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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, -Kelly Fagan Robinson (University of Cambridge)
Paper short abstract:
This paper addresses potential epistemic dissonance and testimonial injustice by interrogating the delicate treadlines between advocacy and appropriation. It critically engages with re-presentations of deaf people by a non-deaf anthropologist, on forms for benefits assessments and in ethnography.
Paper long abstract:
During field research, I volunteered as an advisor at a deaf support charity. Alongside other volunteers I collected testimonial evidence from deaf claimants as they sought to be approved for the UK benefits Personal Independence Payment (PIP) and Employment Support Allowance (ESA). I wrote down their statements, attempting to explain their reasons for claiming, highlighting their accounts of “long term adverse effect” which according to the Equality Act 2010 would prove these claimants were eligible for State support.
However, expression and reception of testimonials attesting to pain in daily life are shaped by experiential proximity to such life-ways, and though I witnessed the adversity, I had not personally experienced it. Sensorial, social, material and ethical experiences within welfare claiming have profound implications for legibility of claimant testimonies, empathy, and understanding. My re-presentations and those of thousands of other support volunteers throughout the UK wielded significant influence over eligibility statements within UK benefits claiming processes with untold consequences. Between 2013-2019 more than 1,363,000 benefits benefits judgements were reviewed, 3-of-4 decisions were ultimately deemed incorrect.
This paper unpacks epistemic dissonance and resulting testimonial injustice (Fricker 2007; Wanderer 2017) through interrogating the delicate treadlines between advocacy and appropriation. It maps instances of communicative/epistemic disjuncture affecting deaf disability support claimants, witnessed and recounted by a non-claiming, non-deaf anthropologist. It critically engages with deep implications re-presenting another person brings to bear on communication barriers within both welfare and ethnographic practices, particularly when textual representations can inadvertently uphold hegemonic rigidities, impacting our interlocutors' ability to survive.
Sofia Ugarte (London School of Economics and Political Science)
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyses practices of racialisation as intimate encounters. Based on Haitian women's efforts looking for work in Santiago, I show how racialised differences become materialised in bodies, sediment the history and pedagogy of Chilean whiteness, and push the limits of otherness.
Paper long abstract:
This paper analyses practices of racialisation as intimate encounters that problematise anthropology’s use of ethnographic otherness. Departing from Sara Ahmed’s work on migrant encounters in which strangers are framed in prior histories of difference and relationships of power (Ahmed 2000), I conceptualise encounters as an ethnographic device through which we can study everyday interactions in connection to broader processes of social transformation. Based on fieldwork with migrant Haitian women looking for work and their interactions with Chilean employers in job interviews and skills-training programmes in Santiago, I examine how racialised differences become materialised in Haitian women’s bodies, constitute a landscape of servitude in the Chilean labour market, and sediment ‘Chilean whiteness’ with its particular history and pedagogy. These encounters, I argue, are abundant of emotional epistemologies (Ramos-Zayas 2011) that redefine Haitian women as dispossessed afro-descendant labour migrants and affectively attach them to Chile’s ambivalent promise of being a welcoming country. Moreover, racialisation as encounter and its consequential character also points to the peripheral proximity of researchers in these situations, in which differences between self and other can become exacerbated or even subsided. I thus further reflect on the ways anthropological attention to encounters opens possibilities for redefining the limits of otherness theoretically and ethnographically.
Sophia Hoffinger (University of Edinburgh)
Paper short abstract:
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Paper long abstract:
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Leyla Neyzi (University of Glasgow)
Paper short abstract:
In this paper, I use my research with Kurdish youth in Turkey to argue that contemporary anthropology must point not away from but towards a discussion of the historical and political context which shapes both the positionality of the anthropologist and the production of anthropological theory.
Paper long abstract:
The turn towards extreme abstraction associated with the obsession with (a particular kind of) theory in anthropology is doing a disservice to what anthropology does best: long-term fieldwork based on intimate relationships with informants. Anthropological classics have long demonstrated that anthropologists’ concepts tend to derive from analytical discussions with informants in the field. Some of the most compelling new ethnographies—theory from the south—are by anthropologists whose ties to the societies they study are multiple and complex. This paper will analyse the violence that necessarily provided the starting point in my relationship with potential informants as an academic from Istanbul working with Kurdish youth in the unofficial capital of Turkey’s Kurdish region, Diyarbakir. Highly sophisticated politically, these young people challenged my authority, making it clear that any research to be carried out would be subject to negotiation. In effect, they positioned themselves as akin to anthropologists in so far as they themselves were engaged in analysing and representing their individual and collective experiences. I contend that the ongoing debate over the responsibility of anthropology points not away from but directly towards a discussion of the historical and political context which shapes the positionality of the anthropologist and the process by which anthropological theory is produced.