All the world is staged: intellectuals and the projects of ethnography (original) (raw)
Contesting the politics of ethnography: towards an alternative knowledge production
We were free, but our bellies were empty. The Master had become the Boss-Medouze, in the film Sugar Cane Alley Balmurli Natrajan and Radhika Parameswaran Chandra Mohanty, an Indian feminist scholar, in her influential essay &dquo;Under Western Eyes&dquo; critiques Western feminist scholarship as universalizing and rendering static the lives of Third World women in terms of &dquo;underdevelopment, oppressive traditions, high illiteracy, rural and urban poverty, religious fanaticism, and 'overpopulaton.&dquo;'1 Documenting the numerous books and articles that have shaped the discourse of &dquo;Third World women&dquo; in the West today, Mohanty observes that the above terms get operationalized as objective indicators of well-being such as life-expectancy, sex-ratio, nutrition, and educational level, which have become the predominant categories of analyses found in social scientific studies of women in developing countries. Arguing that these indicators fail to adequately portray the lives of Third World women, she says:
The Strange Case of Ethnography and International Relations (2008)
Over the past couple of decades a growing number of International Relations (IR) scholars have adapted and adopted ethnographic research and writing modes, hoping that ethnography would introduce an emancipatory research agenda and refurbish the discipline's parochial vestiges. This article discusses the promising and problematic implications of this move. It argues that the 'ethnographic turn' in IR ignores recent anthropological literature on the topic and employs a selective and often instrumental notion of what ethnography is and does. By reviewing some of the most prominent ethnographic contributions made by feminist and social constructivist authors, this article demonstrates that, in international relations, the complexity of ethnography has been reduced to (1) an empiricist data-collection machine, (2) a writing style, or (3) a theoretical sensibility. However, this intervention also hopes to encourage students of global politics to rewrite international relations from an ethnographical stance and take full advantage of ethnography's radical promise.
Hypatia
's anthology Decolonizing Feminism: Transnational Feminism and Globalization addresses a broad range of issues that underscore the importance of decolonizing feminist theory. Chapters included in this book examine a wide variety of approaches to decolonizing feminism from a transnational and global perspective. Theorists champion Indigenous feminism, global and communal forms of knowledge, collective movements that emphasize women's rights, citizenship, care chains and democratic processes, home in a global worker context, and the plight of refugee women, to name a few. These issues demonstrate the need for feminism to have a transnational, decolonial, and global lens. McLaren and the authors in the anthology face these challenges head-on. The result is a bold and innovative anthology that makes a significant contribution to feminist philosophy. Decolonizing Feminism links feminism and decoloniality by joining the conversation about decoloniality begun and sustained by Anibal Quijano,
Troubling transnational feminism(s): Theorising activist praxis
This article identifies a misfit between transnational feminist networks observed at the World Social Forum and the extant scholarship on transnational feminism. The conceptual divide is pos-ited as one between transnational feminism understood, on the one hand, as a normative discourse involving a particular analytic and methodological approach in feminist knowledge production and, on the other, as an empirical referent to feminist cross-border organising. The author proposes that the US-based and Anglophone character of the scholarship, its post-structural-ist and post-colonial genealogies, and the transnational paradigm's displacement of area studies can be seen as contributing to the misfit. The article concludes by arguing for theoretical reconsideration of activist practice, place, and the 'posts'-post-structuralism and post-colonialism, in the study of contemporary transnational feminist activisms. This marks an effort to get beyond the binary framework of 'transnational feminism' versus 'global sisterhood' in analysing activist practices on an increasingly diverse and complex transnational feminist field.
Journal of International Women's Studies Ain't I A Woman? Revisiting Intersectionality
In the context of the second Gulf war and US and the British occupation of Iraq, many 'old' debates about the category 'woman' have assumed a new critical urgency. This paper revisits debates on intersectionality in order to show that they can shed new light on how we might approach some current issues. It first discusses the 19 th century contestations among feminists involved in anti-slavery struggles and campaigns for women's suffrage. The second part of the paper uses autobiography and empirical studies to demonstrate that social class (and its intersections with gender and 'race' or sexuality) are simultaneously subjective, structural and about social positioning and everyday practices. It argues that studying these intersections allows a more complex and dynamic understanding than a focus on social class alone. The conclusion to the paper considers the potential contributions to intersectional analysis of theoretical and political approaches such as those associated with poststructuralism, postcolonial feminist analysis, and diaspora studies.
Cultural Dynamics 22 (2), 2010
Ethnography is like much else in the social sciences … It is a multi-dimensional exercise, a coproduction of social fact and sociological imagining, a delicate engagement of the inductive with the deductive, of the real with the virtual, of the already-known with the surprising, of verbs with nouns, processes with products, of the phenomenological with the political. (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2003: 172) Forgotten places … have experienced the abandonment characteristic of contemporary capitalist and neoliberal state reorganization … [H]ow can people who inhabit forgotten places scale up their activism from intensely localized struggles to something less atomized and therefore possessed of a significant capacity for self-determination? How do they set and fulfill agendas for life-affirming social change-whether by seizing control of the social wage or by other means? (Gilmore, 2008: 31) In what ways might the work of ethnography, conceived of in this inclusive and multidimensional way by Jean and John Comaroff, prove useful for reimagining the multi-scalar work of building activist solidarity, pace Ruth Wilson Gilmore? Our comments emerge from a sequence of workshops on 'Ethnographies of Activism' organized by us at the London School of Economics in 2007 and 2008, the second of which was focused on revising papers for this double special issue of Cultural Dynamics. The two of us-Donner, an anthropologist of South Asia, and Chari, a geographer of India and South Africa-came together through the question of whether it might be possible to think through the problems of ethnographic research on activism with a specifically left or 'progressive' focus. In the process of engaging this problem, we recognized disciplinary constraints and possibilities in our attempts to harness ethnography as a transdisciplinary and transformative practice. We found that thinking across ethnography and progressive activism involves transgressing disciplinary boundaries to address complexity and universality .