Paper short abstract:

My aim is to contribute to the shining of problematic situations in which the capacity of the ethnographer to produce data is instrumentalized by social agents, especially in context of social conflicts and public policies.

Paper long abstract:

Some recent trends in anthropology demonstrate the existence of an evident increasing of practices of public and activist ethnography. As Juris and Rasza have stressed recently (2012), "anthropologists are making themselves politically relevant [..]". Opposite current tendencies (Price, 2000) point out how ethnographers and their data - intended as high qualitative and very specific information - can (still) represent a sophisticated instrumentum regni for social control. Ultimately, the dichotomy between these two trends seems to be determined by a deontological and ethical procedure related to the production, the use and the diffusion of fieldnotes and data.

The question of the possibility of existence of ethnographic archives seems to be deeply interconnected to the sphere of the production of fieldnotes. Fieldnotes have often been considered as a private and intimate matter by anthropologists, but also as a symbol of professional identity. On the opposite, archives are usually consider as open, collective and public spaces.I suppose that this dialectic is central.

Starting from a personal experience of a militant research conducted with a social movement for the right to the city operating in Lisbon, my aim is to contribute to the shining of problematic situations in which the capacity of the ethnographer to produce data is instrumentalized by social agents, especially in context of social conflicts and public policies. I would like to focus on the importance of a strong deontological ethic in the process of producing and archiving data in relation to the necessity of a non-hegemonic and public anthropology.