Negotiating Power, Reflexivity, and Positionality

This chapter examines gendered power dynamics in research as a native feminist ethnographer among the Dagaaba people of northwestern Ghana. Using a feminist decolonial framework, it explores fieldwork relations in light of the joking relationship between the Frafra and Dagaaba, and both the affordances and restrictions this offers. A decolonial perspective helps examine gendered power relations, identification processes, and systems of knowledge without oversimplifying the violence exerted on non-conforming subjectivities. This analysis derives from my year-long residential ethnography and over a decade of relationships in a rural settlement in northwestern Ghana. The study reveals the complexities of a young woman researching in a hyper-patriarchal, decolonised context. At times, I held the privileged position of an elite researcher. At other times, I was viewed as a vulnerable, “silly” Frafra woman needing protection from mystical ontologies. The joking relationship, due to my ethnic identity as a Frafra and my insider status as a Dagao woman, provided unique access to sensitive issues. However, I was often reminded of my outsider status as a Frafra who could not be trusted with secrets. This constant navigation of the shifting sands of insider-outsider identities illustrates their tenuous nature. Intersecting structures of power—gender, class, ethnicity, age—are woven into the fieldwork of a young female native researcher who is only culturally affiliated through marriage. Consequently, I propose that feminist research in patriarchal settings needs to pay attention to the contradictions of gendered power relations and the possibilities they de-authorise/authorise. In African contexts where the practice of joking relationships is culturally permissible, it could be deployed to overcome barriers in negotiating access, building rapport, and sustaining it throughout the fieldwork period and beyond. In reflecting on these issues, the study also makes an important contribution to long-standing debates on “anthropology at home” and discussions surrounding epistemological issues in ethnographic knowledge production.