New care workers in Britain typically struggle to understand, on their initial encounters, people who communicate atypically due to their intellectual disabilities. But they are required to provide care that is attuned to these individuals’ desires and intentions. Why, then, does a care organization called L'Arche UK make it harder for carers to learn what is going on inside these people's minds? I argue that doing so does not prevent the acquisition of essential knowledge, but rather trains new carers to relate to those with intellectual disabilities as opaque. This creates a more involved relationship that opens up the possibility of forms of status and intimacy otherwise closed to such people—thereby raising questions about the supposedly fundamental role that transparency and knowledge play in knowing others.
{"title":"The Limits of Knowing Other Minds","authors":"P. McKearney","doi":"10.3167/SA.2021.650101","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/SA.2021.650101","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000New care workers in Britain typically struggle to understand, on their initial encounters, people who communicate atypically due to their intellectual disabilities. But they are required to provide care that is attuned to these individuals’ desires and intentions. Why, then, does a care organization called L'Arche UK make it harder for carers to learn what is going on inside these people's minds? I argue that doing so does not prevent the acquisition of essential knowledge, but rather trains new carers to relate to those with intellectual disabilities as opaque. This creates a more involved relationship that opens up the possibility of forms of status and intimacy otherwise closed to such people—thereby raising questions about the supposedly fundamental role that transparency and knowledge play in knowing others.","PeriodicalId":51701,"journal":{"name":"Social Analysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87929068","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Through what fictions do anthropologists become co-present in ‘the field’? And what happens when ‘the field’ becomes co-present in anthropologists’ lives? In this article, I reflexively contrast two experiences of fieldwork connectedness: first, the changes to my interactions with Bidayuh villagers in rural Borneo since 2003, and, second, my recent engagement with the social media-scape of orangutan conservation. Both examples shed light on the methodological and ethical questions about the self-fictions through which anthropologists create our presence in the field—and how those fields assert their presence beyond our research projects. Recent technological developments, I suggest, thus underscore fundamental questions of how to calibrate fieldwork relations and where to locate the boundaries and openings of the anthropological self—a process that we cannot entirely control.
{"title":"Selfies and Self-Fictions","authors":"Liana Chua","doi":"10.3167/SA.2021.650111","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/SA.2021.650111","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Through what fictions do anthropologists become co-present in ‘the field’? And what happens when ‘the field’ becomes co-present in anthropologists’ lives? In this article, I reflexively contrast two experiences of fieldwork connectedness: first, the changes to my interactions with Bidayuh villagers in rural Borneo since 2003, and, second, my recent engagement with the social media-scape of orangutan conservation. Both examples shed light on the methodological and ethical questions about the self-fictions through which anthropologists create our presence in the field—and how those fields assert their presence beyond our research projects. Recent technological developments, I suggest, thus underscore fundamental questions of how to calibrate fieldwork relations and where to locate the boundaries and openings of the anthropological self—a process that we cannot entirely control.","PeriodicalId":51701,"journal":{"name":"Social Analysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78914793","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Based on fieldwork with migrants and border populations in Central America and the story of a young Congolese woman in particular, this article discusses how research participants’ use of mobile communication technology provokes a redefinition of the ethnographic field. Increasingly popular trajectory research often sets out to follow migrants, yet a focus on migrants keeping in touch with researchers at their own initiative and discretion, following them, reveals entanglements of selective on- and offline engagement and self-representation. Critical exploration of research participants’ differentiated use of digital technology for navigating a social environment that includes the researcher herself not only transforms our understanding of the field in empirical, ethical, and methodological terms, but also counteracts potentially voyeuristic and life-threatening practices of following people on the move.
{"title":"Following, Othering, Taking Over","authors":"N. Winters","doi":"10.3167/SA.2021.650109","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/SA.2021.650109","url":null,"abstract":"Based on fieldwork with migrants and border populations in Central America and the story of a young Congolese woman in particular, this article discusses how research participants’ use of mobile communication technology provokes a redefinition of the ethnographic field. Increasingly popular trajectory research often sets out to follow migrants, yet a focus on migrants keeping in touch with researchers at their own initiative and discretion, following them, reveals entanglements of selective on- and offline engagement and self-representation. Critical exploration of research participants’ differentiated use of digital technology for navigating a social environment that includes the researcher herself not only transforms our understanding of the field in empirical, ethical, and methodological terms, but also counteracts potentially voyeuristic and life-threatening practices of following people on the move.","PeriodicalId":51701,"journal":{"name":"Social Analysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83334811","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Partial processes of knowledge making, online and offline, demonstrate modes of experiential newness. Indicative of the ‘shocks’ and joined curations of field encounters, such experiences re-engage anthropological debates as being of the present. The extended field suggests vast change and unlimited spaces to engage participants and ‘invite’ new unrelatable publics. The reflections and encounters disturb an apparent mandate of digital anthropology as a sub-discipline to ‘upturn’ field and knowledge approaches. As these forum articles indicate, this vision of the field is not easily dissociated from continuities with participants as knowledge producers in and out of offline interactions. Notions of exit and entry or participants gaining seemingly unlimited new access to fieldworkers remain connected to performative/curated forms of field relations, while attuned to an ongoing ethnographic present.
