Being, doing and knowing in the field: reflections on ethnographic practice in the Arab region (original) (raw)
Related papers
Commentary on ‘Ethnography as Knowledge in the Arab Region’ by Roosbelinda Cárdenas
Contemporary Levant, 2017
I write these words from what feels like a crumbling world. As I walk through the streets of Havana to find an internet spot from which to read the terrible news coming from the three places I consider home-Mexico, Bogotá and East Harlem-the sense of routinized crisis, which Kanafani and Sawaf describe in this introduction, is palpable and debilitating. I see the accumulated exhaustion of deprivation, my family tells me stories that normalize spectacular violence, and I read about the emboldened expressions of xenophobia, racism and misogyny that are surfacing in my neighbourhood and in my daughter's school. The determination to exploit, the will to oppress, the desire to annihilate overwhelm me. Thankfully, as I read through the articles in this issue, I find comfort in the common recognition that 'such a broken day is our time indeed' (Kanafani & Sawaf, 2017). The commonalities across our broken worlds are evident. Last winter, as my colleague, Hiba Bou Akar, and I held a surprisingly crisp and steady internet call between Lebanon and Bogotá, it didn't take long to find the threads that would suture together our course on comparative contemporary politics in the Middle East and Latin America. The urgencies of the field sites we are familiar within some cases very intimately so-surfaced easily. The everyday meanings of postwar in devastated landscapes; the surprisingly similar gendered divisions of space in places marked by seemingly radically different labour regimes; the continued violence of segregation and displacement; the economies of suffering supported by the international humanitarian system; the worlds destroyed by voracious extractivism and the illusory landscapes built atop their ruins. These stories allowed us to draw comparisons between San Salvador and Beirut, to illuminate connections between Egypt and the Dominican Republic, and to contrast the roles of race and religion in reproducing communities of belonging that continue to enact violent exclusions and colonial relations of domination. When we finished the syllabus we read the titles of our weekly sessions in dismay. Although we didn't want to obliterate our students' 'optimism of the will', ending the course on a hopeful note seemed not only forced but dishonest. The best we could summon was a final discussion on the current crossroads as a place of uncertainty, which doesn't entirely foreclose hopeful readings of our futures. What does our labour as ethnographers entail in such a context? I share Abu-Lughod's concern for the dangers of such dire representations of the field sites that we care so deeply about and for. We cannot afford to contribute to orientalist or otherwise colonizing depictions of the places and people we love, knowingly or unknowingly. And yet, I do not think that we can turn our attention away from this state of routinized crisis that we are living in. For this reason, I read the invitation to contribute to this issue, which is concerned with people and places halfway across the planet from where I work, love and live, as an invitation to engage in a radical politics of interconnection (Haraway, 2007). While remaining attentive to the historical particularities that make places like Cairo and Mexico City distinct, I feel accompanied by the recognition that we inhabit similarly precarious and overwhelming worlds. And that, as Kanafani and Sawaf so beautifully echo Bjork's words, we continue to lean into the crack of this broken day in the hopes that it will tremble and sparkle ever so nicely.
The New Middle Eastern Ethnography
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 1: 805-20., 1995
Moral and theoretical challenges to traditional modes of study and to the notion of culture itself have led to a deep crisis in Middle Eastern ethnography. The six books under review are taken to be exemplary of recent responses to this crisis. Recourse to personal narrative and biography humanizes the Middle Eastern Other, but at the expense of any possibility of theory building or comparative work. More promising avenues of approach aim at reconceptualizing the manner in which power relations are instated, maintained and challenged in a cultural milieu that is ideologically committed to egalitarian individualism.
