends explicitly to ongoing processes of constitution’. ²⁵

This shift to an understanding of the research encounter as ‘a bundle of trajectories’ ²⁶ or ‘simultaneity of stories-so-far’ ²⁷ extends the temporal scale and admits relationships with absent others, or ghosts, into the range of influential entanglements. Several researchers reflect on how human characters from the past, frequently from childhood, impact research interactions, interpretations of those interactions and the stories which are ultimately told in academic theses, journals and books. ²⁸ These ghost relationships may awaken a ‘sympathetic openness’ ²⁹ to research participants, however, as warned by Doucet, this position may change as research progresses. ³⁰ Similarly, Burarrwanga et al. suggest that research may be influenced by relationships which are not yet in existence but might be expected to arise in future, for example, with reviewers and readers of the outputs of research, including academics, tourists, university students and the general public. ³¹

So far this review has focussed primarily on human relationships. However, research encounters take place within specific physical, geographical and artefactual environments. Research within performative and phenomenological paradigms more generally has described the co-evolution of humans and place, ³² and cultural geographers have challenged oppositional dualisms relating to time to show how more-than-human pasts as well as presents construct people and place. ³³ In the specific context of field research, Bawaka Country inc. highlight the importance of attending to the locality within which the research takes place, ³⁴ but we might also expect more-than-human absences to influence the generation, analysis and storying of research ‘data’. ³⁵ Working within a relational paradigm, Kelly notes that ‘. . . researchers’ explorations in a particular setting will be dependent on their fluency in the dominant language, awareness of ways of knowing and being shared by other participants, recognition of situational factors . . . and familiarity with significant wider influences’. ³⁶ Accepting that (some of) the other participants may be neither human nor present, and that ‘ways of knowing’ may have developed through relationships with(in) environments far from the research locality, further expands the possible range of influences on research encounters.

In this article, I explore how present more-than-human entanglements interact with ghost entanglements to influence observations, reports and interpretations of field research. By focussing on an interaction in an ancient wet sclerophyll/rainforest in northern New South Wales involving an Australian ‘tree-changer’ of settler heritage and an immigrant researcher haunted by a ‘homeland’ half a world away, I expand the existing literature reflecting on relational research encounters into different territory. I use a creative non-fiction approach to illustrate my argument for the reasons now described.

Creative non-fiction

In writing accounts of field research, the researcher is challenged by the complexity and the dynamic, processual nature of entanglements. Traditional academic writing can appear to fix and freeze the slippery and indistinct and the momentarily existent. Social research, particularly as described in text books, is often now

. . . understood as an autonomous procedure in quest of a conclusive discovery about self-presenting natural data that is subsequently related in an omniscient, transparent text . . . The text calls no attention to itself, even while it struggles to appear as an automatic and faithful reproduction of an a priori reality. ³⁷

This has served a purpose and has furthered debate on social issues but critics suggest that it can conceal the subjective and ephemeral nature of research. ³⁸ Efforts have been made enliven research writing to render it less susceptible to criticisms that researchers are obsessed with framing and fixing, through, for example, non-, or more-than-, representational theory ³⁹ and visual and other arts. ⁴⁰ The messy nature of research has been highlighted in academic ‘stories’ of research produced in Australia by a collective of Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers and more-than-human agencies, ⁴¹ and in the context of spectral geographies, Wylie has called for research to work with forms of documentary experimentation’ ⁴² in a way which ‘unsettles narrative and subject, that reveals the shaping of place through haunting rather than dwelling, that dislocates past and present, memory and visibility . . . ’ ⁴³

Throughout the short history of social science, there has been considerable internal wrangling about art versus science, single versus multiple realities, positivism versus a whole host of alternatives. However, these dualisms are themselves a fairly recent invention as

Before the 17th century, these dualisms (between ‘art’ and ‘science’, ‘fiction’ and ‘nonfiction’) were nowhere to be found . . . It took an ‘assault on ambiguity’ by the mathematical and physical sciences, with their emphases on theoretical rigor and metric precision . . . to devalue the then prevailing ‘natural’ forms of discourse through the erection of a hierarchy of language genre. ⁴⁴

