Alterity in praxis: What is it that we teach
when we teach ethnographic methods?
Speaker: Adelaida Caballero (PhD student, Department of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology, Uppsala University)
Date: October 6th 2017
Time: 10.15-11.30
Location: Engelska Parken, House 3, room 2028 (Eng3-2028)
As a crisis on the role of the expert unfolds, discourses on cultural (mis) appropriation and the question of whether or not it is correct for some groups to write about the lives of others are permeating politics and calling out for a reexamination of what it means to be ethical. This context presents us with two alternatives: we can either understand altitude as an effective means that visibilizes demands that can once lead to a stronger ethics of commitment; or we can admit that the positions from which some people write about others are fundamentally unequal and choose to focus instead on whether there is something --- and if so, what --- we can do about it.
Anthropology has largely satisfied itself with assuming this latter position. Within disciplinary boundaries, discussions about how to bridge the gap that separates the-ones-who-write from the-ones-being-written-about have found a neutral reference in the relationship between foreign researchers and local fixers / assistants. Such discussions tend to lift the importance of the role played by assistants in interpretative work, as well as the need to address the results of in-situ collaborations as co-authorship. These discussions are important, but they often meet a dead end. Indeed, one could argue that as they purposely try to balance the power asymmetries proper of the researcher-assistant relationship by means of accounting for how the 'low' impacts the 'high'
Within the framework of my own field work, I have worked closely with Equatoguineanos in issues that concern both access and interpretation of materials. Now, but I look forward to formal training of local human resources in ethnographic methods as a form of retribution. With this in mind, I find myself reflecting on the following questions:
What is it exactly that we teach when we teach ethnographic methods?
What kind of discourses about alterability are embedded in our practices of data collection?
What opportunities do these conditions open when such practices are performed by and among alleged cultural peers?
What is the value of intersectionality in general when developing an idea of ultimate alterality as a productive entity from which one can ethically engage with others? What different dimensions of being are playing here?
Welcome!