Being, doing and knowing in the field: reflections on ethnographic practice in the Arab region (original) (raw)

Being, doing and knowing in the field: reflections on ethnographic practice in the Arab region

Samar Kanafani & Zina Sawaf

To cite this article: Samar Kanafani & Zina Sawaf (2017) Being, doing and knowing in the field: reflections on ethnographic practice in the Arab region, Contemporary Levant, 2:1, 3-11, DOI: 10.1080/20581831.2017.1322173

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/20581831.2017.1322173

Published online: 26 May 2017.

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Being, doing and knowing in the field: reflections on ethnographic practice in the Arab region

Samar Kanafani a{ }^{a} and Zina Sawaf b{ }^{b}
a{ }^{a} School of Social Sciences, The University of Manchester, Manchester, UK; b { }^{\text {b }} Anthropology and Sociology Department, The Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, Switzerland

Abstract

This article introduces the present special issue, which focuses on the relevance of ethnographic experience to methodological practice and to understanding the conditions of social reality in the Arab region today. The authors frame this focus within an interplay between methodology and knowing the field, passing through the ethnographer’s critical selfawareness about method and prevailing field conditions, which they identify as crisis-ridden and overbearing. After first revisiting the role of positionality within the reflexive turn that has influenced ethnography for thirty years, they explore how conditions of the field imprint themselves on the ethnographer’s emotional, sensorial and sometimes unconscious experiences during fieldwork. They chart how the six authors of this issue translate such ‘states of being’ in their fields-in Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Palestine and Mexico-into particular methodological strategies to grapple with impasses or anxieties, and to unlock particular forms of knowledge on the spatial, material, discursive/ rhetorical and emotive registers of the field. In so doing, this special issue contributes to a discussion about (a) what preoccupies the ethnographer of this region today and (b) what attention to ethnographic experience can tell us about the circumstances that come to bear on informants and researchers alike, in significant and sometimes unavoidable ways. Over and above self-awareness in the field, the present reflections are signs of a growing preoccupation and a binding solidarity with-indeed a personal interest in-the conditions of our fieldsites, and hence in devising critical ways of understanding them.

KEYWORDS

Ethnographic practice; methodology; knowledge production; overbearing conditions; critical selfawareness

This special issue is born of an impulse to think about the ethnographic experience and its relevance for understanding social reality in the Arab region today. It is an inquiry about the interplay between being in our fields, doing fieldwork and what we come to know in this process about the place and time of our fieldsites and the method of ethnography itself. With the exception of and since the edited volume Arab women in the field (Altorki & Fawzi El-Solh, 1988), this line of inquiry on methodology specifically has been conspicuously side-lined in literature on the region, as political struggles -both historical and emerging, within and beyond its recognized territory-prompted urgent discussion of the politics of representation. While a wealth of compendia addressing theoretical and thematic trends in light of such politics are available to us (Abu-Lughod, 1989; Deeb & Winegar, 2012; Hafez & Slyomovics, 2013; Altorki, 2015), we propose joining this discussion on knowledge production in the region by picking up the thread on ethnography both as a practical, descriptive and ultimately theoretical enterprise as well as a mode of analytical attention (Nader, 2011). We

[1]

1. CONTACT Samar Kanafani ◯\bigcirc samarkanafani@gmail.com ◯\bigcirc The University of Manchester, UK; Zina Sawaf ◯\bigcirc zina.sawaf@gmail. com
   © 2017 Council for British Research in the Levant ↩︎

echo Dresch’s understanding that ‘Middle Eastern fieldwork’ is not well described as observation nor as data collection but rather as ‘listening for the unsaid’ in the everyday and thereby producing sincere and reliable knowledge (2000, pp. 122-125). In the pages that follow, contributors deal with the spatial, material, discursive and emotive registers of fieldwork. In so doing, this special issue wants to say something about (a) what preoccupies the ethnographer of this region today and (b) what attention to ethnographic experience can tell us about the circumstances that come to bear on informants and researchers alike, in significant and sometimes unavoidable ways. We use the term ‘overbearing’ to characterize the weight of seemingly unmoving and non-negotiable circumstances and forces, which materialize on the level of spatial arrangements, violent conflict and dominant discourses, as well as hegemonic political and economic regimes. Their overpowering effect on the ethnographic experience is such that the ethnographer is compelled or constrained to devise unanticipated ways of grappling with research in that moment. Framing these within a globalscale moment of a ‘routinization of notions of crisis’ (Hage, 2012, p. 294), our sense is that the overbearing circumstances of ethnography are pertinent indices of the political and ethical contours within which research unfolds and which beckon innovative forms of sensibility, analytical attention and critical self-awareness in the pursuit of social science.

