Ethnographic Encounters Research Articles

Fire and smoke: savouring ethnographic encounters with sustainability in Cyprus' rural tourism spaces

Fire and smoke: savouring ethnographic encounters with sustainability in Cyprus' rural tourism spaces

Fire and smoke: savouring ethnographic encounters with sustainability in Cyprus' rural tourism spaces

Fire and smoke: savouring ethnographic encounters with sustainability in Cyprus' rural tourism spaces

Opening Up Fieldwork with Ethnographic Poetry

Four ethnographic poems are used to explore, elucidate and complexify four ethnographic encounters in the field. Each poem is accompanied by a brief explanation as to the ethnographic context in which the poem was written, as well as the reasons why an ethnographic poem was chosen as a tool to illuminate, complexify and do justice to these varying fieldwork experiences. The strengths of ethnographic poetry as a rigorous and subtle tool for cross-cultural understanding is addressed.

Phenomenology of Exclusion: Capturing the Everyday Thresholds of Belonging

In this article I critically interrogate the ways researchers produce knowledge about the making and unmaking of borders. I do so by focusing on social processes of boundary-drawing that have dramatically intensified since the 2015 summer of displacements in Europe. I think through some of the methodological possibilities and conundrums that arise if we try to make visible the unarticulated social conventions underlying the everyday thresholds of belonging that determine who is permitted in, and who has to remain outside, the affective socio-political space of societies. By drawing on my own research experiences, I show why methodologies aimed at lending marginalized people a voice often fail to capture the voiceless, silent nature of these boundary-drawing practices. I suggest that in order to bring the invisible barbed wires permeating societies into the open, we need to develop phenomenologies of everyday exclusionary practices, or ‘cultures of unwelcome.’ Through my ethnographic encounters with marginalized refugee youth and individuals who believe that the influx of refugees is a threat to their values and ways of life, I argue for more nuanced research methodologies that allow us to better capture the everyday social processes underlying acts of boundary-drawing. I suggest that approaching border work as an intersubjective, worldly phenomenon involves paying attention to the experiences of individuals who find themselves pushed to the margins of society, and to those who actively participate in keeping people and groups marked as other locked out.

Does the Unconscious Influence Our Ethnography? Psychoanalysis during Fieldwork in Argentina

SummaryEthnographic fieldwork is an emotional research practice because of its intersubjective nature and empathic embrace of the actor’s perspective. This intersubjectivity also involves the fieldworker’s unconscious, which influences ethnographic encounters and anthropological interpretations. Two years of psychoanalysis in Argentina revealed the influence of the unconscious on my fieldwork about political violence and trauma through dream analyses and the analyst’s interventions. This understanding improved the rapport with research participants and opened an alternative road to reflexivity.

Meeting the Garden Halfway: Ethnographic Encounters with a Sound Installation Microculture

AbstractThis article follows the installation of a sound art project titled Pleasure Garden in a historic garden in Sydney, Australia. Discussing various activities, from laying cables to mixing the installation, I argue that an ethnographic perspective can deepen our sense of what is meant when sound art is described as a “practice.” The article discusses the distinctive microculture that emerged around the installation process and traces issues of creative agency, epistemology, and ontology at stake as diverse actors—the creative team, the technological infrastructure, the garden, and its inhabitants—were brought into relationship.

Sight and Touch between East and West

In this Forum contribution, I develop the idea of the learnings of post-socialism beyond Eastern Europe. I propose retaining the distinctness of the peripheral vision ‘from the East’ and purposely keeping its ‘provinciality’ in order to illuminate the qualities and shortcomings of the theory at the centre. The note starts with an ethnographic encounter in Riga and draws on it to show how the peripheral vision of post-socialist Eastern Europe can challenge the stubborn boundary between morality and social theory.

Senses as Mobile Actants: Sketching Conceptual and Comparative Possibilities

The senses and their concomitant practices have historically and contemporaneously traversed borders and boundaries and in effect, acquire different meanings. Sensory modalities and ways of knowing become reconfigured as a result of cross-cultural sensory encounters in everyday life. Drawing from colonial and contemporary ethnographic encounters in Singapore, we make a case to extend sociocultural analyses of the character of the sensory—in particular, sound and smell—to consider its agentic potential to permeate and traverse boundaries. We employ the sensory as a lens to capture intimations of connectedness and disconnectedness; and to more broadly unravel alternative and comparative understandings of mobility and movement through time and space.

