CAPITULO VI: YACIMIENTOS NATURALMENTE FRACTURADOS
6.2. C ONCEPTO DE Y ACIMIENTO N ATURALMENTE F RACTURADO
I was not an ‘insider’, despite how I came to being interested in this topic. I have not lived in an intentional community, but I considered I had some degree of ‘insider’ status because of my own life experiences (explained in Chapter 1, page 13). In early conversations with key contacts and potential interviewees, I used opportunities to describe how I had come to be interested in this subject and the origins of my PhD research questions and used these to build relationships with potential participants.
These conversations helped secure participation in three ways. First, I have mentioned how communities had experienced previous media and research interest that had not always felt worthwhile for them (p50), so my involvement in building a community with my friends marked me as a sympathiser rather than an antagonist. Second, amongst potential participants there was often enthusiasm for helping other communities, so my practical experiences and engagement felt positive to them. Third, my project management experience in health and social care helped me present as an experienced person (not amateur) who might be well-placed to influence relevant policy makers.
The priority for me was to ensure I set out my research goals clearly and honestly. Therefore, I always emphasised the principal academic purpose of my research was the achievement of my PhD and that any other outcomes would be secondary. Being consistent with my
theoretical and methodological approach, I did not consider it appropriate or possible to be
objective; rather, I was explicit about my background and my motivations. I held in mind
Bourdieu’s injunctions to academic researchers not to just critique ideologies of domination and reveal injustices, but to commit to ‘create the conditions for a collective effort to
reconstruct a universe of realist ideals, capable of mobilizing people’s will without mystifying their consciousness’ (Bourdieu, 2003: 9). I balanced this approach with the necessity to apply academic rigour to my research.
This approach is recognised in the methodological literature as marking a departure from traditional positivist approaches to interviewing, in which association or sympathy with those interviewed, or empathy in the conduct of face-to-face interviews might be construed as bias or partisanship. In this traditional positivist approach to interviewing, the interviewee is seen as the seam of information and the interviewer as the extractor, or miner, of that information (Kvale, 1996). I accepted the premise that my research was inherently social and inherently political (see above p 53) and that in order to achieve academic rigour, neutrality was not an option. Instead I accepted the imperative to develop ‘self-knowledge and conscious self-monitoring’ as part of my learning to research effectively (Dunne et al., 2005: 35). For this purpose, I kept a researcher diary throughout my field work which I discussed with my peers and my supervisor and which helped me to consider the social relations and dynamics of my research encounters - the ‘dynamic synchronous intersubjectivity’ of my interview experiences (Dunne et al., 2005: 46). This process was ongoing throughout the research process, including the analysis and writing up stages: ethical considerations were part of my reflective process and decision-making regarding data preparation and analysis and were part of my concern to not disembody and unduly fragment my research
participants’ lives and perspectives.
This Chapter has, then, set out my epistemological position, my methodological approach and the methods I used to conduct my research and explained how they link together. In the next four Chapters, I outline the findings of my research, starting with Chapter 5 which sets out the context in which my interviews with individuals were located - the nine intentional communities - and outlines the main differences between them based on economic capital.
CHAPTER 5 - A TYPOLOGY OF THE COMMUNITIES AND
DISTINCTIONS BASED ON ECONOMIC CAPITAL
Introduction
The purpose of this chapter is to describe in detail the intentional communities included in the study, given how little detailed research has been undertaken in this field (evidenced in Chapter 2) and to situate the lives of my interviewees within the different types of
intentional community. In order to understand what makes living in intentional communities possible for my interviewees I needed to draw out the habitus of the intentional
communities they were part of, formed around the key concepts of economic, cultural and social capital. In this chapter, therefore, I answer the following key research questions:
- How many communities had older members? - What kinds of communities had older members?
- Were there distinctions between the communities in terms of the economic capital required to become and to sustain living as a member?
- Were there other key distinctions between the communities relating to cultural capital?
I start with the results from my survey of the communities in the South of England, which provides the age profile of the membership of the nine communities that responded to my telephone survey and the members of which I interviewed. I then describe the current financial costs of entry and the cost of living in the nine communities as the basis for distinguishing the communities in terms of Bourdieu’s key axis - economic capital.