This focused exploration initially emerged from a doctoral dissertation writing group, through which we and several of the authors contributing to this journal (Nassif, Al-Masri and Moghnieh) gradually developed the idea for a long-term research and publication project. The conversations that spanned 2015-16 took place mainly in Beirut, where all of us reside, regularly pass through or call home, and where we gradually conceptualized our core questions and concerns around doing ethnography in and generating knowledge of the Arab region. In June 2016, we presented our research and preliminary thoughts before a supportive audience of fellow scholars at the Arab Council for the Social Sciences’ annual research forum in Algeria. We also discussed questions of fieldwork and knowledge production in contexts of violence, surveillance and fear at an international workshop hosted by the Centre for Near and Middle East Studies, University of Marburg in October 2016. In addition to publishing the present special issue in Contemporary Levant, the group’s intent is for this research to develop through public debate on ethnographic knowledge, attracting other interested scholars from the region and the Global South to join more discussion forums in the near future. The contributors to this issue can be considered regular practitioners of ethnography as a means of research, be that as social anthropologists (Al-Masri, Kanafani, Moghnieh, Saleh and Sawaf), or scholars of media studies (Nassif) and comparative literature (Eqeiq). In the interstice between the moment of intensive doctoral work and training, and our catapult into-or indeed struggle to join-professionalized academia, this present moment of preoccupation with ethnography as method reveals a concern with refining the received canons and toolkits of our practice, and of considering how these can be made to respond ethically and politically to the time and place of the sites where we live and work.

Inasmuch as the authors of this issue reflect on their encounter with the field and the relevance of their research practice to the formation of their analytical categories, our introductory word first makes a brief segue to the various theoretical and methodological paradigms, which helped define the agenda for ethnographic knowledge over the past thirty years. While this is not an exhaustive scoping of methodological debates, it mirrors the specific trajectory that this collective’s exploration has taken until the present and includes an assessment of the role of reflexivity in ethnographic fieldwork. Reflecting on this frame of thought and its research programme serves to consider the place of the ethnographer in the field, and the ways in which rigorous and critical knowledge has been contingent upon the ethnographer’s self-awareness. Next, we look more closely at what positionality means for ethnographers presently, considering in particular the researcher’s indigeneity and gender in the field. Noting the centrality of the who of fieldwork, which reflexivity inaugurated in social sciences in the 1980s-in American-based anthropology most notably-we posit our growing interest at this moment in the what, when and how of fieldwork. From self-awareness, we shift the epicentres of our inquiry away from the subject positionality of the ethnographer to the

heightened emotions, hauntings and sensory perceptions of fieldwork. This brings up routine encounters with fear, suspicion, discomfort, doubt and misanthropy, just as much as friendship, solidarity, affinity, affection and love. We ask what kind of critical knowledge can attention to these aspects of the ethnographic encounter (and the methodological adaptations that ensue) generate?

An important question cropped up during a conversation we had in Beirut in 2016 with anthropologist Ghassan Hage about some long-term concerns with ethnography in the region. At a moment when ‘ontology’ is taking its turn as a popular and contested paradigm in theorizing methodology and social analysis, he wondered why the need to rethink ethnographic knowledge making emerges. Is it due to a gap in scholarship on theory and ethnography, or to a change in the world and ways of being in it, coming to know it and conceptualizing it? Without explicit preference for-or indeed reference to-epistemological or ontological approaches to ethnographic knowledge, which are often contentiously oppositional without needing to be (Graeber, 2015), the contributions in this special issue grapple with both dimensions: the world and the way we think about it have changed, as they are apt to do and continue doing.