Resistance in disguise and the re-construction of identity: a case of the Pashtuns in Pakistan

ABSTRACT This ethnographic encounter explores the historical, cultural, and political erasure faced by the Pashtuns in the formal educational institutions of Pakistan. Besides this erasure, Pashtuns are seen as a suspect community in the metanarrative and state discourse of Pakistan. This study aims to provide an insight into ways that a group of Pashtuns resist the popular hegemonic narrative of the state and provide an alternative narrative using spaces which this study calls “informal spaces.” Qualitative research methods, including in-depth interviews, participant observation, and informal discussions are used to collect data in the informal spaces that how the Pashtuns encounter the assimilationist project of the state. Findings show that the Pashtuns are stereotyped and suspected irrespective of their class, regional and tribal affiliation. Their historical and political figures are erased in the formal textbooks, and their language and cultural attire are synonymously and interchangeably equated with the Taliban and terrorists in popular media. Facing this marginalization and stigmatization in the metanarrative, a group of the Pashtuns resist the popular image somewhat James Scott terms as “resistance in disguise.” This study suggests that, for the nation-building project, the state must follow an inclusive and democratic approach that includes the historical, cultural, and political existence of the Pashtuns.

Using digital tools and ethnography for rethinking disability inclusive city design - Exploring material and immaterial dialogues

Successful inclusion is a subject that addresses the question of how well a society can prevent discrimination and ensure access to information, products, services, and spaces for all. Disability may not necessarily lead to exclusion, unless society fails to respond to the needs of people regardless of their impairment. Digital tools combined with ethnographic research may help researchers explore users’ needs, perceptions, behaviors, and attitudes and can aid in understanding the interactions between the human, the space, and the digital within the urban realm. This paper thus outlines a diversity of digital tools in the context of the disability-inclusive city. Through ethnographic encounters with Joe, Ann, and Vanessa, we then explore how these tools can be applied to practice. Centering on Joe, we attempt to exemplify some of the key issues that need to be addressed when looking into the terrain of disability, the city, and digital tools. Points of interest This paper explores how mobile phones and mobile applications can support people with disabilities in accessing the city and its services. The research also explores how modern technology, such as mobile applications can support city officials in understanding better what makes cities more disability friendly. With the help of Joe, Vanessa and Ann from Maribor, Slovenia, the authors have tried out a selected number of mobile applications and observed how these can help people with disabilities use the city and its services. The research with Joe, Vanessa and Ann showed that mobile phones and mobile applications can be useful for moving around the city, but people with disabilities may still face difficulties using mobile phones while moving. The research also showed that technology can make cities more disability friendly, but it cannot remove all the barriers that people with disabilities face in their everyday lives.

‘Vulnerable Refugees’ and ‘Voluntary Deportations’: Performing the Hotspot, Embodying Its Violence

ABSTRACT In this paper, we intervene in naturalised distinctions based on problematic assumptions about agency and choice that underpin the global regime of migration management: namely, that categories of human mobility can be ontologically and juridically distinguished from one another in terms of the degrees or forms of freedom they embody, and that different rights legitimately adhere to each. Focussing on the ‘hotspots’ instituted on 5 islands in the Aegean Sea to manage ‘mixed migration flows’ during the declared ‘refugee crisis,’ we show that the ideological justification for the process of differentiation involves variable attributions of agency, choice, and freedom, or their lack thereof, all of which silence the actual subjects transformed into objects of ‘migration management.’ We argue that the figure of the refugee is divested of agency through the ascription of vulnerability, while the migrant is invested with economic rationality. However, the forms of vulnerability that internment within the camp produces are excluded by design from vulnerability assessments. By tracing the various paths out of the hotspot – including the IOM’s Assisted Voluntary Return and Reintegration Programme – we show that the hotspot is, in essence, a deportation mechanism. This analysis is based on an ethnographic encounter, which illustrates the psychic and physical violence through which the will is bent and shaped, leading some illegalised subjects to ‘self-deportation.’

