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- Convenor:
-
Rachel Harris
(SOAS University of London)
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- Chair:
-
Xavier Hallez
(Institut français d'études sur l'Asie centrale (IFEAC))
- Discussant:
-
Madeleine Reeves
(University of Oxford)
- Format:
- Panel
- Theme:
- Anthropology & Archaeology
- Location:
- 207 (Floor 2)
- Sessions:
- Friday 7 June, -
Time zone: Asia/Almaty
Abstract:
Since the upsurge in state repression in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in 2017, Uyghur, Kazakh and other Turkic Muslim exiles have been at times overwhelmed by approaches from journalists, rights organisations, activists and anthropologists who have asked them to act as witnesses to the violent upheavals of their homeland, often by recalling traumatic memories of harassment, detention, and the rupture of family ties. This panel brings a much-needed critical and reflexive lens to the methodologies, encounters, and engagements involved in ethnographic and other forms of interviews with exiles, and the consequences for interviewee and interviewer which flow from the production and circulation of interview-based texts and media items within this difficult terrain.
The panel will present a series of case studies drawn from recent experiences of interviews with exiles from XUAR, bringing these case studies into conversation with debates in anthropology around modes of knowledge production and the ideological constructions of “truth-telling” (Briggs 2007). We ask how interviewing practices produce subjects and objects, knowledge and authority. We draw on discussions in sound studies of “genres of listening” (Kapchan 2017), the ways that they orient the listener in particular affective directions, and perform different kinds of aesthetic and political work. We engage with recent writing on “dialogic ethnography” and the importance of accounting for context and relationships under conditions of authoritarian rule (Makley 2018). Finally, we consider the focus in critical race studies on practices of “refusal” (Campt 2019), and reflect on how activists and ethnographers working with marginalised and precarious communities in Central Asian contexts can respond to this call. Our discussions will explore the notions of reciprocity involved in these exchanges, as well as questions around research ethics and the difficult boundaries between research, activism and human engagement.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 7 June, 2024, -Abstract:
Sening yading eger ketse dilimdin / Wujudin bir quruq weyrandin artuq
If the memory of you left my heart / The emptiness of my life would be greater than ruins
This paper reflects on interviews with Uyghur followers of Naqshbandi Sufism living in exile in Istanbul and Dubai. They are part of a transnational community they term El Tesawwuf, and inheritors of an Islamic cultural and spiritual tradition which is oriented through an aesthetic radically opposed to the ‘spiritual civilisation’ (jingshen wenming) promoted under current government projects of ‘re-engineering’ Uyghur culture and history. Their approach to our ethnographic encounters was rooted in their own traditions of dewet (religious teaching) and helqe sohbet (gatherings held by Uyghur Sufi groups involving the recitation of zikr and sung hikmet poetry.) These modes of communication involve particular styles of speech and embodiment, citation of traditions of spiritual poetry, and vivid accounts of the sounds, rhythms, and ‘spiritual joy’ (rohi ghuzzur) produced in helqe sohbet.
Our interviews formed part of a tradition of remembering which they have nurtured through decades of suppression: a style of religious teaching that they sustained even during long periods of incarceration in the region’s prison camps. They convey decolonial forms of knowledge and ways of being defy imposed notions of modernity, nostalgically producing alternative sources of hierarchy and power (Gatling 2018), and creating transnational communities of affect (Kapchan 2013). How should an ethnographer listen to dewet, and what is the place of the ethnographer within the transnational circulation of memories of helqe sohbet?
Abstract:
In this presentation, I will discuss the adaptation of the classic anthropological method of in-depth and semi-structured interviewing for working with survivors of re-education camps in XUAR and their relatives. Activists, anthropologists, human rights researchers, and journalists primarily gather data from former detainees, witnesses, relatives, and existing testimonies. In the case of camp victims from XUAR, anthropologists employ remote ethnography to comprehensively understand the human rights catastrophe. I will explore different target audiences for interviewers of varied backgrounds and their common objectives. While participant observation is a key method in classic anthropology, interviews serve as a crucial component of the ethnographic process. However, journalists and activists often require quicker data analysis. Additionally, the interviewer's positionality, timing, location, and circumstances may significantly influence the process. The method of interviewing, as a key tool to gather information, must be applied carefully when working with sensitive information for victims, emphasizing empathy and avoiding harm to both interviewers and interviewees. This presentation compares interviewing methods (including narrative analysis), ethics, and challenges when working with victims of incarceration, colonial legacies, and differing cultural backgrounds.
Abstract:
It’s an established rule of research ethics of both anthropologists and journalists that we do not pay for information. There are good reasons for this. Payment suggests a commercial exchange and incentivises the production, sometimes manufacturing, of the sellable commodity – in this case information, testimony, stories. At the same time, anthropologists know very well that it is rarely a good idea to visit a new house without bringing a gift and that the building of trust over time includes a complexity of giving and receiving. In a broader perspective, the ethics of the relationship between researchers and participants, too, involves considerations of reciprocity of various kinds. When, starting in 2018, camp survivors from XUAR who had fled to Kazakhstan gave testimony to activists, journalists and researchers, they did so with a complex bundle of motives often including the hope of an improvement of the situation for themselves, their relatives or a larger community. In 2023 many of them told me: “they came, took and made their careers on our stories, but for us nothing has changed. Why should we continue to talk to them?” Some journalists and human rights researchers, at the same time, felt that they were doing these people a favour by providing them a platform. The classical core difference between commodities and gifts is that former are not part of an ongoing personal relationship while latter are. The real expectation entailed in a gift is not a counter-gift – this would follow the commodity logic – it is a lasting relationship of care and responsibility. In a word: community or kinship. The denial of this is often experienced as betrayal or exploitation. This paper draws on examples of camp survivors from XUAR in Kazakhstan, Turkey and Euromerica to explore the interview as an exchange of gifts situated in a larger social context of relations, hierarchies and power.