On Ethnographic Confidence and the Politics of Knowledge in Lebanon
Contemporary Levant, 2020
Fieldworkers in politically sensitive spaces traditionally need to negotiate their presence in the field with local (in)formal authorities and epistemic power-holders. I illustrate how attempts at both holistic politicisation and neutralisation of the research space can question ethnographic knowledge production. Drawing upon the anthropology of silence and agnotology, I interrogate the whats and hows of ethnographic authority and local validation of ethnographic research when political and epistemic powers complexly and discontinuously overlap. By examining how knowledge is boasted about, concealed or questioned by political and humanitarian actors, I examine the ways in which a lack of political protection, as well as overt advocacy, shape different modalities of access – or lack of access – to the field. Against the backdrop of a growing body of literature on the ethics of research in settings affected by political transformations and emergency crises (such as today’s Arab Levant), I try to upend ethnographic confidence as a self-centred process of knowledge production. I instead rethink it not only as an ethical but also an inter-subjective effort towards a more effective integration of the counter-epistemologies of field interlocutors into our own research.
Women's Studies International Forum, 2014
This paper examines the model of ethnographic framing of the self/other relationship, and how this framing contributes to de-essentializing the theorizing of women's agency and subjectivity. The paper reflects on my own PhD field research experience conducted during 2007-2008 in the Gaza Strip. In a situation where the researcher and the research subject share the spatial history, as well as the multiple positionalities in their life cycle, the researcher's self inevitably becomes a subject of the ethnography. The analysis in this paper transcends the simplicity of the interactive relations between 'researchers' and 'researched'. It rather depends upon a much more nuanced recognition of the shared subjective experiences of both ethnographers and their subjects of ethnography. The paper concludes that the relocation of the ethnographer to be a subject of research helps her to be critical of her own epistemological feminist knowledge.
On Reflexivity in Ethnographic Practice and Knowledge Production
Commoning Ethnography, 2021
Deployed as much during fieldwork as in writing, reflexivity is itself positioned, its saliency as an epistemological device having transformed over time and space. Retracing its initial absence, subsequent rise in popularity and eventual routinization in academia, we position ourselves against reflexivity's near-total displacement today by a narrow and increasingly prevalent understanding of positionality. We argue for a return to a broader and more relational understanding of reflexivity, proposing a methodological program to achieve and maintain its critical, ethical and political edge. Our aim is to engage in conversation about the value of reflexivity as an iterative and collaborative ethnographic endeavour with potential to produce more relational and engaged knowledge about increasingly overbearing field-sites in the Arab region and beyond.
Positionality and self-reflexivity: Backyard qualitative research in Palestine
2021
Conducting qualitative, critical ethnographical research on disability in Palestine requires deep self-reflexivity, exploring positionality while claiming authorship. As a Palestinian conducting backyard research, I explored ways to conceptualize disability in light of language and macro factors related to Israeli occupation practices. While conducting interviews and observing, I learned to appreciate the advantages of being an insider and an outsider, and to be aware of the disadvantages of being both. Positionality and selfreflexivity helped me focus on my participants' voices. Through exploring disability in Palestinian higher education, I realized I was not only the representative of the collective knowledge, but I was also reflecting on how my research was creating indigenous discourse and decolonizing methodologies that challenged being politically correct. This was especially true when using certain acceptable language and content in Western academic discourse. Positionality and reflection on my own feelings, as an outsider and an insider at the same time, were an essential part of the research, especially when participants were addressing questions on lived experiences, content, language, and concepts to use when describing macro and micro-related factors causing physical disabilities.
The Ethnographic Studies In The Arab Communities In The Wake Of The Arab Spring
2013
For many reasons the Arab spring was sparked. It has a numerous implications in the life fields specially the social one. As a result of this, the ethnographic studies will be formed according to new type of anthropology. In light of the social networking role in the Arab spring, this article proposes a suitable type of Virtual Ethnography which depends on blending the cyberspace and cosmic spaces, and presents a model of procedures of this. [Ethnographic studies – The Arab spring - Virtual ethnography – Social networking ]
Ethnography in Israel: Ethnography in a Country Like Any Other
1969
We often see Israel as a country of binaries: religious and secular, Israeli and Palestinian, hawks and doves. Although we know these binaries do not encapsulate the depth of diversity in Israel, or the moral ambiguity that weaves through them, we rarely see scholarship that engages this cultural and ethical diversity. Ethnographic Encounters in Israel: Poetics and Ethics of Fieldwork, edited by Fran Markowitz, introduces readers to a variety of ethnographic settings that are not often part of discussions about Israel.