Reflexivity reconsidered or what ever happened to the who of fieldwork

The 1980s and 1990s saw the arrival of reflexivity as totemic to anthropology’s disciplinary identity, largely emboldened by feminist and post-colonial scholarship. Awareness and discussion of the field researcher’s positionality, especially gender position and (national) cultural origin, became increasingly salient as a precondition of and for the analysis of and theorizing about social experience. The reflexive ‘turn’ became an invitation for researchers to hold up any combination of the filters we believe to be colouring our impression of the world, and through which others see us as we see them see us. Integrating this double gaze, reflexive ethnographers assert that the resultant representation of social reality is more refined, more just and more honest in its divulgences about who the ethnographer is, how she is perceived and, by extension, what facilities and limitations the ethnographic encounter affords her. Importantly, it represents a critical stance against the violence of unidirectional and hierarchical objectification, particularly ones that presume (or construct) a firm separation between the object and subject of fieldwork. Additionally, it has produced a corpus of work that challenges regimes of knowledge and domination, which reproduce patriarchal, imperial and capitalistic structures in their recounting of history and depictions of contemporary social reality (Behar & Gordon, 1995).

The edited volume Arab women in the field was a seminal contribution to the discussion on reflexive anthropology and remains singular as an exhaustive reflection on ethnographic experience in the Arab region (Altorki & Fawzi El-Solh, 1988). Its authors (the editors as well as Abu-Lughod, Joseph, Morsy and Shami), five women anthropologists, who identify at least partially as Arab and partially as foreign, reflected on how the multiple categories of their subjectivities, mainly gender and national belonging, affected their fieldwork experience. They analyzed the way some degree of sex segregation and/or gender roles, norms and exceptions framed fieldwork in Arab societies. These influenced their choice of topics, access to particular settings and people, ethical dilemmas and responsibilities, and eventually the analytical categories that they challenged or proposed in their research. The take-away argument was that being an Arab woman in the field can constitute a vantage point with the potential to enable a more nuanced, less gender-biased and less Westerncentric take not just on women’s worlds but on social realities of the Arab region more generally. The book toes the line of scholarly gestures, derivative of feminist critical writings of the time, which responded to patriarchal structures of knowledge, to restoratively bring to light gendered and non-Western perspectives (Behar & Gordon, 1995, p. 2).

Within this scholarship, gender and indigeneity have been central guiding concepts in determining how the fieldworker’s positionality-the first-person who of fieldwork—affects ethnographic and epistemological practice, inasmuch as feminist and postcolonial struggles have beckoned for such intervention. Yet, since the height of the reflexive moment, the anthropology of gender has

problematized the category of ‘women’ by exploring its learned, performative and unstable dimensions (Butler, 1990). In this sense, the category of ‘women’ obscures the personal history of the field researcher and more importantly the often multiple, shifting and contingent ways in which gendered subjectivity is made, unmade and remade in the field. Queer studies, in addition to those of masculinities, femininities and sexualities, have made new inroads into the anthropology of the region, allowing for various cross-overs and interactions to arise (Kandiyoti, 2015, p. 10). 1{ }^{1} More specifically, and once unshackled from the limited focus on women, gender stops being a stand-alone analytic. Rather it becomes increasingly pertinent insofar as it opens up onto the interpretation of various other social realms such as labour markets, the state and citizenship, law, development, governance, social movements, revolution, violence and conflict (Kandiyoti, 2015).

Following more than half a century in Western academia (much longer within European scholarship), area studies too is waning as a fore-runner of critical ideas, even as-and perhaps because-its epistemological ‘artefacts’ (e.g., the Middle East, the Muslim world or Islam tout court) are increasingly co-opted by dominant political agendas (Caton, 2015; Kandiyoti, 2015). As academic interest turns towards the complexity of everyday lived experience, including its liminalities, mobilities and hybridities, the privileged vantage point of the native’s point of view has met with serious challenges (Sabry, 2011). A dilution of the dichotomy between insider and outsider has worked to lessen concerns with subject positionality in the field by foregrounding that the ethnographer at all times occupies ‘shifting identifications’ (Narayan, 1993, p. 672). This has made way for a notion of ethnographic knowledge as created in dialogue between researchers and their interlocutors in the field (Caton, 2015, p. 82). In this manner, attention to geography and gender is increasingly being displaced by themes that cut across these age-old tropes. Our present contribution is in the realm of the sensory, embodied and emotive aspects of field experiences and a bid to make such dimensions a more salient part of knowledge that comes about through ethnography.

