Ethnographic Encounters Research Articles

Ecologies of mistrust: Fish, fishermen, and the multispecies ethics of ethnographic authority

AbstractHow do you conduct research with beings that are deeply suspicious of you, who don't trust your presence, and with good reason? This was a central question in my ethnographic work with diver fishermen in the changing marine environments of the Dominican Republic, waters populated by trickster barracuda, parrotfish who knew the schedules of fishing bans, and escape‐artist grouper. Ethnographers have historically considered mistrust as something to be overcome, an obstacle to the necessary rapport of the anthropologist. This article considers ethnographic encounters in subaquatic multispecies worlds and the methods practiced amid inherently unequal relations of power. Instead of considering trust as the ultimate achievement in ethnographic research and the gatekeeper of anthropological authority, I consider mistrust as a way of perceiving the myriad inequalities, political ecologies, and power dynamics animating our fieldsites and their human and more‐than‐human inhabitants.

‘of evident invisibles’: Ethnography as intermediation

Evident invisibles emerge in the ethnographic encounter which change the whence and the whither of the ethnographic gesture. Long ago, Margaret Mead critiqued anthropologists for ignoring ‘the world in between’ that makes their fieldwork possible – this article takes the argument a step further, proposing that all ethnographic encounters are fundamentally ‘amidst’. Thus, it calls for a shift from translation to intermediation as the guiding trope of ethnography. Although the practice of ethnography requires the objectification of a ‘field’, metaphysical pluralism remains the fundamental condition of ethnographic intermediation. In light of that, the article critiques (a) the practice of describing our main methodological disposition as ‘participant observation’, arguing instead for the older term ‘intensive ethnographic research’; and (b) the implicit use of the trope of ethnography-as-translation. Ethnographic examples are taken from the author’s own fieldwork in the coastal mangroves of southern Bahia (northeast Brazil) in the late 2000s.

Encontros etnográficos: utilizando a etnografia para estudar as instituições de governança participativa do Brasil

Abstract This article explores the contributions that ethnography and ethnographers can make to understanding governance institutions. Told through the story of a collaborative research project on participatory health governance in the municipality of Cabo de Santo Agostinho in north-east Brazil, we explore how the principles of ethnographic research intersected with other principles: of collaborative enquiry, participatory research and a methodological ethics grounded in the reversal of the conventional relationship between researcher and researched. Picking up on some of the core defining features of ethnography as a methodology, we examine how these came to inform our understanding of the dynamics of politics, power, and participation. In doing so, we reflect on how it is the pliable and improvisational nature of ethnography in practice that contrasts most substantially with the conventional tools of the political scientist and that makes ethnographic encounters so rich and valuable for the study of political institutions.

A Chinese woman’s journey to the “west”: Ethnographic knowledge production amid ambiguous power dynamics

This article is a reflexive critique from a female Chinese anthropologist who conducted ethnographic fieldwork examining why Chinese immigrants have purchased local coffee bar businesses and how they manage their everyday racial/ethnic encounters in Bologna, Italy. It provides a new narrative of ethnographic knowledge production from the perspective of a non-Western woman amid ambiguous power dynamics in the metropolitan West. It examines the advantages and disadvantages of the ethnographer’s intersectional positionality, which affected her access to the field, interactions with interlocutors, and embodied experiences throughout multiple ethnographic encounters. It argues that none of the putatively disempowering notions, including racial/ethnic identity, gender, age, marital status, were necessarily barriers to the ethnographic knowledge production. This critique goes beyond the Euro/American frameworks of white/non-white and native/non-native binaries in understanding ethnographic knowledge production and further contributes to understanding the situated and relational nature of ethnographic knowledge and the process of its production.

Encountering COP26 as a security event: a short walking ethnography

ABSTRACT This paper represents a short ethnographic encounter with the site of the COP26 Climate Conference in Glasgow in 2021. It communicates an experiential picturing of the site as it was assembled and disassembled, as this was recorded in notes, conversations, via phone footage and in a short talk afterwards with human geography colleagues at the University of Glasgow. The paper seeks to make sense of this short experiential encounter by drawing from scholarship on ethnography, security and events of emergency assemblage. The paper concludes by reflection on the ordinary purpose of walking sites of climate security and emergency.

