American Ethnologist最新文献

This piece interrogates aporias of epistemic certainty by thinking through categories of medicine and uchawi (witchcraft) in Tanzania. I open with an account of how I misrecognized the meaning of a newspaper article about “head-switching operations” posted on a hospital bulletin board. I then offer a close reading of the colonial/anthropological archive and its epistemic disavowal of uchawi nearly a century ago to demonstrate this disavowal's similarities to my own mistake. I learned from this mistake to question the grounds on which I (like my colonial predecessors) separate and purify categories like medicine, religion, and witchcraft. I conclude by discussing how to interrupt that impulse: to recognize and refuse the epistemic conceits of singularity and closure, I propose epistemic humility enabled by “not knowing” and by inhabiting the undecided situation. This resists the colonial, anti-Black violence of the single story about Africa and opens to the possibility of storying otherwise.

In 2012 the US government began requiring DNA testing in its Refugee Family Reunification Program, which was primarily used by refugees from African countries. The policy was established to allay concerns that refugees were committing “family-composition fraud,” or including people outside their families in their resettlement and reunification cases. In humanitarian contexts “fraud” has often been understood as resulting from scarcity, corruption, and mistrust, but it misnames practices embedded in distinct moral and social worlds. For Somali communities in Kenya, incorporating nieces, nephews, or unrelated orphans as sons and daughters is part of remaking social worlds in places of refuge. By examining how displaced people grapple with DNA testing, we can see that their practices, sometimes labeled “fraud,” emerge from moral economies of kinship. Moreover, the family emerges as a contested category, one that is essential to the work of the US and global refugee regimes.

The cognates proper and property have a racialized relationship: ownership rights were historically rooted in white supremacist notions of propriety. Thus, Black people's efforts to challenge these rights entail the improper: breaches of rules that render us as property and as propertyless. I ethnographically illustrate this transgression to theorize the intersection of property and the improper, or improperty: modes of ownership that paradoxically unsettle the logics of accumulation and enclosure that are proper to the property form. I introduce improperty to contextualize nascent Black land projects that are funded through the nonprofit industrial complex, online crowdsourcing, and microreparations. These projects simultaneously reproduce the capitalized relations they wish to supplant and create exciting new possibilities for decolonial land work, minimizing the dependence on commerce and the settler state that has traditionally hampered Black farms. Embracing this simultaneity can deepen our understanding of the transformative power of Black land stewardship.

Having successfully completed fieldwork in a US nuclear weapons community, I went to Russia to interview a handful of the country's nuclear weapons scientists. Epistemologically, I made the mistake of viewing them more as variant weapons designers rather than as Russians. More seriously, I failed to think through in advance the risks to myself and to my human subjects of interviewing important national security personnel in an (until recently) enemy state where practices of surveillance and arbitrary detention were more salient than in the United States. This partly reflected a broader common sense in anthropology that focuses concern on vulnerable human subjects at the bottom of social structures, not on elites. In subsequent years the digitization of information has at least made it easier to conduct such fieldwork without carrying sensitive data across national borders.

More than a decade ago, at the beginning of my doctoral fieldwork, I was kidnapped and robbed one morning in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. As I negotiated the logistical and emotional aftermath of this traumatic event, I took refuge in elite, privileged spaces. In doing so, I grappled with difficult problems: my privilege, my fear and feelings of vulnerability, and my broader moral concerns about Tanzania's poverty, gross wealth inequities, and the impacts these have on public health. Here, using Harrison's framing of multiple consciousness, I reflect on my vulnerability and privilege, and how they illuminate the impact the kidnapping had on my research and my perspectives on knowledge production. I call for our discipline to continue dismantling narratives of heroic fieldwork and to make more compassionate space for honest stories of our mistakes and privileges. Doing so would allow anthropologists to more faithfully account for fieldwork's messy unpredictabilities and tangled relations.

Displaced people have not escaped war and do not live apart from it. This is evident in the material life of internally displaced Iraqi farmers seeking refuge in a concrete construction site, downstream from a cement-processing plant in Iraqi Kurdistan. There, one family has repeatedly tried to build a traditional tannour (bread oven) out of unworkable, cement-infused materials in their environment. As their experience shows, physical brushes with the cement industry, rather than kinetic violence like bombs and battles, lie at the heart of what war is. Through ambiguously embracing cement's contaminating qualities, displaced people open a space to reckon with their predicament.

Difficult challenges are an unavoidable aspect of doing ethnographic fieldwork in sensitive spaces or on sensitive subjects. A less commonly discussed problem, however, is the impact that vicarious or secondary traumas can have on researchers. Here, I discuss my experience of secondary trauma in conducting research with legal advocates in family-detention facilities in the US. Even in work in which trauma is centered, I show, the traumatic “wounds” of fieldwork can go unidentified, to the researcher's own detriment. I echo calls for our discipline to better recognize how ethnographers experience trauma, which results in part from continued disciplinary norms, and to reconsider our work as care. Additionally, I call for further attention to the more complex psycho/somatic traumas that can result from field research.

In this commentary I interrogate the implicit picture of anthropological knowledge as vulnerable to errors because its primary scene is taken to be an encounter with an alien society. Using a method of autobiographically inflected ethnographic writing, I ask how the philosophical fantasy of “the logical alien,” which Wittgenstein untangles, finds another version in the anthropologist's imagination of anthropology as the scene of encounter with the wholly Other. In such cases the idea of a mistake settles on dramatic moments when the anthropologist avows an error in translation, a misrecognition, or an instance of unknowingly breaking a taboo. By taking a long-term perspective on the vulnerability of knowledge, which reveals itself over time, I draw attention, instead, to the connections between the knowledge of the alien and our own everyday modes of knowing. We miss these connections if we stay with the stark oppositions of truth and falsity, mistakes and correction.