My paper draws on the challenges of co-constructing the unspoken secrets and unsettled pasts of a family ethnography. Is collaboration and co-production enough to adapt to the different ways of looking, listening, and paying attention to our interlocutor's unsettled pasts?
Paper Abstract
When anthropologists work on life projects that are part microhistory and part memoir, learning how to protect or break research participants’ unspoken secrets remains fundamental. In this paper, I outline the methodological challenges and collaborative opportunities that have surfaced in my familial ethnography between myself, an anthropologist, and my father, my research participant. Studying extended family connections as a field-site, my project pieces together the lived experiences of my father and wider kin as a Chinese-Finnish mixed-race family living in Beijing under Mao Zedong rule at a time when careful monitoring and mutual surveillance geared people’s everyday affairs. Secrets, self-enforced social forgetting, repression and disremembering shapes the biographical narratives of many that grew up in this insulated environment. When conducting fieldwork, I am frequently faced with silence and warnings that undoing, exposing and concealing the unspoken past can lead to fatal consequences. How can I as an anthropologist and daughter help to co-construct my family member’s intimate recollections in these conditions? Rather than salvaging the past of our research participants and waiting for the sudden exposure of the ‘unspoken’, I contemplate whether co-production can help anthropologists adapt to different ways of looking, listening, and paying attention to the unexposed narratives of our research participants.