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Accepted Paper:
'You speak to me, I write for you. But also for/to me/us?' Reflecting on how shared experiences of dispossession and solidarities per/formed in the field could transform Anthropology.
Ioanna Manoussaki-Adamopoulou
(UCL)
The proposed paper reflects on the present opportunity to review the conceptual distance of social and academic settings, by placing shared experiences of dispossession and solidarities per/formed in the field in the centre of anthropological praxis.
Paper long abstract:
Practicing Anthropology 'at home' has allowed me to observe a 'conceptual gap' between the experience of fieldwork as an embodied, deeply invested practice affected by socio-economic changes that shape the social experience of researcher and research participants alike and the setting where analysis takes place, systematically denying these interconnections. Whilst Anthropology assumes empathy towards research subjects, shared dispossessions and 'thick solidarities' enacted in the field are regularly discarded from academic writing. Beyond being a historically 'white public space', the epistemic status of Anthropology also often demands the performance of 'middle-classness'; adopting a position of 'safe' social distance, instead of recognising entanglements with situations of precarity and discrimination we write about. I argue for the 'bridging' potential of solidarity (Rakopoulos 2016) not only to counter the effects of the 'business of Anthropology' (Cabot 2019), still reproducing the neo-colonial violence it critiques, but also to produce 'thicker' descriptions of contemporary social experience.