Several authors have explored the nature of these dualisms. In 1977, Richard Harvey Brown concluded that, while the methodology, and perhaps even the type of person attracted by arts and sciences, may differ ‘ . . . the pioneering artist and the pioneering scientist are both seen as involved in essentially the same activity: making paradigms through which experience becomes intelligible’. ⁴⁵ Neilsen also seeks to minimise the ‘false distinctions or choices our enterprises often invite: literary or academic, subjective or objective, science or art, humanities or social sciences’. ⁴⁶ However, Neilsen does observe that while the scientific method gathers data to ‘prove’ (perhaps, more accurately, to disprove, or to suggest beyond reasonable doubt), the artistic intention is ‘to immerse, to illuminate and to connect’. ⁴⁷ And, in contrast to the scientific experience, through lyric inquiry, ‘A reader does not take away three key points or five examples. A reader comes away with the resonance of another’s world . . . ’ ⁴⁸

Following an explanation of the background to this research, this article presents and analyses a creative non-fiction report of an ‘interview’ in Northern New South Wales. I use a creative non-fiction approach to draw attention to the messy, ephemeral nature of entanglements within the encounter and the subjectivity involved in the writing of the report. I focus on the detail of a single interaction in order to highlight the complexities of developing a relational understanding of a more-than-human research encounter and explain ‘how we come to know and write about others’. ⁴⁹

Background to the research

During 2012–2013, I was involved in an evaluation of an Australian fire management training programme. Through a 2-day series of workshops, this programme provides landholders with information to enhance their ability to make decisions relating to practical and sustainable management of fire in the landscape.

As part of the evaluation, I undertook case studies of two workshop series, one of which was held in the border country of New South Wales/Queensland. Aspects of the case studies relevant to this article include the following:

I wrote the following account of a research encounter in the field following a second interview with a landholder, Kenny, in northern New South Wales. This was our fourth meeting, after the first interview and 2-day-long workshops. The research purpose of the meeting was to understand Kenny’s responses to the training process and to set this within the context of his relationships with fire and land management more generally.

Description of the research encounter

Squinting through the rain, I skid and stumble the 50 metres from the car to the tiny lean-to extension of the caravan and knock on the door. Muffled bumps and thuds rumble through wood and silicon. The door opens and the warm, earthy residue of an afternoon bong floats out before sinking in the sopping air. Kenny wipes his eyes with the back of a grimy hand and peers into the murky light. Laughing at my two-wheel drive hire-car, he asks how I made it up the long, steep, mud-slide of a drive and confirms that I won’t get to the guest house tonight because the ford’s been washed out for two days. Then he squeezes bare, dirt-ingrained feet into board-stiff boots and joins me out in the rain.

We stroll across the garden. New animal-spirit sculptures, carved from too-good-to-burn brushwood, snake in a circle just above the ’van. ‘I’m protecting myself’, he tells me and I know enough of his history to sympathise with his need for a little protection. But the spirits have not protected the cacti which tumble hopelessly to the ground, waterlogged roots unable to hold their sodden weight. Shrugging philosophically, Kenny observes that they’re not difficult to propagate, he’ll sort them out when it dries up a bit. They could sort themselves out, no doubt to the chagrin of the networks of humans beavering away to halt the self-driven march of cacti across Queensland. ⁵⁰ But Kenny doesn’t let the cacti have it all their own way here, he likes the garden to be a two-way thing, a co-creation of plant and human. He smiles, ‘I guess it’s so much a part of me now, I feel you don’t know me until you come here’. Like a field-woman from Tess of the d’Urbervilles, he is ‘ . . . a portion of the field; (he) has somehow lost (his) own margin, imbibed the essence of (his) surrounding, and assimilated (him)self with it’. ⁵¹

I can relate to that. Or maybe I relate better to Emily Bronte, whose ‘native hills were far more to her than a spectacle; they were what she lived in, and by, as much as the wild birds . . .’ ⁵² But I’m a long way from my native hills, here. In those hills, I can recognise most trees at 100 m and, moreover, would be able to hazard a decent guess about the plants underneath them, the animals who make long-term homes in them and the visitors who come just for the season. Here, I’m a visitor, but not a regular migrant who knows these hills as well as my own. Here, I’m lost among the eucalypts, the bloodwoods and the bangalow palm and have to console myself with the fact that even Kenny would be lost among the fungi. ⁵³

Kenny asks if I’d like a cup of tea, warning me that it could take some time as he does not use gas in protest against local fracking applications. I accept and we return to a cleared area of land near the ’van. The fire has drowned in the deluge so he retrieves a handful of sticks from beneath a plastic cradle and squats to build a pyramid under a square of suspended corrugated iron. He balls up a newspaper, flicks his lighter against the trailing edge and gently fans a reluctant flame with a ‘Lock-The-Gate’ ⁵⁴ sign. I laugh at this double protest against coal seam gas. ‘I’m growing my dreadlocks again’, he says, ‘As a public symbol to the fucking government that makes a mockery of everything; that makes landholders obey a hundred petty rules and regulations then threatens to walk right in, take over the whole valley and destroy it forever’. A third protest then!

