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- Convenors:
-
Judith Okely
(Oxford UniversityUniversity of Hull)
Alenka Spreizer (University of Primorska - Faculty of Humanities)
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- Format:
- Workshops
- Location:
- 15 and R2
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 27 August, -, Thursday 28 August, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Ljubljana
Short Abstract:
Fieldwork has been idealised as detached from political implications. Yet anthropologists have become engaged. Necessarily, the anthropologist eschews participatory violence. Engagement may also be interpreted as responding to the people's concerns. Topics can be transformed.
Long Abstract:
Traditionally, the anthropologist and the discipline have been presented as ideally detached from the political implications of fieldwork. Yet the notion of the researcher as disengaged observer is a positivist legacy. Research and its very process have consequences. As participant observer, the anthropologist is confronted by choices. S/he cannot always remain disengaged, especially when confronted by suffering, hardship and injustice. Anthropologists have inevitably become involved. They have been asked to act as intermediary. Anthropologists have been engaged as expert witness in land claims and in prosecutions for discrimination and as policy advisors. They have used their privileged skills for change, eg negotiating with the authorities for the provision of a well. This is a means of giving back something, albeit small, to their hosts for hospitality and priceless knowledge. In some cases, the anthropologist has become activist. In others, the anthropologist may have to study conflict, while necessarily refraining from factional allegiances and participatory violence. In virtually all cases, the anthropologist has to engage with the topics which concern the people themselves. Thus engagement can also be interpreted as actively responding to the encounter thereby transforming the initial research focus. Preconceptions and desk bound plans may have to be jettisoned, once the anthropologist engages with the people and specific, unpredicted field contexts. Presentations in this session will explore a full range of cross-cultural engagements.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 27 August, 2008, -Lenka Jakoubkova Budilova (Charles University, Faculty of Humanities) Marek Jakoubek (University of West Bohemia)
Paper short abstract:
Our contribution will concentrate on a specific position of anthropologists dealing with the Roma/Gypsies, particularly in the Czech and the Slovak Republics. We want to show that the anthropologists have not only the right to do “just anthropology” without any practical engagement, but that this stage of the “anthropology itself” is necessary for realization of any other projects. In other words: what we have to do first and foremost, is to understand.
Paper long abstract:
Our contribution will concentrate on a specific position of anthropologists dealing with the Roma/Gypsies, particularly in the Czech and the Slovak Republics. Roma, being often marginalized, discriminated and unemployed are supposed to be the people who need our help. There is a strong pressure form the part of public opinion, policy-makers, NGO-employees, and especially European structures on anthropologists working in Roma/Gypsy groups that their work should contribute in a way to developmental projects that are aimed at improving the living conditions of the Roma/Gypsies. We assert that the anthropologists have not only the right to do "just anthropology" without any further (practical) consequences, but that this stage of the "anthropology itself" is a necessary precondition for realizing any other projects; or, in another words: that what we have to do first and foremost, is to understand.
Karsten Paerregaard (University of Gothenburg)
Paper short abstract:
The paper discusses the predicaments I faced studying a conflict among Peruvian migrants working as sheep herders in the US and argues that as a circumstantial activist in a globalized world the anthropologist must take not one but several often divergent positions in the field.
Paper long abstract:
Anthropology has conventionally been associated with engagement and activism in favor of marginalized people. However, in so far as processes of globalization connect the people we study with the rest of the world the conditions of such a position have altered and today social and political advocacy often change meaning and scope as social tensions and cultural strives evolve from local to regional, national or global issues. As Marcus suggests, in a globalized world the field worker often becomes a circumstantial activist which implies not one but many and sometimes divergent engagements and therefore places the anthropologists in ambivalent roles in relation to the people they study. This paper explores this predicament in my own study of Peruvians who work as sheepherders in the United States. It examines a conflict between two groups of herders: one that struggle to improve their rights as transnational migrants and another that stay loyal to their US employers. Moreover, the paper discusses how this conflict over time became a national and international issue that involved Peru's consul in Los Angeles and migrant communities in the United States and, eventually, the Peruvian government. Most important, the paper scrutinizes the difficulties I faced as a field worker when asked to take position in the escalating conflict. It concludes that as a circumstantial activist the anthropologist must consider the global complexity of the local issue they study and recognize that this implies to take not one but several often divergent positions in the field.
Susana Viegas (Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the potentials of ethnography as engaged knowledge, focusing on the experience of research for the Tupinambá of Olivença and the department of the Brazilian Ministry of Justice that deals with indigenous affairs (FUNAI), following an indigenous land claim.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper I will discuss the possibilities of conceiving contemporary ethnography as engaged knowledge, following the general argument of this panel that engagement in anthropology should be understood in a wide sense, in order to encompass both the strictly academic attitude of engaging with the topics which concern the people themselves, and pure advocacy. The debate is sustained by the experience of conducting an anthropological research (2003-2005) for the Tupinambá of Olivença, and the department of the Brazilian Ministry of Justice that deals with indigenous affairs (FUNAI), following an indigenous land claim, sustained by the ethnographical arguments previously developed under the scope of a academic PhD thesis.