We presently find ourselves at a juncture vis-à-vis the potential of reflexivity for generating critical understanding of social reality. Recognizing the impact that attention to the ethnographer’s subjectivity has had and its necessary corrective for unyielding patriarchal and colonial regimes of knowledge and domination, the rise of identity politics beckons a careful consideration of what reflexive research needs to encompass. In other words, how to do ethnography with attention to the subjective experience of the ethnographer without rendering subjective experiences into token gestures, or worse, into “ready to wear” products of identity politics’ (Robertson, 2002, p. 788)? Faced with the pitfall of ‘navel gazing’ on the one hand and the risk of slipping into prevailing multicultural liberalism that blunts the political edge of social investigation on the other, how does ethnography-based research maintain its raison d’être of deploying the ethnographic self as a central research tool while continuing to push the boundaries of critical inquiry? With participant-objectification, Bourdieu (2003) argued that revealing the conditions of possibility through which the researcher objectifies social reality is imperative for the production of objective knowledge, focusing on the ethnographer’s educational background as the social domain where her/his intellectual biases take form. Yet, as the imagined membranes between the various domains of ethnographic labour continue to stretch and thin, and the ethnographic field becomes gradually ‘co-extensive with our homes, our minds, and our dreams’ (Goulet & Miller, 2007, p. 4), shifting theoretical priorities and stringent (violent and perilous) practical and political considerations combine to hush a little the who of the fieldworker in order to remark and attend to field conditions on their own terms.

This special issue reflects on the practice of fieldwork from the present and onward, with concern for the future of fieldwork as well. It is therefore not oriented toward recovering past (or indeed present) misrepresentations through gendered and indigenous self-awareness, which was championed over the decades and continues against difficult odds in laudable directions. Recent examples have challenged orientalist views and exposed blatant forms of discrimination, including within the academy itself (Hafez & Slyomovics, 2013; Deeb & Winegar, 2015). Inasmuch as the field researcher’s subjective experience continues to shape ethnographic knowledge, however, our interest here is the way the field makes its imprint on the researcher as the researcher tunes into the visceral, sensorial,

ethical, spatial, cognitive and political registers of fieldwork as methodology and fieldwork as an extension of daily life. Broadly, this collection of articles and essays is concerned with the what, the conditions that have a bearing on ethnographic practice today, and the how, the ways to do and think in and about our field contexts with a mind to push debates towards frontiers where critical thought can still speak to (and against) the realities of everyday life, which encompass the researcher and her interlocutors alike (Sabry, 2011, p. 14).

Overbearing field conditions or the what of fieldwork

When we speak of the conditions of the field, calling it the what of fieldwork, we also imply when and where, and generally mean the conditions affecting ethnographic practice in various sites of the Arab region and beyond, where we have done research and where some of us also espouse a sense of belonging. Most of us (especially the initial research group) are Beirut-based, though variously doing research in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria, Palestine and Mexico, in addition to Lebanon. We therefore claim no comprehensive scope of the region even though we view our work as necessarily nestled in and inflected by historical and geopolitical trajectories that have shaped our primary fieldsites since at least the late 1980s. One might enumerate the events as a way to qualify this vast and various geography, and thereby end up with a list of mostly war and conflict-related items. Several of these would have occurred or been instigated elsewhere (or everywhere) in the world, even as they transform in recognizable ways-abrupt or gradual-the experience of our fieldsites. The most obvious examples include vestiges of colonial wars, independence wars, the end of the Cold War and most recently the US-led Global War on Terror, yet many other subtle machinations and geographical variations of these global power struggles qualify as well. The individual contributions in this issue reference specific events around which they wish to theorize and reflect. Yet, preferring in this introduction to avoid a spectacular and spectatorly framing of experience, which indexing current affairs necessarily entails, we rather qualify these ethnographic contexts as existing within what Hage explains as routinized crisis (2012). This global condition is crisis without foreseeable resolution, and violence as protracted and permeating most aspects of daily life.