A log rolls off the fire and burns Kenny’s finger as he retrieves and balances it. He crowns the pyramid with a soot-blackened kettle. We talk in the rain long after the kettle has boiled and the tea has been drunk. I discover that Kenny lived in my homeland for many years and that we share many other experiences and opinions as we discuss Catholicism, animism, education, court cases, house building, dentists, consumerism, children, the death of loved ones, personal freedoms in Australia and Europe. Then I remember that we’re supposed to be co-creating research data about human/fire/land relations and we set off for a walk around Kenny’s 100 acres. The rain has washed away the sebum on my hands and the blood vessels in my fingers are constricting, turning my skin into tyre treads. Kenny laughingly wonders aloud if he didn’t prefer the drought. Still, he reckons the rain, the discomfort, just the sheer effort of maintaining his existence, are infinitely better than the cosy numbness of a city house. He’s done that before but he couldn’t do it again. I share with him my distaste for suburbia, the need to make frequent escapes to the hills in order to remain sane.

We walk up the hill to the area Kenny is thinking of burning. He’s worried that if he burns this patch and there’s no rain following the burn it’ll be invaded by Crofton weed. Crofton weed is the bane of Kenny’s life, resisting his every attempt to destroy it. I’m still struggling to identify this plant and have to ask him to confirm it is what I think it is. He tells me that Crofton weed is just hard work, that’s what it is. He doesn’t mind hard work but he does it on his own terms. When the creative urge takes him he grafts for days and nights at a time, until the job’s finished or the urge fades. He says he’s a bit obsessive compulsive, having enormous motivation once he decides to do something until it’s finished or until the urge goes. Like my older son, he’s bursting with extraordinary creativity, thinking laterally, drawing in metaphor and analogy.

At the top, on the ridge, grass trees are growing from seed. Kenny’s going to plant them out up here in a geometric design – circle, straight line, circle, straight line, circle, straight line. It’s another plant-human co-creation but he hesitates as he talks about this one, revealing a twinge of doubt about making the ridge ‘unnatural’. Then he sees the moment when he strides up the path to look along the ridge and the grass trees all line up – whoosh – and grins. ‘It’s all a bit Andy Goldsworthy ⁵⁵ – sort of magic’, he says. He likes working with magic but not all the magical and mystical is positive. As we begin a downhill slide into a gully, he is discomforted again. This part of his land gives him the creeps. Perhaps not an Emily Bronte then – more like one of her raw, haunted spirits from Wuthering Heights. ⁵⁶

Dusk envelops the hill as we return to the caravan. Kenny spends much time re-agitating the idling fire into productive life to re-boil the kettle. By the time we enter the caravan to start the interview proper, it’s dark. A candle flame bathes Kenny’s face in an eerie golden glow. We talk through the fire training workshop we recently attended. When I ask, ‘Did it change your vision for your land?’ a small smile curves the corners of his mouth. He pauses a moment, before stating, ‘Not as much as the mushrooms’. He tells me that earlier this year, over 1,000 psilocybin mushrooms opened up his world. He ate them for up to 5 days at a time and felt connected to everything, felt animal spirits channelling through him, knew exactly what he had to do with his land. This is one fungus with which he’s very familiar!

I flash back to my single experience with magic mushrooms – to cartwheels on a remote Scottish beach, star-spattered skies and sand-gritty mussels – and smile. He watches my response, then pushes a roll-up towards me, ‘I’ve got some nice bud here if you wanna smoke it’. I laugh – finally a plant I recognise – but decline the offer because I don’t smoke cannabis. But then I’m visited by anxiety about my commitment to this research. There are so many ways of ‘knowing’ and I worry that in passing over the opportunity to smoke this plant, which is ‘literally . . . grounded in (this) precise and particular locale’, ⁵⁷ I am failing to truly engage with situated human/fire/land relations.

