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Paper short abstract:

Considering a potential return to the field, anthropologists face "endo-nostalgia" for past ethnographic experiences and "exo-nostalgia" for unexplored phenomena. This contribution aims to explore various dimensions of ethnographers' nostalgia and its impact on anthropological research and writing.

Paper long abstract:

In the late 2000s, my ethnographic research in contemporary Serbia focused on the evolving perceptions of the body and corporeality within groups practicing 'eastern' therapeutic and meditative techniques. Immersed in their activities and connected through an extensive informant network, I scrutinized the complex interaction between cultural perspectives on the body and diverse health knowledge in a specific sociocultural context.

In 2009, I relocated to France, pragmatically adjusting my research focus, and distancing myself from my prior work and the associated field without giving it much thought. This shift marked a new chapter, involving thesis writing in a foreign language while juggling roles as an academic researcher and a parent. Despite remotely following my initial field through digital platforms, I discerned new aspects in my contacts' practices, particularly changes in their narratives. The global health crisis in 2020 intensified my desire to revisit my previous research area from a new perspective. However, at that time, I faced a unique predicament : being in the final phase of writing a thesis on an entirely different subject and with no possibility of traveling, returning to my initial field seemed impossible.

Since then, I have navigated between two nostalgic sentiments: "endo-nostalgia" for ethnographic experiences I have previously lived, and "exo-nostalgia" for unexplored phenomena. My intention in this contribution is to explore various dimensions of ethnographers' nostalgia, contemplating a potential return to the field.

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Paper short abstract:

Conducting fieldwork as an East Asian anthropologist during the Covid outbreak, I was forced to leave the field after receiving threats of violence. This paper challenges romantic ideas of ethnographic encounter, grappling with the impossibility of sentimental nostalgia when the field turns hostile.

Paper long abstract:

As an Asian American attempting to uncover sometimes difficult, complicated truths in an East African city, it would be disingenuous to pretend I was just another anthropologist in Kampala, Uganda. While I was immensely privileged, being "Chinese", for all intents and purposes, in a place deeply mistrustful and often resentful of the category into which I fell did not lead to everyday life being a romantic endeavor. Anthropologists have grappled with issues of power and inequality inherent in researcher-subject relationships, but assumptions about fieldwork being an idealistic part of anthropologists linger. The thought of not loving the place one does research continues to be unfathomable for many. But, my subjectivity led to many uncomfortable encounters in Kampala that prevents my memory of fieldwork from being purely sentimental. Because most of the Chinese and Chinese-looking population in the city is there for business, it was difficult to situate myself as an anthropologist. Aside from harmless "ching-chong" greetings and questions about China, there were more hostile meetings, including demands for me to explain why the Chinese were exploiting Ugandans. In March of 2020, when Covid was spreading across the globe and quarantine measures were being enacted, I was surrounded in downtown Kampala by people frustrated that the government did not kick Chinese contractors out of Uganda to prevent the spread of Covid. This paper reflects on this hostile ending to complicated fieldwork, asking what such a relationship to the field can offer to the production of knowledge.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper will explore the challenge of being a vulnerable observer (Behar 1997) when these same vulnerabilities may prevent us entering the field. It will explore the nature of hopes, dreams and longing against a back-drop of business model-led academia.

Paper long abstract:

It has been almost 30 years now since Ruth Behar asked anthropologists to strip away those apparently solid pretexts associated with being an objective observer. Instead, she encouraged us to acknowledge, and then engage critically with, our own subjectivity, emotions, experiences, positionality and so on – a process that requires us to reveal something of our vulnerable selves. But what are the implications when it is some of these same vulnerabilities that may reduce opportunity to access to the field? This paper will explore these challenges through the lens of my own and others’ academic and personal experience – how do our hopes, dreams and longing stack up against a back-drop of business model-led academia? Through this focus I will consider ways in which our vulnerabilities provoke questions relating to the shifting nature of the academy – or more appropriately, the imagined shifting nature of the academy.

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Paper short abstract:

The Middle East has become increasingly inaccessible to researchers, impacting the ability of young scholars to engage in sustained fieldwork. The study examines the potential insights multi-sited ethnography can offer into the practical evolution of anthropology.

