Ethnographic Refusal Research Articles

Pedagogy of ‘Refusing’ – commentary to Siriwardane-de Zoysa, Sreekanta, Mwambari, Mehta and Majumder

This commentary is a critical response to the dialogic essay “The unruly arts of ethnographic refusal: power, politics, performativity” that unpacks the complex performances of hierarchies and violence as performed during ethnographic research works in anthropology. During ethno-graphic research works, the encounter between the researchers and the research participants are often underlaid with tensions that either compel the participants to speak in definite patterns to satisfy the demands of the researchers or force the researchers to conduct field works according to the advisable guidelines of the academic institutions, funding agencies and contact persons. On the basis of my personal experiences and the ethnographic experiences of the authors of the essay, this commentary argues how the performance and acknowledgment of ‘refusal’ can be adopted as a research methodology in anthropology and other academic disciplines to counter the colonial/Eurocentric parameters of knowledge production.

The unruly arts of ethnographic refusal: power, politics, performativity

Refusal remains a core concern in processes of research across the sciences. Drawing on previous anthropological theorisations, this paper contemplates on the manifold ‘arts’ of refusal during ethnographic research praxis, drawing on diverse thematic experiences and contexts across coastal India, Malaysia, and Uganda. We argue for a concerted engagement with refusal as more than an act of withholding co-operation and as an expression of resistance. While recognizing refusal as a locally situated and historically contingent sensibility, we ask in what other ways might the more generative qualities of refusal be explored, paying particular attention to the performative nature of refusal itself that may entrench as much as reverse power differentials in the ‘field’. Drawing on decolonial and post-development epistemologies and diverse experiences as scholars situated and working across different geographies and disciplines, we explore the many entanglements, articulations, and enactments that remain ubiquitous in everyday ethnographic research praxis through several thematic angles. These include the negotiation of uneven (and often violent) forms of research collaboration and co-optation, the enactment of benevolent sexism as an ‘ethics of care’, and embodied practices such as silence(-ing), together with play and humour in participants’ critiques of scientific truth-telling. While illustrating subtler manifestations of refusal across ethnographic research-based encounters, we also contemplate pedagogical practices of un/learning (to ‘read’) and to teach the arts of identifying and productively working with the many appearances of refusal – both manifest and less visible.

On resistance and pluriversal voices of subversive archaism

On resistance and pluriversal voices of subversive archaism

Relational filmmaking

Relational filmmaking

“I Ain’t Even Gonna Cap to It”: Ethnography‐as‐Surveillance and Dark Sousveillance in the Classroom

This article theorizes classroom ethnography in the socio‐historical context of the U.S. as a form of racialized surveillance which is calibrated by anti‐Black colonial discourses, racially saturated perception, and one’s vulnerability to interpellation. Focusing on the interaction of “Dominic,” a Black focal student, which was documented through ethnographic fieldwork, I conduct a frame analysis to investigate how ethnographic surveillance, as a racialized technology of power, becomes relevant to the frames Dominic negotiated. The analysis demonstrates that a surveillance frame was consequential to Dominic’s interaction and that Dominic’s verbal behavior was sensitive to the racialized element of surveillance generally and to anti‐blackness specifically. The analysis further shows how Dominic engaged in “dark sousveillance” (Browne 2015) as a form of ethnographic refusal, and the ensuing discussion considers aspects of reflexive practice by which ethnographer‐surveillers in education may engage in “abolitionist” (Shange 2019) ethnography.

Revisiting ‘honor’ through migrant vulnerabilities in Turkey

ABSTRACTThis essay revisits the trope of honour and takes stock of its critiques by foregrounding the elusive bodies of undocumented migrant women in Turkey. Specifically, I engage with the extent to which the legal normalization of the culture of honour results in routinized sexual violence against undocumented migrant women and in impunity for the perpetrators. On the one hand, I pursue the critique of honour as an essentalized, generalized and timeless notion about Middle Eastern and Mediterranean societies. On the other hand, I ponder whether our efforts to battle such stereotypical explanations may occasionally result in giving short shrift to the reality of sexual violence as experienced by those who bear the brunt of it. In avoiding culturalizing honour and yet recognizing its continuing cultural power, I take my inspiration from the concept of ethnographic refusal to navigate a potentially lethal terrain in which migrants, activists, and academics enact, with converging and discrepant stakes, deliberate or unwitting engagements with the demands of ‘honor’. I suggest that being cognizant of the kinds of ethnographic refusals we undertake to foreground or avoid the discomfiting aspects of honour as a gendered norm can aid us in our pursuit towards yet thicker ethnographies of exactly where and when honour continues to matter.

