Paper short abstract:

I look back on the process of co-authoring a reciprocal ethnography with my friend Liria Hernández. Reflecting on the encounter between our reciprocal aims and the imperatives of academic anthropology, I argue for a way of writing ethnography that foregrounds doubt and the inevitability of failure.

Paper long abstract:

In my contribution, I reflect on the process of co-authoring a reciprocal ethnographic memoir with my friend, Liria Hernández, a book where we tell together our intertwined lives as Spanish women, street-seller and scholar, Roma and non-Roma. Liria had been my informant for twenty years until together we decided to devise a new way of working and she became my collaborator and co-author. In our monograph, we observe and attempt to define each other so that the traditional roles of anthropologist and informant are discarded. We also confront uncertainty, ambiguity and doubt—our difficulties in discerning paths and asserting truths, our disagreements with each other—and turn them into unstable foundations for our stories. The result is more than an experiment in ethnographic writing: it is an experiment in ethnographic being and knowing, one that has demanded that we construct our own reciprocal genre. It is the process of devising this genre that I examine here. Reflecting on the encounter between our reciprocal aims and the aesthetic and institutional imperatives of academic anthropology, I ask what makes a text ethnographic, what makes it reciprocal, and what makes it scholarly. I argue for a way of writing and teaching ethnography that foregrounds doubt and not just certainty, the inevitability of failure and not just the striving for authority and success. And I consider the advantages of an anthropology that takes as its starting point the fundamental ambiguity and groundlessness of human experience.