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- Convenors:
-
Anna-Maria Walter
(LMU Munich)
Geoffrey Hughes (University of Exeter)
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- Discussants:
-
Narmala Halstead
(University of Sussex)
Eva Theunissen (Masaryk University)
- Formats:
- Panels
- Sessions:
- Friday 24 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
New modes of online connectivity dissolve traditional ideas of the ethnographic field, with profound implications for power asymmetries, mechanisms of representation, data analysis and more. We tease out the methodological, ethical and political implications of the possibility of staying connected.
Long Abstract:
While classical ethnography depended in large part for its coherence on a sharp divide between 'the field' and the academy, anthropologists have worked to trouble this relationship, conducting field research 'at home' and even within the 'ivory tower' itself. Yet changes in the nature of globalized academic knowledge-production and advances in communication technology like the internet, social media, and ubiquitous mobile telephony further trouble the relationship between the space of 'writing up' and the field in complex ways—with profound implications for methodology, research ethics, and the politics of representation. This panel takes up the question of how this new reality of staying connected long after fieldwork has ostensibly finished is transforming the nature of ethnographic knowledge-production. What happens when interlocutors acquire new technological and institutional means to reach out to researchers from afar? What is at stake when researchers find themselves being pulled back into the systems of social control that define their field sites via social media—or even just the wider availability of access to their publications? How do changing modes of communication demand a reassessment of anthropologists' own experiences of and reflections on personhood and identity? In what ways do the challenges posed to traditional field methods represent something unique to the project of ethnography? This panel seeks to investigate these questions through grounded reflections of ethnographers working at the intersection of technology and relationality in a range of fieldsites the world over.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 24 July, 2020, -Felix Girke (HTWG Konstanz and Allegra Lab)
Paper short abstract:
Anthropologists' arrival stories serve to justify and domesticate the moment of entering other people's lives, even as the analogous moment of final departure from the field has been little discussed so far. Today, digital media enable us to maintain a disembodied presence and never really leave.
Paper long abstract:
In Mary Louise Pratt's discussion of arrival stories as a textual trope (1986), she urged anthropologists to reflect on ways of writing and this kind of positionality. That ever since this intervention the analogous moment of departure from a field with the prospect never to return has rarely been addressed is remarkable (with exceptions like Perner 2016): with much reflection invested in 'getting there', as well as 'being there', of course, the omission of the moment of 'no longer being there', 'never again going there' and 'leaving there behind' in our methodological and textual discussions seems odd for a discipline that prides itself in the trust, rapport and even kinship relations established elsewhere. But the truth of the matter is that eventually, we eventually do stop, and one visit was the last. Drawing on biographical data, this paper offers further reflections on what leaving the field has meant for the longest time, but equally engages the changes brought by digital media that allow us to remain connected in some way or another to the field indefinitely. This seems a humane affordance in that we can uphold communication or update data from the modern armchair, but it has its postcolonial barbs: It is no longer feasible to cleanly sever those ties established 'there' as it had been for our predecessors, even when desired, as when the anthropologist leaves the field, the field will likely follow them - on Facebook.
Rosa Cordillera A. Castillo (University of Bremen)
Paper short abstract:
For researchers who live elsewhere than their field sites, being connected on social media with one's interlocutors creates ethical, political, and methodological advantages and challenges, and reconfigures the relationality, temporality, and affect of ethnography.
Paper long abstract:
I draw from my experiences as a Filipina based abroad who conducts ethnographic research on violence and peace-making in the Philippines to discuss how, on the one hand, being connected on social media with research interlocutors facilitates processes of informed consent, right to comment, data validation, organizing field work, data gathering, political activism, as well as the strengthening of bonds through easier and more continuous contact. But, on the other hand, it can pose risks to the anonymity of research participants and their and the researcher's security, and complicates the researcher's "impression management" that can impact one's relationships during fieldwork and even one's attitude towards one's research project. I end with reflections on how being "active now" on social media reconfigures the relationality, temporality, and affect of ethnography.
Chiara Cocco (Heriot Watt University) Aleida Bertran (Latvian Academy of Culture)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the multifarious dimensions of ethnographic knowledge-production in festival studies. Case studies from Sardinia, North Catalonia and the Baltic States elucidate on alternative methodologies and off-field implications on the ethnographer's experience and perception of identity.
Paper long abstract:
The construction of knowledge in ethnography has been widely debated within the traditional framework (see for example Boas 1888, Malinowski 1915, Geertz 1973). The continuous changes in ethnographic research paradigms have transformed the meanings and boundaries of 'the field', allowing the researcher to 'being there' rather than simply 'being there' (Nic Craith and Hill, 2015), bringing complex realities onto the surface. This phenomenon is especially visible in festival studies, where the fieldwork is subject to constant change and media platforms build new and often contrasting narratives. Hence, ethnographic observation and technology become an intrinsic duality that poses challenges to the understanding and interpretation of festivals as emotion and identity-building platforms (Leal, 2016). By discussing alternative methodology, such as 'visual ethnography' (Pink, 2013) and multi-sited 'yo-yo fieldwork' (Wulff, 2002), this paper sheds light on the implications that off-site research has on the researcher's own experience. Particular focus is placed on the value of reflexivity in the field (Salzman, 2002) and the challenges faced by the ethnographer in relation to identity. Through the research of Chiara Cocco (Heriot-Watt University, Scotland) on the Festival of Sant'Efisio in Sardinia, and Aleida Bertran (Latvian Academy of Culture) on the International Sardana Festival of Ceret (North Catalonia) and Festival Baltica in the Baltic States, this presentation will examine the diverse perspectives of ethnographic knowledge-production.