Peripheral humanitarianism: Ephemerality, experimentation, and effects of refugee provisioning in Paris

This article examines the place-based assemblages of humanitarian care, which emerge at neighbourhood scales in response to a wider politics of exclusion. We ground our discussion in the variegated humanitarian efforts and solidarities that took place in a working-class neighbourhood on the periphery of Paris, which brought into sharp relief the combination of precarity and provisioning in the wake of the 2015 ‘refugee crisis’. Drawing on ethnographic encounters, we recount the combination of reactive, emergency humanitarian logics (between 2016 and 2017) and experimental humanitarian strategies contesting wider exclusionary and deterrence-based asylum practices (2018 to the present). We show how modes of ephemeral and experimental humanitarianism operated across local spatiotemporal nodes – inside a welcome centre (the ‘Bubble’), and on the surrounding streets. We argue that attention to the effects of the ephemeral and experimental solidarities and encounters that formed outside the formal infrastructure of humanitarian care in Paris were in part palliative, but profound in their re-imagining of a progressive politics of solidarity amidst protracted and overlapping precarities. We propose peripheral humanitarianism to describe these effects, a spatially and temporally contingent humanitarian assemblage engaging with both traditional and DIY humanitarian responses that challenges structural exclusions of racialized ‘others’.

We All We Got

Urban ecologies are fraught with inequities, often resulting in humanitarian or charity solutions that emphasize lack rather than communities’ self-determination. While these inequities have been widely documented, the COVID-19 pandemic further reveals how these crises are not the sum result of individual failures. Rather, they are systemically produced through policies that harm people. How do Black urban residents contend with the sociohistorical antagonisms between feelings of scarcity (e.g., food and housing insecurity, underemployment, and financial strain) and aspirations for abundance? Using ethnographic encounters in Chicago and Austin we consider how practices of mutual aid are meaningful both spatially and affectively. First, we explore how mutual aid transforms “decaying” urban spaces to meet residents’ needs. Second, we explore felt experiences of mutuality in social relationships as distinct from authoritarian, charity-based relationality. Thinking these spatial and affective dimensions collectively, we work toward a framework of Black ecologies of care and mutual aid.

The Mise-en-Scène of Modernity

Abstract This article examines the various stagings of progress as exhibited at Argentina's International Centennial Exhibitions hosted in Buenos Aires in 1910. In preparation for the exhibitions, a wealthy port aristocracy oversaw renovations of the private and public, material and symbolic spaces of the city which transformed the capital into a political theatre. A chronology of the exhibitions (agriculture, industry, hygiene, railways, and the arts) and their accumulated symbols are read as multidimensional sites of encounter where a clash of contradictory interests and agencies interact. The text emerges out of a moment of ethnographic encounter and weaves together the words of my interlocutors with historical and theoretical analysis. In doing so, the article reflects from different angles upon the relationship between the rituals of showing and of spectatorship involved in the State's aesthetic performance of national progress.

Everyday State and Democracy in Africa: Ethnographic Encounters, edited by Wale Adebanwi

Everyday State and Democracy in Africa: Ethnographic Encounters, edited by Wale Adebanwi

