Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Peter Pels
(Leiden University)
Joao Pina-Cabral (University of Lisbon)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Workshops
- Location:
- 119
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 27 August, -, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Ljubljana
Short Abstract:
Many anthropologists agree that the discipline lacks an accepted vocabulary of method. This may be the effect of a wider social scientific environment that suspects the mutual recognition that is basic to ethnographic fieldwork. This workshop aims to help develop this "method of mutuality".
Long Abstract:
The lack of an elaborate language for discussing the methodology of ethnographic fieldwork, especially of its changes after the "literary" and "global" turns of the 1980s and 1990s, puts anthropologists at a disadvantage in competitions for research funding and in maintaining the discipline at its current academic level. Our vocabularies of method are still held hostage by the desire to either put the process of research under the full control of the researcher (producing the "expert"), or turn the researcher into a fully transparent conduit of knowledge (resulting in "objectivity"). Ethnography, however, relies on the "mutualities" of interlocution and collaboration. We have not sufficiently invested in what one could call a "methodology of mutuality", often leaving this work to qualitative sociologists, but, more often, subjecting ourselves to the scorn of those disciplines whose claim to expertise can fall back on the "distinction" of more obviously quantitative methods.
This workshop should help develop the following aspects of that vocabulary: (a) an articulation of anthropology's focus on validity and mutual value recognition, that (b) shows our method is therefore a (neglected) model for ethics, that (c) indicates we work against the mutual recognition of values when we claim expertise as "independent" and asocial authority on knowledge, and finally that (d) shows which redefinitions of method, ethics and expertise are required that will fit ethnographic fieldwork. This should transform our curricula, the "methodology" sections of the average grant application, our relationship to people researched and our position vis-á-vis so-called "applied" research.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 27 August, 2008, -Paper short abstract:
Anthropologists neglect methodical language because they too often think of method as a positivist heritage. We should extend our conception of method to cover research into what anthropologists are particularly good at: the mutual recognition of values-in-practice.
Paper long abstract:
For a considerable period, "method" was either a well-kept secret or a dirty word in anthropology. This is detrimental to the anthropological position in the marketplaces of funding and public service. This paper suggests what a non-positivist conception of method could look like - one that incorporates research demands (such as ethics and expertise) that are discursively similar to method, and that also incorporates themes structurally in tension with method (such as history, reflexivity). I argue that time and process, contrary to what many anti-positivists argued, are not inimical to method.
Paper short abstract:
This paper argues that the radically ethical project of social anthropology is to craft a research methodology that has spatial, temporal, and conceptual flexibility structured into it, and asks how contemporary institutional processes in higher education and research administration undermine that project.
Paper long abstract:
Does anthropology lack an adequate language for discussing the methodology of ethnographic fieldwork, or do some anthropologists deliberately resist developing such a language? Or are there attempts to develop an alternative methodological language that are silenced by more dominant institutional discourses that privilege articulations of methodology in terms of natural science and technology transfer? How does the restructuring of universities in general and graduate education in particular - promoting a uniform "1+3 years" model for the completion of Ph.D. degrees and implementing "generic skills" modules for the professionalization of Ph.D. programs - undermine the radically ethical project of 21st century social anthropology, which is to train scholars to allow their research agendas to be shaped by a collaborative encounter with interlocutors at (and beyond) fieldsites, and to therefore craft a methodology that has spatial, temporal, and conceptual flexibility structured into it? Methodological borrowing across disciplines is a constructive practice that has in many ways strengthened anthropology and its interlocutor disciplines; but are there cases of methodological hijacking (funding agency-approved) that similarly undermine social anthropology, such as "human dimensions" research in which natural scientists claim to produce social scientific data, or "quick ethnography" whose proponents claim that long-term ethnographic field studies are no longer necessary to produce valid results? In the face of all of this, should social anthropology give in and jump on the bandwagon of managed uniformity, or should it resist and insist that space must be made for a more "bohemian" methodology - and can it be?
Paper short abstract:
Many methodology books on ethnography have adopted not unproblematically, existing anthropological vocabularies. We find that explanations concerning the researcher's positionality (insider-outsider), and the construction of knowledge (etic-emic) have been appropriated uncritically. In this paper we will analyze these and related concepts with respect to what they reveal about assumptions concerning the character of fieldwork relationships and knowledge generation.
Paper long abstract:
Many methodology books on ethnography have adopted not unproblematically, existing anthropological vocabularies. In particular, we find that explanations concerning the researcher's positionality (insider-outsider), and the construction of knowledge (etic-emic) have been appropriated, largely uncritically. In this paper we will analyze these and related concepts with respect to what they reveal about assumptions concerning the character of fieldwork relationships and knowledge generation.
Contemporary anthropology claims to have distanced itself from its colonial heritage through globalization and post-colonial theory, as well as the epistemological upheaval brought about by critical (feminist) anthropologists and the literary turn. Yet binary terms such as emic-etic and insider-outsider remain virtually intact in their usage in methodological discussions. As innocent as they may appear, these terms reify notions of culture and contain several assumptions which contradict present day anthropological practices founded on the plurality of experience and polyphony.