Beyond here, beyond now, beyond human in the research encounter

A multitude of relational presences and absences works to co-construct this encounter. Several involve absent humans; for example, at one point, I am struck by the similarities between Kenny and my older son. However, influences on this research go beyond the human to incorporate complex (bio)physical, geographical and artefactual entanglements which extend temporally and spatially far beyond this encounter.

A few hundred metres below Kenny’s land, a thin film of gas lies bonded to the surface of coal. Formed from plant matter deposited over millions of years and held in place under the pressure of earth and water, this gas is described in promotional material for multinational companies with headquarters far from here as a ‘vast energy storehouse’. ⁵⁸ Its presence brings some uncertainty to the inhabitants of this valley, however; Kenny fears that mining this gas through hydraulic fracturing will pollute the air, contaminate water supplies and reduce biodiversity and may even force him from his land. He brings his protest against this potential mining into his personal life by refusing to use gas in his caravan, instead burning fallen wood from his landholding for heating and cooking. Thus, he reveals himself as highly principled and prepared to undergo considerable inconvenience to support his beliefs. In this way, and through his dreadlocks and the artistic displays of Lock The Gate signs throughout his property, Kenny embodies his protest throughout the encounter. But the influence of this issue goes well beyond these overt signs, for example, encouraging Kenny to question his adherence to rules and regulations around land management and possibly contributing to his increased consumption of illicit substances. As such, this legacy of ancient plants far beneath Kenny’s land and their imagined role in his future give me insights into Kenny’s story and a context within which to interpret his responses to questions about land and fire management.

The spectral futures provoked by the presence of coal seam gas combine with other more-than-human entanglements to influence the direction of the research encounter. Because Kenny does not use piped gas, he builds a fire to heat a kettle but this is made considerably more difficult by the rain. The impact of the presence of rain and its implications for methodology has been explored elsewhere. ⁵⁹ For the purposes of this article, I note only that without the interaction between the rain and Kenny’s reluctance to use gas, this interview would have been much shorter, would have been more tightly restricted to discussions of land, fire and training programmes and would have been less likely to result in Kenny’s revelation that the trajectory of his land is at least partly dependent on psilocybic mushrooms. Here, however, I wish to explore how the rain interacted with my own ‘histories-(futures-geographies-)in-person’ ⁶⁰ to influence the research encounter.

I spent my childhood in Yorkshire, more than 17,000 km from northern New South Wales. On average, the Yorkshire Dales experiences around 1,500 mm of precipitation per annum, ⁶¹ thus rain was a frequent presence in my youth. In addition, another memory of rain was ‘fanned . . . into renewed life’, ⁶² during the writing of this article. Living in remote northern Kenya for a year during the famine of the mid-1980s, I shared with my village celebrations, dancing, utter joy in the, literally, human life–saving rains which eventually came. For me, rain is associated with youth, life and celebration.

When driving to this research encounter, I was warned by mobile phone that I would be unable to reach the guest house and might not make it as far as Kenny’s property due to the rain. However, propelled by ghosts of life-giving rains and an initially subconscious eagerness to return to saturated hills and prepared for the conditions through experience of surviving in wet, remote conditions, I ignored advice to stay on the Queensland side of the border. Similarly, it was not necessary to drink tea on arrival at Kenny’s property – a glass of water would have sufficed – but both Kenny and I preferred to rekindle the fire and boil a kettle. As the rain mingled with our bodies, we discovered and celebrated a shared willingness to experience the tangible and not entirely comfortable offerings of Country. In this way, my own rainy ghosts combined with Kenny’s anxieties about future fracking to change the course of the research encounter.

The influence of my homeland on this research goes far beyond a simple relationship with weather, however. Despite decades of physical absence from my life, Yorkshire plays an important part in my life, provoking my curiosity about people and place and the relationships between them. Indeed, without my ghost relationship with the Yorkshire Dales, I might not have been evaluating a training programme for landholders at all or have chosen to do so through a relational lens. This relationship alerts me to the Aboriginal ghosts of this land, whose displacement dramatically altered its trajectory. My ghost relationship with Yorkshire enables me to develop understanding of the ways in which Kenny and other landholders co-become with their land and sensitises me to the complexities of ‘belonging’ to a land from which the indigenous inhabitants have been forcibly driven. ⁶³ It allows me to share the passion with which Aboriginal people, academics and others seek to promote acknowledgement of more-than-human agency and its implications for the ways in which we live with and care as Nature. ⁶⁴ It engenders awareness of, and frustration about, my limited knowledge of flora and fauna in New South Wales and the ways in which this lack of knowledge alters the balance of power in research encounters. It operates in the unconscious and affective realms ⁶⁵ but also at the bodily level, in neuronal networks, provoking sensitivity to differences in the taste of water, the smells of wood-smoke, the ‘vibe’ of a place that can give someone ‘the creeps’. And, in the context of fire management, it encourages a commitment to amplifying the voices and experiences of landholders to set alongside those of policy-makers, government agencies and training organisations.

