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Paper short abstract

How can writing ethnography stay true to the lives of actors without facilitating the “legibility” of an authoritarian state? I answer this by balancing the ethnographer’s will to write against the competing will of the state to know, exploring fictionalization as a solution.

Paper long abstract

Pseudonymization or anonymization is rarely enough to protect the identity of actors when studying small-scale social worlds, especially when those same actors seek public renown. Writing about an intellectual milieu such as that of the Sultanate of Oman, on which I am working as an ethnographer, requires, however, a thick ethnographic description that pays close attention to the positions and specific trajectories of the actors. Analyzing their social properties is indeed essential to understanding their positions within the field and their specific modes of intervention in the public sphere. How, then, can we render ethnographic material while staying true to the lives of actors without exposing them, especially in an authoritarian context where actors constantly negotiate the relationship between their private convictions and their public statements? How can the ethnographer present their research without facilitating the repressive work of a state that strives to make its society more “legible” in order to better control it? Furthermore, how can empirical data be fictionalized without diluting or manipulating it to such an extent that no reader would ever be able to offer a contradictory analysis? These are the questions I will address in my talk by focusing on the techniques I use to write and anonymize my data and the issues they raise. In doing so, I will interrogate the limits of the researcher's will to write when it comes up against the competing will to know of an authoritarian state.