Collaborating with the Radical Right: Scholar-Informant Solidarity and the Case for an Immoral Anthropology

Teitelbaum, Benjamin R.

doi:10.1086/703199

Cited by 14 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 48 publications

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“…Such an ability may in fact be imperative when studying vehement milieus -like the violent factions of white radical nationalism -in which a distant engagement can be employed to minimise security risks. It also offers an alternative to establish friendship and collaboration with the actors of this milieu (Teitelbaum, 2019). However, we should also ponder the ethical dimensions of such an 'ethnographic lurking', which indeed must be weighed against the expected scientific value of the study.…”

Section: Concluding Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Podcast ethnography

Lundström

2020

International Journal of Social Research Methodology

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This article introduces the method of podcast ethnography. The method encompasses three general stages: to explore a podcast from a particular social field, to engage with it through careful, ethnographic reflexivity and to examine the podcast by developing typologies and themes expedient for analysis. Podcast ethnography is beneficial due to its spatial and temporal flexibility; observing a podcast universe can be performed on the move and in parallel with other tasks. This advantage enables a muchneeded breathing space for researchers inquiring vehement milieus, such as white radical nationalism. The article uses an example from this precise milieu in Sweden-the podcast Motgift [Antidote]-to illustrate and flesh out the potentials and challenges of applying the method's three stages. In so doing, the article argues for inclusion of podcast ethnography into the extended family of ethnographic methods.

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Section: Concluding Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Podcast ethnography

Lundström

2020

International Journal of Social Research Methodology

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“…Within this scholarship, Benjamin Teitelbaum (2019, 414) has recently called for an “immoral anthropology.” Based on his ethnographic research on white nationalist groups in Nordic countries, he argues that moral entanglements and political compromises are inevitable in ethnographic research because ethnographic interaction is “dialogic and intersubjective”; our ethnographic encounters, he suggests, are always laced with moral ambiguities. Ethnographic research, Teitelbaum argues, might be “morally compromised but [is] epistemologically indispensable” (414).…”

Section: Witnessing and One's Ethnographic Responsibility To “Imperfe...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Witnessing “imperfect victims”

Hussain

2022

American Ethnologist

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After the 9/11 attacks, Pakistan's military government unleashed a program of extrajudicial detentions to surveil and track down “Islamic terrorists.” These men are known as the “missing” or “disappeared” persons in the movement mobilized by their families to protest the abductions. Ethnographic research with the families of “missing persons” in Pakistan, however, involves working with people whom I call “imperfect victims”—that is, persons who do not easily fit the subject position of those occupying the “suffering slot.” Such imperfect victims often rely on nonnormative ethics of grief and sacrifice to help them make sense of violence stemming from larger political‐economic structures of power. An ethnography of imperfect victims responds to calls for going beyond the “suffering subject” in anthropology. It does so by questioning the humanitarian assumption in anthropology that suffering is a common, apolitical ground for all humanity and that a politics of solidarity can be built on the suffering of others. [witnessing, suffering subject, ethnography, human rights, disappearances, missing persons, Pakistan, South Asia]

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“…While there is a long and established tradition in ethnographic research that aims to uncover the experiences or 'voices' of ordinary people, the focus has been mainly on the concerns of marginalized communities or individuals. Propelled by the incentive of democratizing research processes, ideas of friendship and dialogue have turned into guiding principles of ethnographic research endeavours, leading to the implicit assumption that in order to gain access to their informants' experiences, ethnographers need to share their world views (Teitelbaum, 2019). The phenomenological approach to exclusion I aim to sketch in this article destabilizes the ideal of scholar-informant solidarity underwriting the paradigm of voice.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Phenomenology of Exclusion: Capturing the Everyday Thresholds of Belonging

Lems

2020

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In this article I critically interrogate the ways researchers produce knowledge about the making and unmaking of borders. I do so by focusing on social processes of boundary-drawing that have dramatically intensified since the 2015 summer of displacements in Europe. I think through some of the methodological possibilities and conundrums that arise if we try to make visible the unarticulated social conventions underlying the everyday thresholds of belonging that determine who is permitted in, and who has to remain outside, the affective socio-political space of societies. By drawing on my own research experiences, I show why methodologies aimed at lending marginalized people a voice often fail to capture the voiceless, silent nature of these boundary-drawing practices. I suggest that in order to bring the invisible barbed wires permeating societies into the open, we need to develop phenomenologies of everyday exclusionary practices, or ‘cultures of unwelcome.’ Through my ethnographic encounters with marginalized refugee youth and individuals who believe that the influx of refugees is a threat to their values and ways of life, I argue for more nuanced research methodologies that allow us to better capture the everyday social processes underlying acts of boundary-drawing. I suggest that approaching border work as an intersubjective, worldly phenomenon involves paying attention to the experiences of individuals who find themselves pushed to the margins of society, and to those who actively participate in keeping people and groups marked as other locked out.

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Collaborating with the Radical Right: Scholar-Informant Solidarity and the Case for an Immoral Anthropology

Cited by 14 publications

References 48 publications

Podcast ethnography

Podcast ethnography

Witnessing “imperfect victims”

Phenomenology of Exclusion: Capturing the Everyday Thresholds of Belonging

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