Taking its cue from the loss (more precisely, the disappearance) of a close friend and sometime collaborator, and drawing on my long-term fieldwork on an experimental arts festival held annually in the Orkney Islands, this essay reflects on the challenges of documenting uncertain or intermittent presence, as well as the possibilities the latter affords for unsettling and expanding received conceptions of identity, place, and belonging, especially in a political moment in which these are being defined in increasingly narrow and exclusionary terms. Bringing ethnography and autoethnography into dialogue with literature, visual arts, and oral storytelling, it suggests that anthropology can most effectively respond to the challenges of the present by acknowledging that it is, inescapably, a creative as much as a descriptive practice.
In this essay, I contemplate the value of ethnography by reflecting on my experience and that of other anthropology-trained individuals who engage with public socio-ecological issues in Indonesia. While these issues are portrayed as urgent and are packaged with established representations of people and communities, ethnographic engagement produces representations that are at odds with them. Nevertheless, anthropology-trained individuals in Indonesia have no way to address these issues other than to work with institutions that produce the problematic representations, and in doing so, inadvertently contribute to their reproduction. Furthermore, the academic anthropology ecosystem does not support the exhaustive exploration of these issues. Eventually, the sensibility generated by the practice of ethnography becomes more of a latent sensibility, which is critical of the predominant representations. It evokes internal conflict and a sense of irony, which most of the time cannot be expressed or practically addressed.
Starting from the little recognition that women have been given in both economic and productive life, as well as in the processes aimed at peacebuilding, this article reflects on the relationship between women, tobacco labor, and peacebuilding, based on work conducted with women in contexts of armed conflict and post-agreement in the Montes de Maria region of Colombia, specifically with the Cocinando Ideas Collective in the Municipality of Ovejas, Sucre. The research is conducted through social constructionism and participatory action research, based on the following questions: how has tobacco labor impacted the lives of women in the Montes de Maria region? And how can tobacco labor become an element of peaceful mediation for women survivors of armed conflict? Three conclusions are drawn: the first shows some visible aspects and reveals other invisible aspects regarding the role of women in tobacco labor. The second accounts for positive and negative elements in how the tobacco profession is represented by women. Finally, the article explores the meaning tobacco has had in the territory in terms of peacebuilding and its role in the political transition of the region.
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：