Now I Am Dead

Now I am Dead (2018) takes an unexpected turn which transforms the narrative from meta-critical docufiction into an immersive tale. Anthropologist Isabel Bredenbröker and director Philipp Bergmann had planned to explore the status quo of the ethnographic encounter through the lens of Isabel’s research on death in a Ghanaian town. Shortly after their arrival in Ghana, in the midst of filming, Isabel’s grandfather dies in Germany. Baffled by the coincidence, in between assisting an undertaker, visiting the morgue, attending funerals and inspecting cemeteries, she asks for advice. How to react to the death of a far-away family member whilst shooting a film on death in West Africa? Help comes from friends and collaborators: an undertaker, a neighbour, a research assistant and friend, a priest. A second narrative streak in which the grandfather is commemorated in town develops alongside other death-related events, such as the picking up of a soul or the dressing and treatment of dead bodies. The perspective of the foreign visitor is tragicomically inverted and incorporated into a local perspective. The distinction between the other culture and one’s own gets blurred, just as the threshold between life and death can be experienced in a playful way.

Ethnographic encounters and local musical theatre in the United States

In this article, I reflect on some of the research and writing choices I made while engaged in ethnographic research for Beyond Broadway: The Pleasure and Promise of Musical Theatre Across America. I consider several challenges, including how to navigate my role and point of view as an empathetic insider or advocating outsider of local musical theatre; how to conceptualize the project’s scope and scale; how to articulate the strengths and weaknesses of a multi-site, limited-view project; how to manage relationships with corporations that challenged my politics; and how to deal with revisions, which I invited, requested by people I interviewed and observed. I also discuss how I understood non-professional theatre-makers’ disavowal of the label ‘amateur’ and came to appreciate the untenable distinction between ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’.

Dreaming of Creativity: Imaging and Imagining the Creative Self in Memoir

Dreaming of Creativity: Imaging and Imagining the Creative Self in Memoir

Codifying Memories through Film

Abstract Before the exponential diffusion of modern video broadcasting media, the history of forced migrations within Africa was mainly transmitted through the spread of individual and collective memories. Filming, instead, agglomerates memories and images by producing new overarching and often convincing interpretations of the past. This article describes how and why a documentary video on slavery in the Indian Ocean was produced and the reasons behind its narrative form. Stemming from the urge of people regarded as descendants of slaves to have their ancestral dances documented as proof of their origins, this documentary is the result of a long-range ethnographic encounter spanning time and space from the Juba River in Somalia to Malawi and the Niasa region of Mozambique. It was only audiovisual equipment like video cameras and computers that made such an amazing encounter possible.

Somewhere between here and there: Negotiating Researcher Visibility in a Digital Ethnography of the Influencer Industry

Despite our preparation for fieldwork, a majority of what ethnographers actually do in the field is based on ‘gut-feeling’, ‘sensing’, and ‘whim’. This paper is a piece of reflexive ethnography detailing a series of minor but important methodological decisions pertaining to researcher visibility throughout fieldwork in a digital community of social media Influencers. It details one anthropologist’s private negotiations during the foray into the Influencer industry by situating the self along various spectrums of conspicuousness. These confessional anecdotes of ‘behind the scenes’ labour can be taken as suggestions on how to negotiate one’s positionalities during ethnographic encounters between and betwixt physical and digital fieldsites. I detail these through six experiences from the field – as the esteemed guest, the exotic inbetweener, the willing apprentice, the trophy acquaintance, the concealed consultant, and the passing confidante – in which I negotiate being ‘seen’, being on ‘show’, and ‘seeing’ from somewhere between here and there.

Prison Ethnography in Africa: Reflections on a Maturing Field

On peut aujourd’hui affirmer que les études sur les prisons dans les pays du Sud sont arrivées à maturité. Dans cet article, nous nous appuyons sur près de vingt années de recherches ethnographiques sur les prisons « au-delà de l’Occident » pour analyser ce processus de maturation. Il n’est plus possible de considérer que les prisons africaines n’ont pas été soumises au regard empirique des sciences sociales ou que tout ce que nous savons sur le sujet est fondé sur des rapports relatifs au non-respect des droits de l’homme. Le champ a connu des progrès, aussi modestes soient-ils, tant en termes de couverture spatiale que de portée analytique. Nous montrons ici en quoi cette appréhension ethnographique de l’Afrique carcérale a suscité une reconceptualisation à contre-courant des prisons, en les considérant comme relationnelles et poreuses plutôt qu’asociales, non conformes et coupées du monde. Nous identifions également deux grandes tendances actuelles en matière pénale (l’extension du filet carcéral et la gestion de l’extrémisme violent) qui appellent à des recherches plus approfondies sur les prisons en Afrique et au-delà.

State, religion and the marginalisation of traditional healing in Gwadar, Pakistan

This ethnographic encounter explores suppression and domination faced by traditional health seekers in Gwadar, Pakistan. The study aimed to provide an insight into the ways in which practicing traditional healthcare...