With this global scale in mind, the papers of this issue pursue particular iterations of global phenomena, while eschewing contribution to a discourse of exceptionality on the Arab region, which is all too often made emblematic of crisis, war and violence. Yet, as we proclaim to focus on the conditions of the field, adapting our practice and attention to its terms, it is these critical (from ‘crisis’ in this case) conditions that present themselves as overbearing and deeply impinging on the lifeworlds we research and on the methods we devise to comprehend them.

These include spatial, discursive, remembered, sensory, embodied and emotive dimensions of work and life in the field, which substantiate the workings of various dominant systems and discourses, through a self-aware reflection about their effects at the intimate level of the ethnographer’s experience in the field, and their effect on understanding. For example, Sawaf substantiates the limits and thresholds of the Saudi state’s spatial and moral control by attending to idioms and practices of lateral movement during fieldwork in Riyadh. Moghnieh’s critical engagement with expert knowledge on violence, such as that of humanitarian psychological relief programmes during and after major episodes of political violence in Lebanon, proposes a simultaneously popular and scholarly understanding of violence as an uneventful and immersive state within a war-prone context. Meanwhile, Al-Masri qualifies the prolonged experience of war as apprehended through the traces it leaves in memory and on the human sensorium, and which emerge as markers of the ethnographer’s ‘insider’ status, over and above subject positionality. The regimes of heightened surveillance and state repression in Nassif’s work on fear in Cairo become manifest through her dual reckoning with clandestine political dissidence and her own ‘punishability’ as a researcher. While in Saleh’s work, the informal economy and possible regimes of knowledge about it are revealed through a rhetoric of morality during her fieldwork with Turkmen female sex-workers/street-vendors in Beirut. Finally, Eqeiq reveals how historical parallels between two distant internal-colonial settings

come to intersect in the ethnographer’s own body and mind such that intimate knowledge of the conditions of the one (Palestine) are indispensable to her sense of intimacy with the conditions of the other (Mexico).

In considering the what of their fieldwork, these various texts at times make manifest the ethnographer’s sense of uncertainty, fear and doubt in the trajectory of her own fieldwork, the soundness of her method as well as the safety of her life in the field. At other times, this engagement with field conditions imparts a familiarity and habituation (from accumulated sense of belonging or invested concern in the future and wellbeing of a place), generating forms of certainty about impending uncertainty. In either case, they prompt the authors to consider how they are doing fieldwork, and they do so precisely from a position of unsettledness with the conditions of the field, due at least in part to a fraught relationship with particular epistemologies about those conditions, be these based on common knowledge or academic conception. Doing fieldwork in all these accounts is an intensely emotional endeavour and not without its distinctive ‘ecstasies’ (Fabian, 2001, p. 31)—frightful, epiphanous and transformative-including ones that the ethnographer experiences through extraordinary ways such as visions and dreams. Fieldwork ensnares and preoccupies, haunts and appears, bothers, discomforts, moves and scares, even as it fosters positive social and affective bonds between the researcher and her informants. In so doing, where and when the field is constituted starts to shift between the conditions of the field and the emotional states that ethnographic labour entails and tries to capture.

Doing as knowing or the how of fieldwork

While the reflexive turn emphasized the extent to which the ethnographer’s positional identity categories informed the data she acquired, such attention had the potential to understate the embodied, emotive and sensory dimensions of fieldwork. Indeed, the ethnographer’s ‘states of being’, including the ‘emotions, reactions, and experiences that are consistently evoked’ in her (Davies & Spencer, 2010, p. 1), are not only enabling and conducive to the process of learning fieldwork, but they are also ultimately amenable to ethnographic knowledge making. The papers in this issue foreground states of being, which the ethnographer importantly shares with interlocutors, and which prompt her to creatively and often spontaneously deploy impromptu fieldwork strategies such as manoeuvring, lying, reading and suspecting as a way to reckon with the conditions of the field. They further turn her consideration towards personal, ecstatic, visceral and often unconscious experiences such as dreaming, remembering and sensing, eventually yielding new realizations about the field itself and more notably insights into the interpersonal and transpersonal, ultimately opening onto unforeseeable insights into the lifeworlds under study. These might often lead her to revisit her initial research purposes and questions. From such attention, we further inquire how do we come to know through doing in the field?