The Affective Triad: Smartphone in the Ethnographic Encounter

“Hanging out” and establishing “rapport” is an essential part of the ethnographic encounter in anthropology. But what happens when the smartphone, seemingly a distraction from the relationship in the making, creates a wall between the anthropologist and the interlocutor? While smartphones have been widely explored as a media technology used by the interlocutors, or as research tools, their affective grip on the researchers themselves has received less attention to date. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with visitors of two youth centers in Vienna, Austria, in 2019, I argue that the moment when the smartphone becomes part of the affective triad, alongside the researcher and the interlocutor, also presents a window on the entanglement of digital technologies with everyday life. Moreover, affective ripples emerging from such irritations also expose underlying assumptions about how ethnographic encounters should ideally proceed and what constitutes rapport and “good” ethnographic relationships, seemingly a prerequisite for successful ethnographies. Hence, affective entanglements and irritations that arise in this context are not disturbances to be discarded or smoothed over in the ethnographic narratives. While the smartphone appears to impair the ethnographic encounter at first, its designed porosity allows the researcher to develop a particular sensitivity to issues of rapport, consent, and privacy, and to negotiate the space of potentiality of ambiguous, door-like situations, thus becoming a methodological blessing rather than a curse.

Contributors

Contributors

Boreal Plants That Enchant

Abstract This article describes moments of plant-induced enchantment during community-based environmental monitoring and ethnographic research in Treaty No. 8 sakâwiyiniwak territories. These multispecies ethnographic encounters while collaborating with Elders and friends from Fort McKay First Nation and Bigstone Cree Nation describe how sakâwiyiniwak ecological care is rooted in kinship. Moments of enchantment, or intense moments of noticing and “plant-thinking,” inspire new appreciation of the boreal forest and the many familiar plants that grow within it, illuminating the magic of muskeg tea, frog’s pants, and aspen. Written in the style of lively ethnography, this article focuses on plants of sakâwiyiniwak ceremonial, nutritional, and medicinal use. These plants are often overlooked or are described as nuisance weeds, despite being indigenous plants, by settlers whose decisions and natural resource extraction activities have a direct effect on the survival and well-being of these plants and larger ecosystems. Enchantment brings attention to the deep-seated settler biases against certain types of plants that are common or abundant or, more specifically, not of current commercial value.

Subjectivity

This article focuses on subjectivity in the ethnography of religion by considering the multiplicity of subjectivity and their relationalities, drawing from the author’s ethnographic encounter with the orisha Oshun in Trinidad. This reflection on the implications of taking seriously the spectral or spirit, in their many forms and aspects, as active agents involves the expansion of subjectivity and the relational aspects of inter-subjectivity from the singular to the multiple. Written from a purposefully provocative compound subject position of “I/we”, this article asks that ethnographers of religion grapple with the offerings of ontologies outside the Western “normative” intellectual tradition. I/we offer that this shift will impact our engagements with the people and communities that we work with, expanding our capacity to share multiple worlds and our ability to engage numerous theorizations.

The Ethnographer’s Ethnicity

Introductions to ethnographic research for university students in Macedonia are understandably starkly different from the often idealized ‘first encounters’ we read in classical anthropological texts, what Hammersley and Atkinson call “the Western ‘rite of passage’”. Students from Macedonia, during their four-year studies, conduct fieldwork in urban and rural areas of their home country, usually focusing on a different geographic region every year. Through this experience, students are introduced to a ‘foreign’ field that is often very familiar – the language is common and the general cultural context is shared. In such a fieldwork context, the question of ethnicity, as a general category of importance in the self-identification of communities and citizens of the region, as well as a category frequently present in the rhetoric of various political groups, cannot be withheld. As such, the aim of this paper is to highlight the need for including ethnicity in conversations about fieldwork in Southeastern Europe, especially in introductory courses on research methodologies. In this sense, it is not only the ethnic identity of our interlocutors that comes to interest, but that of the researcher as well, for whom it can represent either a barrier or a tool with the ability to aid the research process. The paper will examine introductory reading materials and practices in ethnography, and attempt to synthesize understandings of auto-reflexive examples of fieldwork in multi-ethnic communities or multi-ethnic ethnographic encounters by anthropologists from Macedonia to propose methods that ethnicity can be included as a significant factor and characteristic of the researcher in teaching ethnography in the Southeastern European region.

