Short Abstract:

In establishing relationships with research participants, anthropologists are called to build communicative bridges between distant social worlds. Going beyond the issue of “translation”, this panel wants to question anthropologists' dialogic strategies in the field before the writing process.

Long Abstract:

In establishing meaningful relationships with research participants, anthropologists are called to build communicative bridges between distant social worlds, even working “at home”. The researchers’ social, cultural and linguistic capital may differ from that of their interlocutors, as may be their political/moral stances. This places anthropologists under a double obligation of loyalty, one to the participants and the other to the analytical enterprise. Accordingly, ethnography always implies a betrayal of the anthropologist’s interlocutors. These reflections certainly relate to ‘translation’, a widely debated topic. However, less attention has been paid to how these communicative bridges are established in the field, before the writing stage. How do researchers manage this dynamic through verbal interactions? How do they talk to their interlocutors? What language do they use? How do they inform participants about their role and the aims and methods of their research? This panel wants to question anthropologists' dialogic strategies in the field, before or during the writing process. We are interested in papers where the gap between the language/slang of anthropologists and their interlocutors is particularly pronounced, also due to moral disparities (e.g. ethnographies in deviant contexts, analysis of ‘popular cultures’, consumption choices and practices, or ethnographies with reactionary or non-democratic groups). Our aim is not simply to understand – from an almost colonial perspective – how to "better" approach certain subjects. Rather, we want to question the profound – and ultimately ethical – meaning of this operation, asking how oral language can be used or adapted to create ethnographic bonds.

This Panel has so far received 2 paper proposal(s).
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