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- Convenors:
-
Ruba Salih
(University of Bologna)
Yael Navaro (University of Cambridge)
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- Stream:
- Who Speaks and for Whom?
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 30 March, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Extreme abstraction has become a new norm in the transformation of ‘ethnographic concepts’ into anthropological theory, pushing anthropology back to early assumptions of ‘objectivity’. We invite papers that critically address these turns, and reimagine the political in the ethnographic encounter.
Long Abstract:
The project of ‘description’ in anthropology, including that of deriving ‘ethnographic theory’ out of fieldwork, has continued to assume a default neutral positionality vis-a-vis one’s research subjects and context. Relying on an unproblematized subject-position for the anthropologist, some recent advances in the discipline have treated the fieldworker as if an ‘empty vessel’ in the transformation of fieldwork observations into anthropological concepts. The recent professionalization of the discipline in this direction has led to practices of analysis and conceptualization (including of ‘comparison’) which often work through a de-contextualization, de-historicization, and de-politicization of the anthropologist’s interlocutors and findings. Most problematic, is the way that concepts are derived through distance from the political concerns of the subjects of ethnography, while extreme abstraction has become a new norm in the transformation of ‘ethnographic concepts’ into anthropological theory. In such works, a purported detachment from the political context of the field has pushed anthropology back to an early assumption (and promulgation) of ‘objectivity.’ Following Didier Fassin’s call for ‘a time of critique,’ (and against Bruno Latour’s reckless declaration of critique’s ‘running out of steam’), this panel critically addresses anthropology’s recent such forms of professionalization. We invite paper proposals that carve out a space for ethnography as an embodied, affective and political encounter which mobilises critical engagements through contextualized and historicized analyses.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 30 March, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the lessons artistic imaginings of a non-Euclidean city offer the exhibition participants. Co-curating an exhibition of Jerusalem made fieldwork a process of puzzling things out and responding to the material forms and audience configurations that emerged.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the lessons artistic imaginings of a non-Euclidean city, a possible Jerusalem, one not confined to space-time coordinates we use to understand realpolitik, offer the exhibition’s participants and audiences. Following Alfred Gell’s call to study art “as a system of action,” I examine the actions that made an exhibition of Jerusalem at a Palestinian art foundation into a part of the Fourth Palestinian Biennale. This exhibition provided a critical space where actors could analyze the bundling of their lives into incomplete concepts, such as “Palestinian” or “Israeli Arab,” or artificially exclusive ideologies, such as “binationalist coexistence” or “nationalist resistance.” When I was asked by “informants” to co-curate the exhibition, fieldwork became a process of puzzling things out and responding to the material forms and audience configurations that emerged. My involvement as an anthropologist of art forced me to reflect on what I was asking art (and my informants) to do: description can quickly become conscription (getting observations to serve an argument) and prescription (proffering a way to be based on a way of being). Using my curatorial challenges, interviews and walks with participant artists, and intermittent fieldwork since 1992 with Palestinians audiences and cultural activists, I aim to learn from the artistic imaginings a model for contributing to an anthropology of the political imagination.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores ethical and political dilemmas of ethnographically approaching a refugees’ squat in Turin, Italy. By addressing hurdles and conundrums of engaging with such a place, the article seeks to reflect on the refusal of the “researched subject” to be domesticated for academic purposes.
Paper long abstract:
Migrants’ squats often inhabit marginal and “out of sight” urban areas, placed at the intersection of institutional neglect and radical forms of dwelling (Lancione 2019). Yet, at times, migrants’ informal settlements become highly visible places, as they can find themselves in the spotlight as symbols of governmental failure and urban decay. Drawing on some ethnographic encounters that took place at the doorstep of a refugees’ squat in Turin (Italy), this paper reflects on ethical and political dilemmas of ethnographically approaching such a place. Entering a housing squat, inhabited by documented and undocumented migrants, is nothing but obvious. This task was complicated by an intense mediatic attention - experienced as deeply violent by the squat’s residents - as well as by an imminent eviction, which entailed a heightened sense of precarity and suspicion. Squat’s residents’ search for invisibility and their - more or less explicit - resistance to the “ethnographic gaze” can be interpreted as political acts, in that they attempted at re-gaining control over exogeneous narratives and representations. This scenario offers a fertile perspective to critically engage with some underlying aspects of the ethnographic encounter, such as researcher’s ambivalent affects and hesitations, the complex responsibilities of the ethnographic account, as well as the very refusal of the “researched subject” to be domesticated for academic purposes.
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on my ethnography with pro-regime paramilitary organisation of the Basij, whose members are known for perpetuating state violence in Iran, I discuss a research situation where neutral ethnographic position is hardly an option.
Paper long abstract:
Drawing on my ethnography with pro-regime paramilitary organisation of the Basij, whose members are known for perpetuating state violence in Iran, I discuss a research situation where neutral ethnographic position is hardly an option. First, by describing practicalities of doing fieldwork with the Basij in 2015-2016, I provide details on how my close engagement with militiamen of the Basij was often emotionally laced with negative feelings of compulsion and guilt, triggering a deep sense of anxiety about my political commitments and a sense of self-distrust bordering on treachery. Second, by laying out challenges and stakes related to dissemination and publication, I highlight how taking a neutral ethnographic position constantly raises suspicion about my complicity in advancing Iranian regime’s oppressive political agenda among the community of scholars. To constructively face such challenges, I argue that critical reflections on 'negative empathy' (Poewe 1996), and complicity in the production of anthropological knowledge serve as useful counters to many of the (rather romanticised) accounts in anthropological literature, which tend to be premised upon the possibilities for unproblematic forms of intimacy and trust being developed with informants. Moreover, through the notion of ‘ethnographic betrayal', I explain how to inhabit the discomfort of an ethnographic-political space, where the genre of ethnography is used to reveal ‘narrative of involvement’ (Anderson 2013) rather than accentuating the moral and professional certitude of an anthropologist.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper, I reflect on my understanding of ethnography as a self-reflective, intersubjective, and intersectional endeavour of cultural translation as developed over a multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork research on contemporary staged representations of Alevi rituals.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper, I reflect on my understanding of ethnography as a self-reflective, intersubjective, and intersectional endeavour of cultural translation as developed over a multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork research on contemporary staged representations of Alevi rituals.
Approaching forms of embodiment, movement and performance both as investigative objects as well as critical methodologies, my research aimed at refining academic understanding of the processual and contingent character through which Alevi identities have been produced and transmitted over the last decades in Turkey and transnationally. Aware of the distance in my cultural background, I understood ethnographic professionalism not in terms of pursuing objectivity, but rather of moral accountability for what I saw and what I failed to see, and how I acted and failed to act in critical situations (Shepers-Hughes 1995:437).
Inspired by Nancy Shepers-Hughes’ 'more women-hearted' anthropology as well as by Dwight Conquergood’s 'performance ethnography as struggle and moral act', I thus constructed a patchwork of ‘partial, plural, incomplete, and contingent understandings’ (Denzin 2003:8) rather than anthropological abstraction.
This paper relates about the performative processes through which I cultivated immediacy and involvement rather than analytic distance or detachment, addressing the processual rather the procedural aspects of ethics in the design and delivery of my research. Dissecting my ethnographic positionalities, I aim thus to question issues related to shared authority, public visibility and safety in delicate contexts, as well as to suggest notions of 'critical pedagogy' in transnational performance and ethnography production.