Paper Short Abstract:

This paper rethinks the dichotomy between loyalty to interlocutors and critical analysis, showing, with Miranda Fricker's support, how recognition of otherness and reflective silence are central to anthropological practice in the field (and afterward). Listening becomes the place where new meanings emerge and ethnography takes shape.

Paper Abstract:

Ethnographic practice is often conceptualized as a delicate balance between two allegiances: on the one hand, commitment to interlocutors in the field; on the other, the need to maintain a critical and detached analysis. This dualistic model assumes that these dimensions can be separated and that the anthropologist must navigate between them as if they were two distinct poles; the symbolic capitals seem to imprison him/hersef. In this presentation, I challenge, without denying it, this dichotomy through Miranda Fricker's work on epistemic recognition and hermeneutic injustice. I propose that anthropological analysis cannot be disconnected from the recognition of the otherness of interlocutors, nor from the dialogue that this implies. Rather than interpreting the relationship with interlocutors as a limitation or tension with respect to the analytic process, I understand it as a necessary condition for the elaboration of knowledge that is ethically and epistemologically grounded. Through ethnographic examples, I will show how interlocutor recognition is not simply a practice of “loyalty,” but a constitutive aspect of analysis itself. Silence, far from being a communicative vacuum, becomes a productive space where the anthropologist suspends judgments and preconceptions in order to listen and allow the voice of the interlocutors to emerge. The time and space of listening become the experience in which the elaboration of the meaning of the collected ethnographic material takes shape, the arena where simultaneously the recognition of the singularity of the interlocutors, the legitimacy of their words and knowledge, and the becoming of the subjectivity of the anthropologist.