{"title":"Digital and Offline","authors":"Narmala Halstead","doi":"10.3167/SA.2020.650112","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/SA.2020.650112","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Partial processes of knowledge making, online and offline, demonstrate modes of experiential newness. Indicative of the ‘shocks’ and joined curations of field encounters, such experiences re-engage anthropological debates as being of the present. The extended field suggests vast change and unlimited spaces to engage participants and ‘invite’ new unrelatable publics. The reflections and encounters disturb an apparent mandate of digital anthropology as a sub-discipline to ‘upturn’ field and knowledge approaches. As these forum articles indicate, this vision of the field is not easily dissociated from continuities with participants as knowledge producers in and out of offline interactions. Notions of exit and entry or participants gaining seemingly unlimited new access to fieldworkers remain connected to performative/curated forms of field relations, while attuned to an ongoing ethnographic present.","PeriodicalId":51701,"journal":{"name":"Social Analysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79931921","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article investigates new ethnography on AI development relating to imaginaries of technoscientific forms of immortality. As a Think Piece in Analytics, it engages in a somewhat experimental comparative endeavor as I set concepts from the ethnographic field of transhumanism in a comparative relation to concepts developed in the anthropological theory of Christianity, mainly Dumont’s concept of the ‘individual-in-the-world’. I argue that through such a comparison we can understand recently developed ideas about the (technologically) immortal human being in a new light. The article points to how technoscientific immortality echoes core cultural themes, but it also considers a major difference in the perception of the social. When death is made redundant, the question of how sociality is reproduced moves center stage.
{"title":"The Human Version 2.0","authors":"A. Eriksen","doi":"10.3167/SA.2021.650104","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/SA.2021.650104","url":null,"abstract":"This article investigates new ethnography on AI development relating to imaginaries of technoscientific forms of immortality. As a Think Piece in Analytics, it engages in a somewhat experimental comparative endeavor as I set concepts from the ethnographic field of transhumanism in a comparative relation to concepts developed in the anthropological theory of Christianity, mainly Dumont’s concept of the ‘individual-in-the-world’. I argue that through such a comparison we can understand recently developed ideas about the (technologically) immortal human being in a new light. The article points to how technoscientific immortality echoes core cultural themes, but it also considers a major difference in the perception of the social. When death is made redundant, the question of how sociality is reproduced moves center stage.","PeriodicalId":51701,"journal":{"name":"Social Analysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84082847","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
My social media engagement with research interlocutors is shaped by my positionality as a ‘halfie’ anthropologist based abroad who conducts ethnographic research on violence and peacemaking in the Philippines and the diaspora. On the one hand, social media connectivity facilitates certain research processes, networking, activism, and solidarity building. Yet with social media's security issues and amid shifting political tides, such connectivity poses ethical and security risks, resulting in social media-specific ethical concerns. I demonstrate these points through an account of my engagement with Facebook, a ubiquitous platform for communicating among Filipinos. In the process, I reflect on some of the ways in which social media connectivity between researcher and interlocutors reconfigures the relationality, temporality, hierarchies, and affect of the ethnographic ‘field’.
{"title":"When Facebook Is the Internet","authors":"Rosa Cordillera A. Castillo","doi":"10.3167/SA.2020.650110","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/SA.2020.650110","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000My social media engagement with research interlocutors is shaped by my positionality as a ‘halfie’ anthropologist based abroad who conducts ethnographic research on violence and peacemaking in the Philippines and the diaspora. On the one hand, social media connectivity facilitates certain research processes, networking, activism, and solidarity building. Yet with social media's security issues and amid shifting political tides, such connectivity poses ethical and security risks, resulting in social media-specific ethical concerns. I demonstrate these points through an account of my engagement with Facebook, a ubiquitous platform for communicating among Filipinos. In the process, I reflect on some of the ways in which social media connectivity between researcher and interlocutors reconfigures the relationality, temporality, hierarchies, and affect of the ethnographic ‘field’.","PeriodicalId":51701,"journal":{"name":"Social Analysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91228200","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ethnographers today find themselves experimenting with new approaches to digital ethnography amid pandemic-related restrictions on research. Yet such developments only accelerate a broader trend toward the dissolution of the traditional ethnographic ‘field’ due to new communications technologies and the emergence of a globalized ‘knowledge economy’. Through six contributions from around the world, this forum explores how the emergence of a more diffuse, interconnected ethnographic field is impacting fieldwork’s status as a rite of passage, creating new affective entanglements and shifting power relationships between researchers and participants. Despite the potential for influence and surveillance that new technologies cede to already powerful institutions, the discussions underline how ethnographic interlocutors are auteurs in their own right—and that ethnographers are also often bit characters in other people’s stories.
