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Accepted Paper:
Paper Short Abstract:
Journalists and anthropologists are professionally cousins when it comes to the dialogic form of the interview, which is central to both intellectual endeavours. Online since 2021 and on site during 11 months of ethnographic research in South Africa, I conducted fifty-something interviews with (former) broadcast intellectuals, people who had witnessed or practiced the transformation of the South African Broadcasting Corporation from apartheid to democracy. I consider several of the interviews now in retrospective as 'failed' and want to discuss that as a problem of simulation and dissimulation. As a concrete example of 'studying up' or 'studying sideways' the interview recordings may serve as a sounding board for the developement of professional ethics in anthropology.
Paper Abstract:
In a recent book on Adolf Hitler's interviews with foreign correspondents, historian Lutz Hachmeister analyses the dynamics of publicized speech on the basis of contemporary original sources and memoirs of journalists and politicians (2024). In his final chapter he highlights several cases of 'failed interviews' with autocratic rulers in the present which do not stand the test of critical questioning and merely serve the ruler as occasions to demonstrate power. Whereas journalistic interview recordings often times are open to see for the public, ethnographers/anthropologists usually have wider gaps in time and space between the conversation and the publication. The purposes of conducting the interviews may also differ, with journalism neighbouring 'news'. However, in competitive academic environments, 'scoops' or being first with certain publicized ideas is not unknown either.
Online since 2021 and on site for 11 months in South Africa in 2023 I conducted several biographic interviews with (former) broadcast intellectuals who had witnessed or practiced the transformation in the 1980s and 1990s. It was an exercise in simulation/dissimulation for both parties involved.
Before, during and after the conference I want to discuss with the convenors and other panelists the challenges of 'writing ethnography' while 'unwriting' the histories of oppression. The often uncomfortable others I was with during research as much as myself had many strong emotions to process and I want to take off from the difference between the recorded and the un-recorded speech.
Oral speech before writing: academic speaking and ethics in the field
Session 2