On the one hand, the circumstances and experiences of fieldwork evoke a motley group of subjective emotions and reactions within the ethnographer, such as fear, guilt, anxiety, paranoia and doubt, constituting her ever-shifting states of being. During ethnographic fieldwork, the embodied and emotive often find ethereal expression in personal memories, sensations and musings, or introjections that find their way into nighttime reveries, spilling over into the process of ethnographic writing, and impregnating the ethnographer’s unconscious. These inadvertently generate insights beyond the personal and become ‘crossing-points’ (Jackson, 2010, p. 47) that not only link the ethnographer’s experiences with others’ (her interlocutors and social milieu), but also connect different times and places, in and out of the field. On the other hand, fieldwork spawns a multitude of openended and imponderable relations that implicate the method of ethnography itself-with the researcher at its centre-even as they bear epistemic fruit. These relations are not limited to the relation between the ethnographer and the other(s) of the field, but extend to the relation between the ethnographer and methodological practice itself, and the ethnographer and the materiality or environment of the field. Davies has termed these ‘inter-methodology’ and ‘inter-materiality’,

situating them within ‘radical empiricism’, which regards the emotions arising during ethnography as having ‘proven’ empirical value and the capacity to generate anthropological insight (2010, p. 23).

Thus, while the lies (‘plot-holes’) and suggestive jokes that spontaneously emerge in the exchange between Saleh and her interlocutors were initially unexpected, she reveals how they index the moral and material boundaries of knowledge about informal (sex) labour more generally, even as they act to bridge social and material inequalities in the field. Through a foray into the sounds and smells of wars that she remembers in her distant and more recent pasts, Al-Masri conceives of the place and time of fieldwork to include this sensory register in protracted crisis as a shared experience among those who lived it and as essential to conceptualizing selfhood in such contexts. Also in this issue, feelings of fear and hope about the apparent thinness and amorphism of urban ethnography manifested themselves unconsciously in Sawaf’s account of ethnographic practice in Riyadh. Interpreting her dreams of the Saudi religious police surveilling sex segregation and marking the physical thresholds of the field as their own not only signalled that she had effectively internalized the space of the city but that she had also learnt how to be with others, and how to do fieldwork, in Riyadh. Eqeiq’s nocturnal dream connected her fieldsite in Mexico to her native Palestinian hometown under Israeli occupation, ecstatically liberating her from her writer’s block by way of a symbolic reckoning with the borders and censorships that such colonialism had embedded in her. Meanwhile, Moghnieh’s own experiences and-more crucially-memories of ‘living-in’ and through the fifteenyear Lebanese Civil War and the more recent July War of 2006 revealed to her a disconnection between what she knew from experience and the expert knowledge on violence she was researching and writing about. Taking cues from her own embodiment of protracted violence, she reorients her inquiry and theorization toward her own and interlocutors’ practices of reading and assessing the liveability of daily life in violent times. Nassif, for her part, reflects on her own fear and daring in the field, claiming that such intense and visceral experiences influence the research and allow for a complex interrogation of fear. She compares her own emotions in the perilous conditions of an arbitrarily punitive police government and the fear (and defiance) of her interlocutors, who were political dissidents in Egypt of the 1970s, thereby unpacking the impact of emotions on the research process, including its questions, subjects and methodology.

Conclusion: interested research or ‘being in’ the field

Is it not in times of crisis that the human being and imagination finds the power and resource to be creative and productive, rather than when things are running smoothly, unchallenged and undeterred? In the lyrics to the song, It’s Not up to You, the Icelandic singer Bjork captures the creative undertones of crisis nicely:

