Ethnography as thrownness and the face of the sufferer

Tarik Sabry

doi:10.1177/1367549421994577

Abstract

This article provides a self-reflexive account of ethnographic research conducted on the outskirts of Burj Al Brajneh, a Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut, run by Hezbollah. It focuses on ethnographic research conducted with a Syrian refugee family including the mother, father and three children. The research is well captured, in hindsight, by Sarah Pink’s definition of ethnography as a ‘reflexive and experiential process through which academic and applied understanding, knowing and knowledge are produced’. The article demonstrates how the ethnographer’s experience with the refugee children was marked, regardless of long and diligent preparations, by several dislocations: methodological, sensorial and epistemic. The ethnographer pursued a non-media-centric approach allowing him to explore both the refugee family’s media uses as well as the lived, everyday conditions that marked their media uses. The primary aim of the article is three-pronged: (a) to provide an ethnographic description and analysis of the media worlds in a Hizbullah area in South Beirut, (b) to analyse media uses and aesthetics of violence in the context of war/refugees’ lives and (c) to theorise using the Heideggerian concept of thrownness, the entangled and affective regime that emerges during the ethnographic encounter.

Highlights

Hicham: I dream of flying on a plane somewhere far Tarik: That’s your dream - to fly away to another place? Hicham: Yes, I dream of taking people to other places. [Hicham is a 12-year-old Syrian refugee working as a mechanic in the Dahia, South of Beirut] Perhaps, along with describing the methods of fieldwork in which the researcher has complete control over his field, we should draw attention to the opposite pole: when society seems to take control of the researcher who has to lend himself or herself to become the anonymous space on which the hitherto suppressed knowledge of society inscribes itself. (Veena Das 1985: 5)
I recall a memorable instant from the fieldwork in Beirut, in a youth club named after the late Marxist Lebanese thinker: Mahdi Amil, when my co-researcher and I held three workshops with young refugee children from Syria, who were aged between 7 and 12
Drawing on research conducted in the Lebanon in the summer of 2015 with a Syrian refugee family, part of a bigger audience research project including fieldwork in Morocco and the UK1, (See Sabry, T. and Mansour, N. 2019), this article uses findings from family ethnography and participant observation, conducted over a period of 4 weeks in Beirut, to explore the relationship between media uses and fear in the context of war

Summary

Introduction

Hicham: I dream of flying on a plane somewhere far Tarik: That’s your dream - to fly away to another place? Hicham: Yes, I dream of taking people to other places. [Hicham is a 12-year-old Syrian refugee working as a mechanic in the Dahia, South of Beirut] Perhaps, along with describing the methods of fieldwork in which the researcher has complete control over his field, we should draw attention to the opposite pole: when society seems to take control of the researcher who has to lend himself or herself to become the anonymous space on which the hitherto suppressed knowledge of society inscribes itself. (Veena Das 1985: 5). Hicham’s voice, and the affect it produced in the room that day, initiated my metamorphosis (and that of the research team) from being a researcher(s) of media audiences to being a witness to something I can only describe as the face of the sufferer.

Results

Conclusion