{"title":"Staying Tuned","authors":"G. Hughes, A. Walter","doi":"10.3167/SA.2020.650105","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/SA.2020.650105","url":null,"abstract":"Ethnographers today find themselves experimenting with new approaches to digital ethnography amid pandemic-related restrictions on research. Yet such developments only accelerate a broader trend toward the dissolution of the traditional ethnographic ‘field’ due to new communications technologies and the emergence of a globalized ‘knowledge economy’. Through six contributions from around the world, this forum explores how the emergence of a more diffuse, interconnected ethnographic field is impacting fieldwork’s status as a rite of passage, creating new affective entanglements and shifting power relationships between researchers and participants. Despite the potential for influence and surveillance that new technologies cede to already powerful institutions, the discussions underline how ethnographic interlocutors are auteurs in their own right—and that ethnographers are also often bit characters in other people’s stories.","PeriodicalId":51701,"journal":{"name":"Social Analysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82268617","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Worldwide followers of the late Chinese Christian reformers Watchman Nee and Witness Lee share a central concern with human-divine ‘oneness’, but there are different understandings in different localities about how such oneness works. I utilize one such difference by analyzing group unity in Euro-America using Taiwanese understandings of oneness, which involve things (selfsame unities) but not relations. Experimenting with Dumontian, Strathernian, and object-oriented anthropologies, I show that anthropological analysis is currently possible (a) by emphasizing things, (b) by emphasizing relations, and (c) entirely without relations. Anthropology entirely without things, however, has not yet been achieved. I conclude by suggesting reasons why we might want to attain this final possibility in our approach to things and/or relations.
{"title":"Oneness and ‘the church in Taiwan’","authors":"G. Breen","doi":"10.3167/SA.2020.650103","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/SA.2020.650103","url":null,"abstract":"Worldwide followers of the late Chinese Christian reformers Watchman Nee and Witness Lee share a central concern with human-divine ‘oneness’, but there are different understandings in different localities about how such oneness works. I utilize one such difference by analyzing group unity in Euro-America using Taiwanese understandings of oneness, which involve things (selfsame unities) but not relations. Experimenting with Dumontian, Strathernian, and object-oriented anthropologies, I show that anthropological analysis is currently possible (a) by emphasizing things, (b) by emphasizing relations, and (c) entirely without relations. Anthropology entirely without things, however, has not yet been achieved. I conclude by suggesting reasons why we might want to attain this final possibility in our approach to things and/or relations.","PeriodicalId":51701,"journal":{"name":"Social Analysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75269873","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The Festival of Sant’Efisio has been carried out for centuries in Sardinia, Italy, to honor a vow made to the Saint after a plague in the seventeenth century. As a result of the global health crisis in 2020, the Festival was performed mainly through social media. Studying this event under such conditions accentuated the inherent complexity of interpreting ethnographic data from religious festivals, in which the body, emotions, and participation play a fundamental role. Emphasizing the hybridity of online and offline worlds, we reflect on how fieldwork has been transformed by COVID-19 through a reflexive account of the methodological challenges of online festival ethnography.
{"title":"Rethinking Religious Festivals in the Era of Digital Ethnography","authors":"Chiara Cocco, Aleida Bertran","doi":"10.3167/SA.2020.650107","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/SA.2020.650107","url":null,"abstract":"The Festival of Sant’Efisio has been carried out for centuries in Sardinia, Italy, to honor a vow made to the Saint after a plague in the seventeenth century. As a result of the global health crisis in 2020, the Festival was performed mainly through social media. Studying this event under such conditions accentuated the inherent complexity of interpreting ethnographic data from religious festivals, in which the body, emotions, and participation play a fundamental role. Emphasizing the hybridity of online and offline worlds, we reflect on how fieldwork has been transformed by COVID-19 through a reflexive account of the methodological challenges of online festival ethnography.","PeriodicalId":51701,"journal":{"name":"Social Analysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85454343","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Anthropologists’ arrival stories have long served to justify, naturalize, and domesticate—often through humor—the fraught moment of entering unasked into other people's lives. This textual convention has been thoroughly critiqued, but no comparable attention has been paid to the analogous moment of departure from the field. The digital age enables both sides to maintain contact, a shift that negates the finality of earlier departures. This article engages the changes wrought by digital media that allow us to remain connected to the field. While this seems a humane affordance, it also means that it is no longer feasible to cleanly sever ties established ‘there’. When anthropologists leave the field, the field will likely follow them—on Facebook or Instagram.
{"title":"Leaving the Field in the Digital Age","authors":"F. Girke","doi":"10.3167/SA.2021.650106","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/SA.2021.650106","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Anthropologists’ arrival stories have long served to justify, naturalize, and domesticate—often through humor—the fraught moment of entering unasked into other people's lives. This textual convention has been thoroughly critiqued, but no comparable attention has been paid to the analogous moment of departure from the field. The digital age enables both sides to maintain contact, a shift that negates the finality of earlier departures. This article engages the changes wrought by digital media that allow us to remain connected to the field. While this seems a humane affordance, it also means that it is no longer feasible to cleanly sever ties established ‘there’. When anthropologists leave the field, the field will likely follow them—on Facebook or Instagram.","PeriodicalId":51701,"journal":{"name":"Social Analysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90842111","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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