Nation, Damned Nation and Statistics

Abstract The Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL)’s main objective is to translate the Bible into all languages by collecting ethnolinguistic data thanks to the methods of participant-observation and lexical investigation. Tracing its origins to the mid-1930s in the United States and Central America, SIL started its missionary, linguistic and development activities in Southeast Asia in the 1950s, especially in the Philippines (1953) and Vietnam (1954). This article analyses the nature and trajectories of SIL members, investigating their missionary activities, their visual and statistical conception of conversion and ethnographic encounter, their conception of Pax Americana during the Vietnam war (1954–75). Both archive- and fieldwork-based investigation reveal what the SIL’s activity meant at the nexus of evangelism, linguistics, ethnography and US foreign policy, challenging some of the very simplified views of the operations of missionaries and religious NGO s in Southeast Asia during the Cold War.

Ronald and Catherine Berndt’s Fieldwork Drawings: Material Sites of Ethnographic Encounter

ABSTRACT This article examines the role of drawings in the fieldwork careers of Australian anthropologists Ronald and Catherine Berndt. This investigation originates from the Berndt Museum of Anthropology at the University of Western Australia, which the Berndts established as the Anthropology Research Museum in 1976 to house materials collected during their ethnographic research. I make use of the Museum’s archive to contextualise three key sets of drawings: the 1945 Birrindudu crayon drawings (around 811 items), the 1945 Katherine ochre drawings (9 items) and the 1947 Yirrkala crayon drawings (365 items). In doing so, I argue that positioned as material sites of ethnographic encounter, these drawings reveal processes of dialogue and exchange that were navigated and shaped by the realities of being ‘in the field’.

Soulcraft: Theorizing Black Techne in African and American Viral Dance

This article proposes the notion of soulcraft as an alternative framing for the work that Africans and African diasporans imbue upon material culture and social projects. Through ethnographic encounters with the practitioners of Chicago Footwork and Afrobeats dance music, the author theorizes a Black vernacular approach to the concept of techne. This essay contributes to discourse in the philosophy of technology to document spirituality in viral dance practices and forms of digital embodiment, linking them to metaphysical understandings of “soul” in African and African American philosophical thought. Interviews and critical analysis of digital media help the author illustrate the ways that these African and diasporic media innovators elide the dualistic distinctions between material tech-making and spiritual strivings, in service of an emancipatory ethos for technology.

The Nexus of Anthropology and Narrative: Ethnographic Encounters with Storytelling Practices

The Nexus of Anthropology and Narrative: Ethnographic Encounters with Storytelling Practices

Insecurities of nativism

This article, through various ethnographic encounters, highlights the advantages and explores the challenges of fieldwork for a female researcher studying what might be taken to be her own community. Doing a native anthropology in a marginal borderland that has not been explored anthropologically before turns out to be an interesting experience. On the one hand, the identity of being a native of the region carves out ways in the field that help her overcome barriers; on the other hand, the same identity, through her common ethnic and cultural belonging, kinship relations, and local familiarity restricts her in many ways. Through explorations of her identity in the field along gender, caste, class, and ethnic lines, the work highlights how sometimes she is an insider, sometimes an outsider, and sometimes a partial-insider-outsider, thereby collapsing the strict division of a researcher into categories of an outsider and an insider.

La Familia versus The Family: Matriarchal Patriarchies in Peruvian Mormonism

By sacralizing the Western categories of gender and kinship and by exalting the husband-centric, nuclear version of family, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints not only alienated its transgender and feminist members, but also its Peruvian families. This study employs ethnographic encounters, kinterm linguistics, and home décor analysis to situate the existence of Peruvian Mormon matriarchies in the context of a phallocentric religion that spanned two strikingly different, patriarchal societies: one in the Southern Andes of Peru and the other in the US state of Utah. Thus situated, the article then dwells on the transcribed oral history of Ofelia, a Peruvian single mother who utilized the power of the male-only Mormon priesthood to preside over her household as the acting matriarch. Ofelia’s fealty to patriarchy during the very enactment of forbidden priestesshood brings to the fore the profound contradictions that some Peruvian Mormons in the late 2010s disentangled as they sought to become legible to their church as participants in eternal families.