Direct experience with the embodied expressions of krsna’s devotion: moments of crisis in the anthropological labor

Abstract

During fieldwork, the social investigator looks for objectivity in social facts, observing, participating in activities, listening and taking notes, looking for elements to knit the conceptual framework with the reality observed. Nevertheless, from my own experience, each fieldwork that I had been involved with, has produced concerns, emotions and a constant challenge between my value judgments and my own subjectivity interposed with the investigation. That is why in this article I share the experience of having performed an extended stay in an āśrāma of the Hare Krsna religious community of Mexico City, which involved a corporealization of devotional practices based on the sex that invests my body, regulating my behaviors through the subjectivation of the sacred symbols established by the religious group, making my body got ill, symbolizing for the community a detoxification and purifying, and for me, a fight between my subjectivity, my emotions and the reality of the fieldwork, signifying a watershed in research around the religious group.