Paper long abstract:

Over the course of successive years, the Middle East and North Africa have become progressively less accessible to researchers. As burgeoning scholars, we were nurtured by the narratives of our mentors, who dedicated extensive periods to fieldwork, thereby illustrating our famous being there in an even more accurate way [Geertz, 1988]. Our academic mentors were traditionally specialized in singular regions or countries. However, over our truncated academic journey, successive closures of research fields resulted in a diminishing pool of young researchers able to commit to a specific geographic space, not without constraint. The paradigm has undergone transformation, particularly within anthropology—a discipline entrenched in a challenging colonial history. The evolution of our discipline and the political context of the region forces us to re-build our tools within our new necessities.

Consequently, this paper aims to explore the viability of conducting fieldwork in a world characterized by pervasive uncertainty. Furthermore, we seek to examine this uncertainty, which we aspire to study in the context that periods of indeterminacy “are ideal moments for investigation, in that they take us back to the modalities and values that emerge from the social logics that underlie the determination and perception of risks.” [Dousset, 2019, p. 44]. We will delve into the existing alternatives to traditional long-term ethnography, such as digital fieldwork, evaluating its suitability as an option. Additionally, we will investigate to what extent multi-sited ethnography, beyond a theoretical perspective, may provide insights into the practical evolution of anthropology.

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Paper short abstract:

Intersectionality of personal nostalgia prompting engagement in academic research, with nostalgia of the community where ethnographic work is completed, can impact anthropological knowledge production in unpredictable ways especially where it has to contend with the involvement of the State.

Paper long abstract:

In Writing Culture, Marcus discussed the importance of doctoral fieldwork for an anthropologist noting that “it is in turning the dissertation into a published monograph or a series of articles that career directions are determined...” (1986: 265)

However, what happens when an anthropologist remains an outsider, unable to secure a suitable academic or research position. Can an outsider seek engagement with academic research and can nostalgia of first academic work be addressed by independent research?

This is especially so since the research work that I intend to pursue contends with nostalgia of others too. My doctoral fieldwork in the year 2000-2001 was in a Sikh village in Punjab in India, which had emerged from a militant movement. Tatla (2006) noted that the memory of the destruction of a holy Sikh shrine by the Indian army in the city of Amritsar in 1984 – interwoven with the memory of Sikh history – emerged as a traumatic event that fuelled Sikh militancy in Punjab.

This event continues to imfuse nostalgia of the Sikhs in Punjab and abroad, resulting in conflicts with the Indian State (Shah: 2022) as well as impinges on Sikh studies (McLeod: 1999) in unpredictable fashion.

This has the potential to complicate any research not only due to legal requirements to seek prior permission in India but also the political context within which it may be implemented, limiting the transformative prospect of nostalgia in expansion of my first ethnographic work with the Sikhs in Punjab.

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Paper short abstract:

Is this nostalgia, where your state of mind is at the heart of the situation, or despair in the face of a situation where you are a stranger? How do you react to the destruction and disappearance of villages, their inhabitants and their cults?

Paper long abstract:

Is this nostalgia, where your state of mind is at the heart of the situation, or despair in the face of a situation where you are a stranger?

How do you react to the destruction and disappearance of villages, their inhabitants and their cults?

Recently, flipping through my notebooks, taken during the shooting of a film in 1992, in the village of Arou, 800kms North of the capital Bamako( Republique du Mali), a certain nostalgia, or rather concern and despair, mingled.

What has become of the priests, the sacred places, the knowledge?

The lines of translation enumerate, explain and transcribe the genealogies, and the precision of the information, the names of places, caves, etc., give this work a timeless "out of the ground" dimension. I can't speak of nostalgia as Angé Olivia and Berliner David understand it. Still, I must admit to a certain despair in the face of the knowledge we've gathered, which has undoubtedly gone to ashes.

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Paper short abstract:

After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia, ethnographic work in Russia became impossible due to sanctions. The presentation will reflect on nostalgic feelings for “good old anthropological fieldwork” in the politics of knowledge production, with particular reference to Ukraine

Paper long abstract:

After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia, ethnographic work in Russia became unsurmountable due to sanctions imposed by nations around the world. Scholars already in the field were immediately evacuated, and the granting of ethical approvals or risk assessments for planned fieldwork research came to an abrupt halt. This presentation illustrates the complexities, blurred boundaries, and acute uncertainties that anthropologists working in Russia have faced since February 2022. Based on interviews conducted online and in person, as well as ethnographic engagement in the field done before the invasion, I share nostalgia among researchers for ‘good old anthropological work’ and contextualise these feelings in the politics of knowledge production in anthropology. In addition, I reflect on challenges for those researchers whose main methodological approach has included ethnography, and discuss the limitations of the turn to digital ethnography enforced by the ongoing inaccessibility of the field. In conclusion, I discuss some epistemological, methodological and ethical issues of carrying out anthropological research in a time of military conflict, as well as the implications for the future of anthropology in this context.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper reflects on fieldwork no longer accessible in the North Caucasus, Russia. It examines the complexities that emerged during this fieldwork and the feelings of nostalgia, regret, and longing in the absence of a return. It questions the place of such fragmentary fieldwork in anthropology.