My relationship with the Yorkshire Dales also creates interest in ways of exploring human/nature relationships which subsequently move on their own trajectory in my research. My evolving and fragmentary understanding of Kenny’s emerging relationship with his land is influenced by physically absent works of art, including the sculptures of Andy Goldsworthy and literature such as Wuthering Heights and Tess of the d’Urbervilles. The presence of these works of art at the research interaction was not always shared. For example, Kenny (and the reader) may or may not have read Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Wuthering Heights. Even if he has, he may never have compared himself to characters from these books and almost certainly was not doing so at the time of this research interaction. Yet, these relationships with absent works of art and literature co-constructed my understanding of Kenny’s story at the time and later during the writing up of the research encounter.

These art works also influence my writing of this encounter and my decision to use creative non-fiction as a tool for discussion. Working in this way enables me to ‘dislocate past and present, memory and visibility . . .’ ⁶⁶ and to convey something of the hesitancies and uncertainty that frequently do not make it into more traditional research accounts. For example, here, I have reported Kenny’s claim that the mushrooms showed him ‘exactly’ what to do with his land while also relating his hesitation about making the ridge ‘unnatural’ with his plan to plant grass trees. Similarly, I decline the offer to smoke cannabis but then wonder whether, in doing so, I am failing to be open to different ways of ‘knowing’. The vignette extends this sense of uncertainty to the reader through my statement, ‘I know enough of his history to sympathise with his need for a little protection’. This is not expanded upon; the reader does not learn what I know. This is partly a measure to protect Kenny’s privacy but also a deliberate attempt to remind readers that when reporting on research, the researcher excludes them from far more information than she/he shares. I am hoping that in adopting a narrative style more commonly associated with fiction, I am encouraging the reader to suspend the belief that this is an accurate portrayal of a singular, contained event and is, rather, just one tale of many that could have been told.

Reflections

Throughout this encounter, multiple ghostly entanglements – with humans, rain, other Country, literature – influence my actions and interpretations. My ghosts do not act alone but interact with those of Kenny and the research location itself to elongate the interview and shift its direction. Dodgshon observes that ‘the present is clearly burdened with all our temporalities’ ⁶⁷ and I have shown how research encounters are burdened with the beyond-present temporalities and beyond-location spatialities of the researcher, researched and research location. Perhaps, then, it is appropriate to emphasise not only how ‘histories-in-persons’ ⁶⁸ influence field research but geographies, histories and imaginaries in persons and places.

These temporalities and spatialities have very real consequences for the generation, analysis and reporting of research data. For example, my own geographies, histories and imaginaries mean that I am generally more able to establish rapport with landholders than with policy-makers, programme staff working from city headquarters and other academics. Like Doucet, I find that on analysing my research, I read landholder ‘narratives with tacit understanding as they (bring me) back to a place of familiar stories and rhythms’. ⁶⁹ But it is not only listening to and reading their narratives but being with landholders and observing their interactions as Nature that bring forth more-than-human ghosts and facilitate deeper understanding of relationships. As observed by Doucet, this position can shift and, while remaining sympathetic, need not remain wholly uncritical. For example, looking out and forward from this encounter to a phantom future for this region, I can imagine the spread of cactii far beyond Kenny’s land, a scenario that invites a different perspective on his life in this wet sclerophyll/sub-tropical rain forest.

