Ambiguous interventions: The social consequences of assistance in the field

Abstract

This article examines how race, gender, and generation influence ethnographers’ ethical decision-making in the field. We consider how decisions to intervene engage these complex variables, which are both cultural and historical constructs as well as lived experiences that researchers and interlocutors differently embody over time. We discuss this from the vantage point of postcolonial communities in South Africa’s Eastern Cape and eSwatini, where we have done fieldwork for over a decade. Our examples highlight researchers’ involvement in crises surrounding rites of passage. When rites went wrong, conflicting forces of race, gender, and generation both confounded our interlocutors’ abilities to define who they might become as well as challenged our own efforts to support them in social and material ways. We argue that “interventions” in fieldwork are intrinsically multidirectional and ethically ambiguous; this ambiguity is an epistemic and practical force that ethnographers must make explicit to realize potentialities for “otherwise” worlds.