Marion Naeser-Lather
(University of Innsbruck)
Timo Heimerdinger
(University of Freiburg)
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Formats:
Panel
Stream:
Knowledge Production
Sessions:
Monday 21 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Research at the margins - transgressing rules in sensitive fields? I.
Panel Know02a at congress SIEF2021: Breaking the Rules: Power, Participation, Transgression.
The panel investigates rules resp. their transgression concerning anthropological research. Such rules may regard positioning, transparency, and the acceptance of research topics. We ask about their discoursivation and their implications for researchers and field partners.
Long Abstract:
Working as ethnographers implies rules which, however, sometimes are bent or broken. This occurs especially in "sensitive" fields testing the boundaries of our discipline, like research in warzones, about tabooed topics, stigmatized groups or "people we don´t necessarily like" (Bangstad). Rules can concern our positioning towards our field (e.g. see debates on solidarity with right-wing informants or action anthropology), transparency about our intentions and results (e.g., towards authorities) and which topics are 'allowed' to research. Rules can be set by the field itself, society, statal institutions, funding organizations and by the scientific community itself. They expose gaps in our research practices, methods, and approaches. They reveal fashions, trends, political, cultural and subject-historical pressures, constraints, and paradigmata.
In this context, the panel addresses the following questions:
• What are the rules concerning anthropological research, how are they negotiated and conceptualized (as conventions or laws), and how is their transgression discoursivized?
• How are those rules connected to power relations within our fields and beyond?
• Do rules constrain or save us? What is at stake when we transgress them? Inhowfar do we empower or endanger others by doing so?
• Inhowfar do certain fields require new approaches? In which cases is breaking or transcending rules feasible, necessary, or might pose chances for the advancement of our discipline?
• Are there (un-)written imperatives to "be on the right side" within the scientific community, and how are they mediated, discussed or enforced?
We invite empirical and theoretical contributions from research settings across Europe.
Michel Foucault sustained that transgression is an act that "involves the limit". In anthropology, the limits are defined by the policy of fieldwork and by the rules shared by the scientific community. Nevertheless, anthropology negotiates its margins, moved by its restless epistemological statute.
Paper long abstract:
The verb to transgress comes from the Latin transgredior and means literally “to go through”. According to Michel Foucault, transgression is an action that “involves the limit, that narrow zone of a line where it displays the flash of its passage, but perhaps also its entire trajectory, even its origin; it is likely that transgression has its entire space in the line it crosses” (1977, pp 33-34). In anthropology, the limits of its practice and research seems to be defined, on one side, by the “policy of fieldwork” (Olivier de Sardan 2015) and, on the other, by the rules shared by the scientific community.
Nevertheless, thanks to the ethnographic practice, anthropology seems to constantly negotiate these margins, moved by the restlessness of its epistemological statute. In this sense, ethnography is a continuous act of transgression. But, as Foucault suggested, transgression has its space of action in the limits it crosses; likewise, ethnography has its space of action in the limits it crosses.
Drawing on a fieldwork conducted between October 2015 and February 2017 in Milan (Italy), where I explored the social and political value of eviction processes, I sustain that the possibility to investigate this sensitive arena was based on the capacity to stand on the “thresholds” of the field, crossing the boundaries – imposed by the interlocutors – between different “cliques”, redefining the moral economy of my positioning, reorienting the theoretical approaches adopted. In summary, transgressing the margins of the effervescent arena I studied in Milan.
Field accidents situate us in a condition of negative capability, making it difficult to know how to go on while facing our limits of comprehension. They also decenter us from our original plan and from our object of study, generating epistemic detours and showing the elasticity of the field.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper, I engage with a set of field accidents and failures and unresolved questions in my research experience in Georgia. Normative approaches would simply dismiss the learning and argue that these encounters lacked systematic engagement and ethnographicness. Yet, following the proposal of this panel, I show that fieldwork is not necessarily guided by an understanding of what significance or relevance are, nor does it have to follow well-planned techniques that involve systematic methods for assembling data.
By putting accidents and failures at the centre of analysis, I have tried to understand how research experiences mature with us, providing a methodological engagement with my epistemic troubles and the accidental in the field. Despite rarely being acknowledged in ethnographies, moments of perceived failure show, however, relevance to understanding the production of anthropological knowledge. The referred stories of failure appeared to be beside the point, neither originally casted as ethnographic, nor designed within a conventional methodological frame. How I gained access to local knowledge and what I learned with these events was not seriously ethnographic, but profoundly anthropological (Ingold 2007), thus complicating the relationship between research experiences and knowledge production.
All these are relevant epistemological and disciplinary concerns that address
the subjective dynamics of data collection in a way that allows analytical questions
to emerge from field accidents. Besides reconsidering the accidental nature of anthropology as a discipline, some other questions answered in this paper are: Which are the similarities and contrasts between the fieldwork of journalists and anthropologists? And what commitments do anthropologists have in the field?
This paper presents the problem of disciplining the undisciplined nature of the work of naming people in Swedish spaces. It aims to trouble the simplistic non-naming stance pushed by society and accepted (for the most) by researchers. Its agenda lies in the epistemological task of scholarship.
Paper long abstract:
The research conducted on Saami indigenous groups at the Swedish State Race Institute of Race Biology founded in 1921 and the Vipeholm experiments conducted on intellectually disabled people during 1945-55 have been condemned as being ethically dubious and have contributed to the establishment of rules that regulate practices within and outside of research. For instance, rules and praxis have been setup that discourage calling attention to human identity categories in the public realm. Thus, while gender categorizations are encouraged in research and in institutional work, naming practices that involve race and functional disabilities are frowned upon or not allowed at all. This paper draws upon ethnographic fieldwork across time (2008-2018) and institutional settings in different projects where the recurring issue of the work of naming identities emerged as salient. The paper presents the problem of disciplining the undisciplined nature of the work of naming people in Swedish spaces. It also presents insights regarding how researchers, public institutions like schools and governmental bodies, and private agencies like regional theaters navigate, comply, challenge and bend rules related to how people are named. The Swedish concepts ras and döva (English: race & deaf) will be used to illustrate tensions regarding what is sanctioned and how members of different settings deal with identity categorizations. The paper aims to trouble the simplistic non-naming stance pushed by society and (for the most) accepted by researchers. Building on the meaning-making enterprise of human languaging, its agenda lies in the epistemological task of scholarship.
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