Paper short abstract:

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 long 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.