Being, doing and knowing in the field: reflections on ethnographic practice in the Arab region

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article introduces the present special issue, which focuses on the relevance of ethnographic experience to methodological practice and to understanding the conditions of social reality in the Arab region today. The authors frame this focus within an interplay between methodology and knowing the field, passing through the ethnographer’s critical self-awareness about method and prevailing field conditions, which they identify as crisis-ridden and overbearing. After first revisiting the role of positionality within the reflexive turn that has influenced ethnography for thirty years, they explore how conditions of the field imprint themselves on the ethnographer’s emotional, sensorial and sometimes unconscious experiences during fieldwork. They chart how the six authors of this issue translate such ‘states of being’ in their fields—in Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Palestine and Mexico—into particular methodological strategies to grapple with impasses or anxieties, and to unlock particular forms of knowledge on the spatial, material, discursive/rhetorical and emotive registers of the field. In so doing, this special issue contributes to a discussion about (a) what preoccupies the ethnographer of this region today and (b) what attention to ethnographic experience can tell us about the circumstances that come to bear on informants and researchers alike, in significant and sometimes unavoidable ways. Over and above self-awareness in the field, the present reflections are signs of a growing preoccupation and a binding solidarity with—indeed a personal interest in—the conditions of our fieldsites, and hence in devising critical ways of understanding them.