Drawing the Contours of Ethnography: Ethnographic Refusal and Anarchistic Consent in Fieldwork and Writing

Research participants and researchers participate together to draw the contours of ethnography. Refusals and consents shape any given ethnographic research and writing project. Setting out on an ethnographic field research project, I followed a contact to an "un-named" city in the US to study how local chapters of an anarchist-inspired project ("Food Not Bombs") confronted challenges presented by spatial politics. While this city has a name, it is not one I can share. This is the subject of this paper. What is the place of refusal in ethnographic research design and implementation? What does "consent" mean in an anarchist context? In this paper, I will describe my experience acquiring consent to research (with) an anarchistic organization, how anarchistic (dis)organization presents challenges to an institutional consent process, and how that same (dis)organization can open up opportunities for more robust collaboration. Drawing on McGranahan (2016), Ortner (1995), and Simpson (2007), I look at the concept of refusal in the context of ethnographic research. I then use my own experiences and failures to interrogate the meanings of consent and the place of refusal in ethnographic research.

When dialogue means refusal

In my response to Rose-Redwood et al.’s (2018) ‘The Possibilities and Limits to Dialogue’ ( Dialogues in Human Geography 8(2): 109–123), I attend to the question of what it means to refuse dialogue. Dialogue as it is often deployed is supported by a host of colonial logics that position many marginalized humans, and nonhumans, as unable to communicate ‘rationally’ (that is to dialogue). Drawing on the work of Indigenous scholars, Glen Coulthard ((2014) Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.), Audra Simpson ((2007) Ethnographic refusal: indigeneity, ‘voice’ and colonial citizenship. Junctures: The Journal for Thematic Dialogue 9: 67–80; (2014) Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States. Durham, UK: Duke University Press.), and others, I suggest that refusal can mean more than merely stepping outside dialogue, allowing the problematic to pass unchallenged. Rather, refusal may be a way of resisting, reframing, and redirecting colonial and capitalist logics, constituting both an important political strategy and an assertion of diverse sovereignties and lifeworlds. Refusal, in these contexts, is neither a negation of the need for dialogue nor a withdrawal from the need to counter colonialism, but a refusal to be drawn into politics that enable colonialism, and so can be a strong assertion of sovereignty. I then position myself in relation to this work, thinking through what refusal as dialogue might mean as a non-Indigenous human geographer living and working on stolen land, committed to the complex, even intractable, task of supporting decolonization.

“Describing Misbehaviour in Vung Tau as ‘Mischief’ Is Ridiculously Coy”: Ethnographic Refusal, Reticence, and the Oral Historian’s Dilemma

Since 2009 I have been part of three projects examining the history of service in the Australian military of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, as well as people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI). The oral histories of these current and ex-service personnel contain tales that include family violence (both as perpetrators and survivors), war trauma, alcoholism, and sexual assault. There are also many silences, particularly among Vietnam veterans, when discussing misbehavior on rest-and-convalescence leave in the Vietnamese coastal town of Vung Tau. In this article, I explore some of the ways that I have navigated the ethical dilemmas of writing these histories, referring in particular to how the concepts of ethnographic refusal and reticence have influenced my practice. I argue that interviewers need to be cautious when confronting participants’ reticence to engage with particular lines of questioning. Researchers must consider the wider social, political, and personal implications of their research for their narrators and decide whether ethnographic refusal—avoiding the subject matter to protect the interviewees—is an appropriate strategy.

Ethnographic refusal in traditional land use mapping: Consultation, impact assessment, and sovereignty in the Athabasca oil sands region

Traditional land use (TLU) mapping is a key mechanism for Indigenous communities to defend their land use and occupancy in environmental impact assessments. Yet, when faced with TLU interview questions, some Métis community members express reluctance to share sensitive land use information. TLU mapping is linked to a broader history of cartographic colonialism that forces Indigenous peoples to subject themselves to western systems of geographic knowledge. This paper asks: what do moments of ethnographic refusal convey about TLU assessments and consultation? Refusal – a practice of rejecting state-driven recognition and asserting Indigenous sovereignty – reveals several methodological flaws with TLU studies that undermine the efficacy of consultation. Based on our TLU research with the McMurray Métis community, the authors describe how TLU studies can undervalue Indigenous geographic knowledge by deemphasizing cultural landscapes, compromising land use locations, and reducing understanding of impacts to site-specific analyses. These problems stem directly from state regulation that deems development inevitable and positions TLU studies as a catch-all mechanism for competing processes: impact assessments and the duty to consult. Attending to ethnographic refusal in TLU studies inspires a more culturally appropriate methodology that asserts Indigenous sovereignty of lands identified for resource extraction in Canada and worldwide.

