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Paper short abstract

Long-time ethnography in the Danube Delta shows how anthropologists become entangled in polarisation through immersive research practices, producing ethical drift across competing moral, ecological, and tourism regimes in a fragile socio-ecological landscape.

Paper long abstract

Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in the Danube Delta, observing diachronic transformations in a fragile socio-ecological environment, I examine how anthropological practice becomes entangled in processes of polarization through expectations of positioning, representation, and advocacy. Rather than a circumscribed “field site,” the delta emerges as a processual and relational landscape in which tension and coexistence are continually co-produced across human and more-than-human worlds. This paper reflects on the anthropologist’s position within a polarized delta shaped by overlapping regimes of environmental protection, tourism development, and adaptive livelihoods. Tourism can be both a buffer and an amplifier of precarity, simplifying complex delta lives into consumable moral polarities such as unspoiled/damaged or authentic/corrupt.

Polarization is not simply an ideological condition but a form of differential vulnerability that governance and tourism seek to manage or “fix” in landscapes that thrive on ambiguity. State actors, conservation organizations, tourism entrepreneurs, and local communities mobilize dissimilar moral and ecological narratives, positioning the anthropologist as intermediary, witness, expert, or supporter. These positionings generate an ethical drift: a gradual, inadvertent movement across alignments produced through everyday research practices such as participating, listening, eavesdropping, translating, recording, and circulating knowledge.

Methodologically, the paper reflects on ethnographic work across contested knowledge regimes (conservationism, policy-making, activism, informal economies). It proposes strategies of partial rejection, strategic ambiguity, and relational accountability that enable engagement without fully reproducing polarized frameworks. Situating the anthropologist “in the net” rather than above the dispute permits cultivating forms of attentiveness that acknowledge entanglement while resisting imposed alignments.