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.