Researching retired ex-servicemen: reflections on ethnographic encounters

ABSTRACT The opportunities and challenges that younger, female, civilian researchers can encounter when undertaking ethnographic research with predominantly male military veterans are relatively underexplored sociologically. This is despite a growing literature on reflexivity in military studies over the past decade. To address this gap, we draw on symbolic interactionist insights to examine the reflective account of a British, female researcher in her mid-20s, who conducted qualitative research with 20 ‘older’ (aged 60+) retired servicemen from the Royal British Legion, a United Kingdom charity providing support for military veterans and their families. The study explored ex-servicemen’s embodied experiences of physical activity. The findings presented here cohere around four salient themes identified in the ethnographic reflections: (1) researcher positionality as a young, female, civilian researcher in a traditionally masculine militarised world; (2) managing distressing topics and interactional discomfort; (3) maintaining an ‘ethic of care’; and (4) dilemmas regarding representational issues and ex-servicemen’s embodied experiences.

Violence and Hope: The Aesthetic Force of Infrastructures

27 Field Trip Jessamyn R. Abel and Leo Coleman Violence and Hope: The Aesthetic Force of Infrastructures The essays of this Field Trip use new approaches to infrastructure, especially arguments about the political force of aesthetics and the relation between infrastructures and political violence, to consider the ways that the mapping, projection, and design of infrastructures shape the distribution of power and intervene in political processes. They emerge from a roundtable titled “Imaging Infrastructure,” which we organized for the Global Asias 5 conference held at Penn State in April 2019. Together, they suggest that the forces conveyed and exerted by infrastructures, as either concept or material reality, direct human action, form identities and expectations, and delimit political possibilities. However, these effects , our authors demonstrate, often extend far beyond the intended function of any particular construction. The three essays here address both intangible and concrete infrastructures . Corey Byrnes and Lisa Hofmann-­Kuroda examine representations of potential infrastructures in order to understand the particular political force of maps, propaganda images, and architectural designs. In Byrnes’s study of China’s aspirational mapping of expanded maritime borders and ongoing island construction in the South China Sea, infrastructures that have been “made up” and then “made real” help bolster the Chinese government ’s case in international territorial disputes by lending its claims conceptual, then actual, solidity. In contrast, the imagined infrastructure in Hofmann-­Kuroda’s study was never realized. In the case of Isamu Noguchi’s plans for a recreational space within a World War II Japanese American internment camp, the aesthetic and practical elements of the infrastructure envisioned in his blueprints aimed to change the meaning of the space for its involuntary inhabitants, literally watering down 28 Field Trip its militarized organization and softening the hard grid of its barracks. Finally, Mubbashir Rizvi examines the role that long-­term colonial interventions , legal and physical, in the pattern of agricultural land holding and irrigation, can play in explaining the patterns of violence after the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. His essay shows that categorizations of identity (and rights) and lines on a map give form to even the most sudden and devastating episodes of communal violence. Importantly, these essays collectively highlight the presence of military power and state violence within legal routines of classification or as a framework shaping efforts to imagine and build infrastructures for play and recreation. They thus question the commonsense idea that infrastructures are built to improve people’s lives. Byrnes draws attention to the damage done to ocean ecologies through construction over coral reefs to provide space for airfields and soccer fields alike. Hofmann-­Kuroda notes that Noguchi’s playground was a small and ultimately unsuccessful effort to mitigate the negative effects of a different kind of infrastructure: the regimented barracks that symbolized and enacted the U.S. government ’s effort to control Japanese American bodies. And Rizvi suggests that both legal and infrastructural attempts to provide better lives and increased productivity for rural Punjabi farmers ended up contributing to a climate of violence that erupted with exceptional force during the period of partition in 1947. Political societies build infrastructures to facilitate the mundane activities of daily life: schools and government buildings allow residents of a newly built island to live as they would in any small city; a playground offers a space for relaxation and pleasure; canals help farmers increase their yield. But attention to the aesthetics and effects of infrastructure shows that, intentionally or not, and for better or worse, they often do much more. Jessamyn Abel is associate professor in the Asian Studies department at Pennsylvania State University. She is the author of The International Minimum : Creativity and Contradiction in Japan’s Global Engagement, 1933–­64. Leo Coleman is associate professor of anthropology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is the author of A Moral Technology: Electrification as Political Ritual in New Delhi and editor of Food: Ethnographic Encounters. ...