The role of anthropology in indigenous land claims in Brazil is substantially different from, for instance, indigenous land claims in Canada where the anthropologist is considered more as an expert witness in the juridical process than as an expert fieldworker and ethnographer. In Brazil academic anthropologists became engaged in indigenous land claims mainly because of their expertise in fieldwork experience with a particular people and region. I will thus present one of the ethnographic arguments, concerning the justification of a small area of the Atlantic sea boarder as indigenous land for the Tupinambá of Olivença, in order to argue that academic and political processes are mutually constituted in contemporary ways of doing and conceiving ethnography in anthropology.
Alenka Spreizer (University of Primorska - Faculty of Humanities)
Paper short abstract:
Anthropologists understand engagement widely and differently. This paper is focused on engagement for accurate and informed transmission of anthropological knowledge in the case of Roms in Slovenia.
Paper long abstract:
Many scholars who had been studying Roma were more or less involved in challenging differing knowledge and misrepresentations of Romologists. This commitment was not the case in Slovenia until recently. During her fieldwork, the author confronted the misrepresentative knowledge of Slovenian Romology. It is the fact that Romani studies as a newly developing field of academic knowledge is still marginal. On the one hand, only a few scholars have started to challenge stereotypical images of Romanies recently and have explored the critical texts. On the other hand, scholars were less informed about contemporary ethnographic studies of Roma. The author argues that the marginalisation of this field made possible the re-invention of archaic theorisation by scholars on Roma, and the vigorous reproduction of the chauvinist and racist discourses on e.g. Romani "race", culture and religion on the other. The author shows the consequences for Romologists themselves. They are vulnerable to reproducing pseudo-scientific discourses of Roma peoples. Furthermore, the anthropologist reveals how this state of the art is reflected in the legal and governance system which regulates the minority policy. This paper describes and analyzes the author's engagement in presenting informed and accurate contemporary anthropological studies of and with Roma to different publics in Slovenia. Ethnography is urgently needed which is focused on events and engagement with accurate and informed transmission of anthropological knowledge. If not, scholars risk reproducing or at least contributing to current scientific racism in social science and the humanities.
Signe Howell (University of Oslo)
Paper short abstract:
A historical and contemporary survey of Norwegian anthropologists' engagement in the media as public intellectuals and critics of practices and implicit values, investigates the motivation of those who engage themselves and seeks to identify the rewards and the costs of engagement.
Paper long abstract:
Since the nineteen-sixties, many Norwegian university employed Social Anthropologists have, from time to time, stepped down from the ivory towers of academia in order to participate in public debates about current social, cultural and political issues. As a result, the discipline of anthropology is relatively well known in society at large. In this presentation I wish to examine some of the background to why anthropologists have chosen to play this role of public debaters and consider some of the practical, professional as well as ethical aspects of 'engaged anthropology'. I shall also consider why the Norwegian public is so open to anthropological comments. A few topics attract the most anthropological contribution and I shall concentrate on these. These are issues to do with development aid, politics regarding the minority population of the Sami, and questions pertaining to the 'multicultural society' that has come into being following a recent influx of immigrants and asylum seekers from countries outside western Europe and North America. These topics are all highly sensitive - or have been so at various times - and they all challenge what one may call a Norwegian sense of identity as well as the strong feeling of moral responsibility of ethnic Norwegians to others less fortunate than themselves - whether these live inside or outside the national boundaries. In order to throw some light on the current situation, I undertook a small investigation amongst those anthropologists who have been most active in public debates in recent years to get their point of view about their experience of being 'engaged anthropologists'.
Davide Pero (Nottingham University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses engagement in research by drawing reflexively on experiences of ethnographic fieldwork with migrant workers in Europe. It will outline the specificities of engaged ethnography and contrast this approach to ‘detached’ research models as well as to those that confines engagements to theorisation.
Paper long abstract:
This paper discusses issues of engagement in social research in the contentious context of migration. This discussion is done by drawing reflexively on my experience of conducting engaged ethnographic fieldwork with migrant workers in Britain, Italy and Spain on issues of justice, exploitation and engagement. The paper offers an analytical description of the rationale, practices and dilemmas that have characterised my ethnographic engagement, for instance when combining participant observation and participatory action research, becoming involved in transformative initiatives while doing fieldwork or witnessing oppressive institutional practices. This account will outline the specificities of engaged ethnography and set this approach in contrast not only to models of 'detached', 'neutral' and 'objective' research (including those that seem to be tacitly subscribed and promoted in the recent surge of institutional regulatory concerns with 'ethical research') but also to models that conceive theorisation as the ethnographer's only possibility of engagement.