Nanneke Winters (Erasmus University Rotterdam)
Paper short abstract:
Based on field research with migrants in transit across Central America, this paper explores sustained contact between migrants and researchers, and analyzes migrants' use of mobile communication technologies as part of the 'social navigation' (Vigh 2009) of an unfamiliar and uncertain environment.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores sustained contact between migrants and researchers throughout an extended fieldsite. When researchers follow the 'twist and turns' (Schapendonk & Steel 2014) of migrant trajectories, by traveling with migrants, visiting them or contacting them from their offices, much of this keeping in touch occurs at the researcher's initiative. However, the ways in which migrants themselves contact the researcher, send pictures, and share stories, offer a different glimpse of how they perceive and structure their trajectories. Based on field research with migrants in transit across Central America, we analyze migrants' use of mobile communication technologies as part of the 'social navigation' (Vigh 2009) of an unfamiliar and uncertain environment. How do they make sense of their journey through online connectivity? The mobile connotation of navigation fits a context in which migrants, migration landscapes and mobility researchers are often 'in motion'. Although we meet many of the migrants that we work with for only a few hours or days at specific places along their route, some of them keep in touch via WhatsApp. Their sustained contact allows room for our interlocutors to share more of their experiences, which may change along the route, and for us as researchers to fully recognize and consider migrants as multi-dimensional, agentic human beings. We also reflect on the methodological and ethical implications of using this kind of contact for our research. We thereby attempt to explore how an incorporation of sustained online and visual navigation may challenge our research convictions, perspectives and strategies.
Jason Scott (Beloit College)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines social media activism in Brazil and asks how ethnographers can assess the reliability and consistency of digital communication over time.
Paper long abstract:
Following the 2016 impeachment of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics, Brazil's favela-based activists were left without institutional support for the first time in a decade. Many activists had risen to fame as social media personalities, reporting on the violent reality of the favela. Institutions ranging from Microsoft to Amnesty International provided support while social scientists wrote countless academic articles that praised once marginalized favela voices. However, even the inclusive and democratic promises of the Internet could not guarantee the long-term viability of these activists to communicate their daily reality. Shootouts and violent threats of censorship from police revealed the limits of the favela's digital voice. Evaporating resources from the government and civil society weakened the once promising favela-based civil society. Many young social media personalities abandoned informal activism to become journalists. Others outgrew their local celebrity and traveled to other marginalized communities to train a new generation of activists. The result was a favela without activists, without communicators, and without a digital voice. My paper asks the questions: What does it mean when the designated community representatives fail to communicate?; Can ethnographers rely on digital platforms as a reliable avenue of communication?; And, how can we understand the online relationships between the ethnographer and the designated communicators in our field sites as historically fluid and in conflict with broadly promoted notions of a disruptive digital inclusion?
Liana Chua (University of Cambridge)
Paper short abstract:
This paper reflexively explores the fictions through which anthropological co-presence is created and sustained during fieldwork. It asks how new modes of connectivity accentuate the basic question of where to locate the boundaries and openings of the anthropological self.
Paper long abstract:
Through what fictions do anthropologists sustain our co-presence (Chua 2015) in 'the field'? And what happens when 'the field' becomes co-present in anthropologists' lives? In this paper, I reflexively contrast two experiences of fieldwork connectivity at different points in my research career. First, I consider how my relations and interactions with Bidayuh villagers in rural Borneo have evolved since 2003, when the area had no phone lines or mobile reception, to the present, when everyone is on WhatsApp and Facebook. I then compare this to my more recent ethnographic engagements with the social media-scape of orangutan conservation, which generates relations, interactions and events that only exist online—and that risk being destabilized when face-to-face contact does occur. Both examples bring to light methodological and ethical questions about the self-fictions through which anthropologists create our presence—as well as the ways in which those fields can assert their presence beyond our formal research projects. I suggest that recent technological developments underscore the fundamental question of how to calibrate fieldwork relations and where to locate the boundaries and openings of the anthropological self—a process that has never been solely within the control of the anthropologist.
Eda Pepi (Yale University)
Paper short abstract:
When a key interlocutor died, her family reached out online to question the circumstances of her cancer. This paper traces the challenges and ethics of doing ethnography under surveillance, thinking through 'conspiratorial talk' and uncertainty as a mode of inquiry in and beyond 'the field'.
Paper long abstract:
The Jordanian government cites national security as a reason for refusing to rescind its gender-biased nationality law that forbids women, but not men, from passing their Jordanian citizenships to children they have with foreign spouses. Jordan maintains that changing the law would open paths to citizenship for Palestinians and imperil their "right of return" to a future Palestine. Children of Jordanian women married to foreigners become immigrants, and those of women married to noncitizen Palestinians become stateless. Noncitizen youth and their Jordanian mothers have mobilized the activist movement "My Mother is Jordanian, and her Citizenship is My Right" to contest policies that have made the marital choices of potentially all Jordanian women a matter of national security. In 2015, the leader of this activist network and my key interlocutor died suddenly from cancer. But state narratives about national security and the Jordanian secret police made her family question the circumstances of her cancer. Her stateless children reached out online to ask me whether they should administer a black-market drug in case her death was being orchestrated by government doctors. But if she was dying from cancer, the drug would make her end even more painful. When I suggested that this was a decision for the family, her children insisted that they had "whatsapped" me because I was family. In this paper, I reflect on the challenges and ethics of doing ethnography under surveillance, thinking through 'conspiratorial talk' and uncertainty as a mode of inquiry in and beyond 'the field'.