If you wake up
And the day feels broken
Just lean into the crack
And it will tremble
Ever so nicely
Notice
How it sparkles down there
If ‘[b]eing an ethnographer today commonly entails moving in social worlds that are being shaped in most profound ways by war, political violence, extreme poverty, and sickness’ (Perdigon, 2015, p. 22), then such a broken day is our time indeed. This is the crucial starting point of the present attempt to reckon with how critical conditions demand of the ethnographer uncharted ways of surviving fieldwork and being epistemologically productive yet not without first succumbing to emotional, visceral, ethical and material challenges. We have found in our work that such complication and trouble have left little use for ethnographic self-positioning through a discussion of discrete identity categories, as

entangled and superimposed as these may be rendered. Rather in the present issue, we identify a preoccupation with a different sort of self-critique or transparent self-reflection, namely one that grapples with inter-subjective landscapes of emotional, sensory and epistemic/rhetorical experience, which compels-often by way of self-doubt and anxiety- methodological strategies and manoeuvres as necessary avenues towards understanding. Taking into account the urgencies that prevail in the field (ones that we live in, sense and intuit first-hand), identification here entails carrying the weight and worry of the presents and futures of the people and places where fieldwork unfolds.

While such visceral and cognitive processes are common and endemic to fieldwork, they are by no means unique to the ethnographic endeavour. In fact, in the case of emotions for instance, their very relevance to ethnographic knowledge making lies in their resonance both in and out of the field (Cook, 2010; Jackson, 2010). From this point, it is important to emphasize that despite their divergent experiences and ways of translating critical ethnographic experience into ways of doing and knowing in the field, the contributions to this issue have in common an interest vis-à-vis their fieldsites that exceed the labour of ethnography and its intended outcomes. ‘Interest’ here signals the ethnographer’s partial and personal stakes in the lives and futures, presents and pasts of the people and places of fieldwork beyond the quest for knowledge.

There may have been a time when the perils in the field were just that, perils in the ethnographic field, which the anthropologist (the traditional practitioner of ethnography) faced when far removed from the relative security and appreciation of the academic milieu from which she had embarked. Yet today, with scarcely any secure jobs available for newly initiated scholars, and the comfort and security of more established professionals waning or continuously threatened, the academic ‘field’ is a risky and frequently underappreciated domain to dedicate one’s life and labour to. So much so that on the London School of Economics’ page, The Impact Blog, Afonso (2013) likened academia to a drug gang for the stark inequalities within its hierarchy and for the ever-slimmer chances of doctoral graduates ascending to secure positions even as their numbers rise annually. Such perilous conditions in the professional spheres where ethnographic research is done, serve to paper over any stark differences between the critical conditions of the field and the ethnographer’s own troubled circumstances, such as the increasing precarity of academic labour. No surprise then that we can glimpse in some of the contributions of this issue a jaded sentiment and a displacement of interest from the academic domain to sites of personal and political commitment.

If the present ethnographic attempts are partial and interested toward their fieldsites, it is because what goes on in the field matters to the ethnographer in ways that leave her stakes less and less distinguishable from those of the site itself. Such interest tells us that there is always a political implication for approaching fieldwork and fieldsites, one way or another (Graeber, 2015, p. 6), but also that ethnographic knowledge making is not only a matter of representation. Given the overbearing nature of our field conditions and the conditions from which we embark to the field, knowledge and understanding, analysis and commentary take on ever more urgent roles.

Note

1. Queer studies and studies of sexuality are emerging in the anthropology of the region; see most recently Mahdavi (2008), Mikdashi (2013) and Merabet (2014).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Samar Kanafani is a social anthropologist residing and working in Beirut. Her research interests, mainly in writing but also in artistic practice, have been about urban change, decay, dwelling, materiality, nationalism, migration, gender and the body. She has taught part-time at the American University of Beirut (AUB) and the University of Manchester. In 2015-16,

she was a doctoral fellow at the Orient-Institut Beirut. She recently defended her doctoral dissertation, entitled ‘Made to fall apart: an ethnography of old houses and urban renewal in Beirut’.
Zina Sawaf is lecturer in anthropology at the American University of Beirut. She obtained her PhD in Anthropology from The Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. Her thesis, ‘Encountering the state: women and intimate lives in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia’, is an ethnographic study of embodied encounters between women and the processes, offices and officials of the state as well as its documentary practices. She holds an MS in Social Anthropology from the London School of Economics and an MS in Foreign Service from Georgetown University.

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