Paper short abstract:

Making sense of traveling biotechnologies and the assemblages to which they belong requires ethnographers to locate themselves beyond positionality, and to ask: what would it mean to consider that there is no wrong turn in one’s ethnographic encounters?

Paper long abstract:

Particular conflations occur for Southern anthropologists trained elsewhere who come to research “home.” First, the assumption that one understands home for what it is. Secondly, the illusion that one shall be openly accepted into the community, and hence entitled to the data and the stories that shall make them a credible ethnographer. In searching for the “ethnographic” moment, the paper inquires about how much data is lost when not valued as good enough. It aims to explore disappointment during fieldwork and its punctuated punctuality as a necessary marker for interrogating how anthropologists may grapple with sense-making. It takes the example of searching for future smart hospitals in Morocco and follows through an inquiry into what would it mean to consider that there is no wrong turn in one’s ethnographic encounters.

In order to make sense of traveling biotechnologies and the assemblages to which they belong, ethnographers ought to locate themselves beyond positionality. The paper argues for the potentiality of getting rid of disappointment by assembling the multiple elsewheres, and centers to which one belongs and doesn’t belong, and the role they play in giving sense to researched matter and sensorial experiences. First, by re-centering and re-evaluating old(er) and silenced questions that paved the way for one’s initial curiosity. Second, by engaging in attentive listening to interactions about how one is located in the world and the particular histories encountered through bodily correspondences, especially for individuals labeled as coming from places of “non-thought.”