Mohawk interruptus: (political life across the borders of settler states)

Acknowledgments ix 1. Indigenous Interruptions: Mohawk Nationhood, Citizenship, and the State 1 2. A Brief History of Land, Meaning, and Membership in Iroquoia and Kahnawa:ka 37 3. Constructing Kahnawa:ka as an Out-of-the-Way Place: Ely S. Parker, Lewis Henry Morgan, and the Writing of the Iroquois Confederacy 67 4. Ethnographic Refusal: Anthropological Need 95 5. Borders, Cigarettes, and Sovereignty 115 6. The Gender of the Flint: Mohawk Nationhood and Citizenship in the Face of Empire 147 Conclusion. Interruptus 177 Appendix. A Note on Materials and Methodology 195 Notes 201 References 229 Index 251

Ethnographic refusal as research method: Example from a study of a family court child custody mediation program

Mediation is a dispute resolution process in which a third party neutral facilitates discussion towards amicable agreement. Parents in Wisconsin filing disputed claims in family court over child custody or physical residence must attend mediation before going back to court. I began research on the Milwaukee Family Court Child Custody Mediation program three years ago with anticipation of data collection challenges due to sensitivity of the topic and need for multiple research permissions. Multiple and ongoing permission is necessary given an ethnographic extended case study research design. This approach was chosen to analyze the meanings of mediation within larger social contexts of court process and private family lives. While refusal from potential research subjects was understandable, I did not anticipate my difficulty staying with the research both in data collection and initial analysis. This essay explains my dilemma as an example of what anthropologist Sherry Ortner calls “ethnographic refusal,” which is also an occupational hazard of using direct engagement to understand lived experience. First, I explain how refusal can become part of ethnographic fieldwork and then use my study as an example. I focus on describing how emotional intensity within the research sites brought refusal that was eventually addressed as a productive rather than obstructive part of the research process. While it is important to avoid risk in going too far in trying to fully engage with others, there is also risk in not going far enough to engage with the full humanity of people struggling in difficult contexts.

'New Barbarism' or Old Agency among the Dayak? Reflections on Post-Suharto Ethnic Violence in Kalimantan

The late President Suharto’s fall in Indonesia was accompanied by an outbreak of violent conflict between local Dayak and immigrant Madurese in West Kalimantan. Journalists resorted to the trope of ‘new barabarism’ to describe this violence; whereas social scientists attributed it to political economic wrongs; but the Dayak themselves attributed it to cultural offenses. This study re-examines accounts of the violence by an anthropologist and an international human rights NGO, on the one hand, and on the other hand a counter-analysis by a Dayak NGO. The Dayak NGO spurned a political-economic as opposed to a cultural explanation for the violence, though it would have gone further to mitigate their guilt in the eyes of the wider world, on the grounds that it diminished their own agency. The anthropological study of such matters has long been characterized by “ethnographic refusal,” which refers to reluctance to represent behavior that is deemed non-liberatory. Retreat from representation does not solve this quandary; but supporting the production of counter-narratives may.

Editorial Foreword

CULTURE POWER Being in the habit of taking the temperature of anthropology from time to time (Sherry B. Ortner, “Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties,” CSSH 1984: 174–90; “Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal,” 1995: 173–93; Webb Keane, “Self-Interpretation, Agency and the Objects of Anthropology: Reflections on a Genealogy,” 2003: 222–48), we take a keen interest in the health of the culture concept. News of its demise may be exaggerated, judging by the first article, which draws our attention to its worldwide spread and tries to account for it.

Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal

L'A. etudie les effets de ce qu'il appelle le refus ethnographique concernant une serie d'etudes consacree a la resistance. Il montre que la plupart de ces etudes sont limitees par le manque de perspective ethnographique. Elles sont peu convaincantes en ce qui concerne la politique interne des groupes domines, la richesse culturelle de ces groupes et la subjectivite des acteurs engages