We argue that a critical anthropology must find ways to do away with these relics of past methodological times, departing instead from a perception of anthropological practice that conceptualizes the research relationship for no more and no less than what it is: the fieldwork relationship within which the construction of knowledge takes place. If this is accepted as the point of departure, then there is no room for concepts like those listed above. We call for an end to their automatic, unthinking invocation and a rethinking of the character of knowledge generation grounded in contemporary understandings of research relationhips and all they entail.
Paper short abstract:
Based both on historical work and on ethnographic fieldwork in Brazil, this paper reflects on the tension between the involvement in personal relationships and the production of a knowledge recognized as valid.
Paper long abstract:
In Brazil, experienced ethnographers, when studying land reform often use survey methods, which give more weight to their findings in a politically sensitive field. How can we sustain claims as to the validity of ethnographic knowlege, which is acquired through personal relationships? Using both personal experience in Northeast Brazil and a study of British anthropologists in the 1930's, I will try to reflect upon the distinctive contribution of ethnography and the ways it can gain recognition.
Paper short abstract:
Sensuous scholarship’s multisensory approach has come to emphasize skilled knowledge. Acknowledging the Other’s authority based on sensory perception other than sight, however, demands a return to pre-modern scientific practices, away from distance and objectivity towards scientific craftsmanship.
Paper long abstract:
Sensuous scholarship during the past twenty-five years has been arguing against an ocularcentrism that came to define western science in the modern era, which turned the Other into an object of the western gaze. By making a plea for a multisensory approach in ethnographic fieldwork, sensuous anthropology acknowledges authorities of knowledge that are not necessarily based on the sense of sight (or on vision as conceptualized in the West), but on other sensory perceptions (some of which not even occur in western discourses on the senses). The mutuality lying at the basis of a sensory methodology demands, firstly, a sensory training/skilling of the ethnographer; that is, emphasizing the participant mode in the common denotation of 'participant-observation' for ethnographic fieldwork. Secondly, it evokes dilemmas in representation that seeks not to undo this mutuality-in-practise. Consequently, sensuous anthropology has not only been redefining method and ethics, but inevitably questions the very - indeed - 'asocial' western epistemology itself. Its advocacy of skilled knowledge may award the Other expertise, 'at home' the ethnographer's acquired skills only widen the rift between scientific claims of objectivity and the subjectivity of being his own instrument of investigation, between distance and immersion. This paper will cast serious doubts on whether a 'new vocabulary of method' will ever be accepted in 'average grant applications,' unless scientific practice in general will regain some of its pre-modern, 'old-fashioned' characteristics of craftsmanship and trade.
Paper short abstract:
Research in the violent townships of Cape Town revealed how methodological obstacles and feelings of anxiety open up avenues for further inquiry into the nexus of intimacy, violence, and social interdependencies.
Paper long abstract:
Successful ethnography is often thought of in terms of the researcher obtaining intimacy and belonging. When I hear anthropologists converse about the close ties they have in the communities they study; how they are adopted by a family; how they see children grow up in multi-generational households; and have several beers in bars and taverns, I cannot help but feel somewhat envious and inadequate. The source of envy concerns the intimacy that their fieldwork enables; inadequacy about my own research in the Townships of Cape Town, South Africa.
When I return to 'my street', where I did extensive research in 1997/98, most (Xhosa) residents have left and are untraceable. When I visit Edith, my research assistant with whom I work since 1997, the social composition of her household has changed beyond recognition. Moreover, violence was a constant obstacle and source of anxiety as people I got to know were murdered, became victims of assault, or told me how they assaulted others. I had to constantly deal with safety and the numerous precautions I took only marginally decreased my anxiety. The anxieties that were part of the ethnographic endeavor offered further lines of inquiry. In this paper I will argue that the methodological challenges of ethnographic research generate crucial insights into life in contemporary urban South Africa, particularly with regards to the nexus of intimacy, violence, and social interdependencies.
Paper short abstract:
This paper argues that the constitution of certain mutuality is vital to a comprehension of relatedness that aims to escape structural-functionalist perspectives. The argument will be developed based on fieldwork on kinship relations in several social contexts in Portugal during the last 20 years.
Paper long abstract:
This paper will argue that the constitution of certain mutuality is vital for the very possibility of comprehension of relatedness. The heuristic value of addressing mutuality as a method to study relatedness is that these kind of relations are based on a permanent fundamental mutuality of interest and experiences between persons defined as relatives (it asserts what Schneider terms "enduring diffuse solidarity" or what Fortes terms the "axiom of amity"). Therefore these forms of relatedness ought to be expressed and understand only if there is some kind of mutuality between anthropologist and people studied as ethnography itself, relies on the "mutualities" of interlocution and collaboration.
I will develop this argument based on my own fieldwork on kinship relations in several social contexts in Portugal during the last 20 years. Having worked in working class neighborhoods in Lisbon, with elite families and with "new families" in contemporary Portugal I have learned that the only way to make this kin of ethnographic enquiry is based on the construction of a kind of mutuality with the people we are working with. That is the ground on which it is possible to raise an ethical and respectful communication when sharing experiences and feelings from a very intimate dimension of their lives. Notwithstanding, it is the sharing of this intimacy that enables anthropological insight to wider social questions.