There are inherent dangers in acknowledging and writing about the agency of (bio)physical, geographical and artefactual ghosts in co-constructing field research. First, with specific reference to the ghostly relationships experienced by the researcher, it could appear that I am suggesting that knowledge of beyond-human entanglements is universal rather than situated in particular places. But it is not of knowledge, nor even of memories that I write but of an orientation or recognition. Gordon notes that ‘Being haunted draws us affectively, sometimes against our will and always a bit magically, into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not as cold knowledge, but as transformative recognition’. ⁷⁰ It is less to do with being an Insider or Outsider in a particular place or even with having the a priori intimate knowledge ⁷¹ required to understand the challenges to local people, than with developing a particular orientation. Writing on the methods used in post-humanist research, Richardson-Ngwenya notes that in order to ‘get at “the vital”’ she did not have to enrol ‘fantastical new methods’ but rather to cultivate ‘a vitalist geographical imagination that was receptive and open to the liveliness of materialities and the significance of relational becomings . . .’ ⁷² I suggest that my ghostly relationships provided me with an a priori receptivity to an understanding of the relational becomings of landholders in northern New South Wales and heightened sensitivity towards the influence of more-than-human relationships.

A second challenge to the development of a relational understanding is the fact that the number of entanglements influencing any research encounter is literally infinite. These entanglements operate across a range of spatial scales, from the international/national/societal through the institutional to the immediately local (or ‘individual’). ⁷³ As discussed, they also operate across a range of temporal scales, being situated in past, present and future. Thelen tells us that ‘The web of causality is intricate and seamless from the moment of birth’ ⁷⁴ but why stop at birth? Knowing the influence of the prenatal environment on, for example, unborn research participants, ⁷⁵ we could trace relational links back to conception, to the experiences of the parents’ preconception, and beyond. ⁷⁶ And the ghosts of research locations can be followed back millennia, through the migration of humans, plants, animals and the very lithospheric plates on which these locations are embedded.

Of the infinite entanglements co-constructing any research encounter, the vast majority will go unrecognised. It is the nature of the human condition that we can process only a miniscule amount of the information available to our senses even at a single moment. It is outside the scope of this article to review the extensive literature on human perception from either a social scientific ⁷⁷ or scientific perspective but it may suffice to point out that in the visual system alone, the amount of information entering the retinas at any one time is far greater than that which can be effectively processed by the brain. ⁷⁸ The likelihood of the agency of any entanglement being recognised as influencing the becoming of the research encounter is dependent on its proximity, positioning, size and/or density. But all these factors interact with the embodied temporalities and spatialities of research participants which influence their tendency to process particular kinds of observations.

Instone observes that ‘ . . . knowing the world is always a process of selection and ordering that involves choices of what aspects of “reality” to emphasise and what to leave out’ ⁷⁹ but, critically, many of these ‘choices’ are taken at a subconscious level. Thrift suggests that ‘probably 95 percent of embodied thought is noncognitive’ ⁸⁰ and while we may argue with the figures, it might be expected that even our efforts to consciously reflect, or to engage in ‘a kind of post-hoc rumination’, ⁸¹ will fail to reveal the vast majority of entanglements influencing our research. Thus, even the most reflexive researchers are not aware of all of the more-than-human ghosts they bring to their work; many emerge during the research itself; they ‘ . . . are not only inaccessible to readers they are likely to be inaccessible to the author herself’. ⁸²

Both supporters and detractors of relational approaches caution against the tendency to get bogged down in the detail. ⁸³ But the entanglements influencing and stemming from any single research encounter are potentially infinite, and the research as it appears in writing could take a multitude of paths. In writing about a single encounter, it is possible to suggest something of this multiplicity and to convey the hesitancies and uncertainties which frequently do not make it into research writings but even when drawing more general conclusions it is crucial to recognise that in generating research data we privilege particular relationships. Drawing (bio)physical, geographical and artefactual relationships which go beyond the present into the detail may cause us to get ever more bogged down but may ultimately provide a more robust understanding of our motivations and orientations to research. As noted by Derrida and cited by Wylie, ⁸⁴

. . . they are always there, spectres, even if they do not exist, even if they are no longer, even if they are not yet. They give us to rethink the ‘there’ as soon as we open our mouths.

Conclusion

Conceptualising research encounters as brief, fragile entanglements of dynamic, more-than-human trajectories admits a multitude of presences and absences which go beyond the human, beyond the present and beyond the ‘here’ to incorporate (bio)physical, geographical and artefactual ghosts. Ghosts within researchers generate particular orientations to research by working to guide choices on the subjects, theoretical paradigms, observations and storying of research. These ghosts within researchers do not act alone, however, but emerge in relationship with the presences and absences embedded within those being researched and the research location. Robust reflexivity thus requires that we look beyond the present and beyond the human to consider how the multiple temporalities and spatialities in people and places contribute to the becoming of field research.