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Accepted Paper:
Ethnographic Paralysis: towards a pathos of field encounter
Sofia Hnezla
(University of St. Andrews)
In the paper, I present my experience of ethnographic paralysis, the shifts in my understanding of field encounters, and the textual and social experiences resulting from these shifts.
Paper Abstract:
During field visits to my birth country of Tunisia, I was faced by the harsh reality of everyday violence and precarity. The language of academia became dysfunctional in encounters with my interlocutors. I was overwhelmed by a research paralysis that provoked me to think differently about the format of interviews and participant observation as they were classically framed in anthropological literature. The structure of my field encounters and the words of my interlocutors became too powerful for the academic writing to hold. In the process of writing my research, their stories, charged with emotion, resisted the academic writing process.
Stepping back from the illusion of the need and urgency to write about my field encounters, I started humanizing them as first and fore most human encounters. I began thinking about ways to meet my interlocutors away from a research agenda, rather as act of coming together, of empathy and recognition of shared struggle. Accordingly, a specific pathos was generated by these encounters, which I transferred into the writing using a strategy of writing through/with anger and pain. The outcome is a collection of stories that present my interlocutors’ life trajectories and words, in addition to a collection of their own writing about their experiences of socio-political precarity. In the paper, I present my experience of ethnographic paralysis, the shifts in my understanding of field encounters, and the textual and social experiences resulting from these shifts.