Paper long abstract:

On 24 February 2022 and in the months thereafter, I watched in shock and disbelief as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine unraveled my fieldwork plans in the North Caucasus. Two years earlier, my plans had been cut short by Covid-19 pandemic border closings and I was expectantly planning my return to the North Caucasus for the first time since 2019. As it became clear that I would be unable to return, I began to reflect on my initial fieldwork stays in the summers of 2018 and 2019, as a Ph.D. student completing graduate coursework. I was filled with guilt and doubt that I had not used my time in the North Caucasus as wisely or productively as possible, and that I did not appreciate it or take advantage of it as I should have while there. As a female scholar in the North Caucasus traveling on a United States passport, I had not only navigated gender dynamics but also surveillance and constraints placed on me by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), which was embedded in the regional university that sponsored my research visa.

Through the lens of longing, regret, and nostalgia, I reflect as an early-career scholar on fieldwork in Uchkulan and Dombay, two mountainous villages in the Republic of Karachay-Cherkessia. I discuss the realities I faced, as well as the ethical, methodological, and security challenges I encountered while attempting to balance the expectations of my Ph.D. program, home and host institutions, and local collaborators in the field.

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Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I will question in a self-reflexive intersectional approach (gender, age, biographical path, origin) how my ethnographic fieldwork in an African country could not find continuity after the PhD. Nostalgia for the idealised fieldwork appeared at the turn of the fifties.

Paper long abstract:

Is Anthropology nostalgic?" is a question raised by Angé and Berliner (2014) in their introduction. In this paper, I will question in a self-reflexive intersectional approach in terms of gender, age, biographical path and country of living, how my ethnographic long duration fieldwork in a rural area in an African country could not find continuity after the thesis. The social pressure of entering adulthood, academics, and family careers has stopped the possibility of being far away from work and family locations. The injunction to succeed both 'Call for Projects', the increasing administrative work in French universities and family life did not allow me to be far away from home during a long time.

However, the main research themes have been instilled into the research programmes during my career. Nostalgia for the idealised far away fieldwork reappears at the biographical turning point of the fifties. Nostalgia can give a breath of fresh air to research that is less subject to social structure. The paper will then examine the extent to which nostalgia can be a driving force behind the research. It is not a question of regretting a past that cannot be redone, but of imagining research objects and fields of investigation that are reinvented in the light of previous ones.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper describes recent encounters in and out of various 'fields' and posits that our own positionalities should not be felt as obstacles to fieldwork but are instead (alongside the caring relationships we foster over time and space) the nourishing kernels of all anthropological understanding.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation offers vignettes from my 2023 ‘nostalgic’ sabbatical world tour that carried me in, through and out of places and relations and memories of the dead and the living that have informed the last 40 years of my anthropological career. My life in anthropology has taken me from remote islands and villages to transnational communities of martial arts practitioners to visiting and letter writing with men in supermax prisons to collaborative studies with deathcare industry workers. I believe that the beating heart of ‘ethnographic fieldwork’ is to be found in mutually meaningful relationships nurtured across time and space and that ‘anthropological knowledge’ emerges (often when least expected) out of encounters with fellow human beings, not ‘subjects’. Such knowledge is mediated by fields and experiences past and it will shift again when placed under the light of the future. Significant changes in the running of academic institutions, of funding bodies, IRBs/ethics review boards, and publishing houses etc are currently challenging the human research landscape with regulatory processes that often threaten the beating heart of anthropology even as they intend to protect it. I seek to find a way forward by suggesting that there is no such thing as an ideal field (only overlapping places, communities, personal relations, histories and memories), and that our own positionalities should not be seen as obstacles but should be acknowledged as the nourishing kernels of all anthropological understanding in the past, present and future.