The Conflicts of Crisis: Critical Reflections on Feminist Ethnography and Anthropological Activism

Abstract

Anthropologists who work with marginalized and disenfranchised communities frequently find themselves in the midst of shortand long-term crises. Ongoing poverty and systemic discrimination, abrupt changes in entitlement programs and other policies, natural and human-made disasters, and profit-minded development initiatives can all threaten the lives and livelihoods of those we study. As practitioners of a methodology that emphasizes personal attachment, our first instinct is to leap headlong into crisis. In recent years, calls for engaged, public, and activist anthropology have ignited the discipline, making such interventions not only accepted but often expected (see Mullings 2013). At the same time, the realities of real-world engagement are messy, and our roles are rarely clear-cut. In this section, we grapple with some of the tough questions and unfinished business that arise in our own work as we navigate the predicaments, uncertainties, and internal crises and juggle our roles as activists, scholars, teachers, and humans. Frank interrogations of our engagements are essential in a discipline fraught with a legacy of collaborating with empire and colonialism, including Cold War counterinsurgency and the more recent Human Terrain System. For instance, critical scholars such as Kamala Visweswaran have suggested that ethnographers are often uninvited guests or traffickers of “the voiceless” (Visweswaran 1994:69). Others, however, hold that ethnographers have a “responsibility to use counter-story telling as a discursive practice or mobilizing tool” (Harrison 2013:x). In the examples here, we explicitly allied with the social justice struggles of our research participants, and they encouraged us to contribute to their causes as both activists and scholars. But those encouragements came with expectations that were sometimes problematic. Our purpose here is to discuss both the expectations and implications that such scholarship generates. We began this conversation as participants in an Association for Feminist Anthropology roundtable for the 2012