Dealing with complicity in fieldwork: Reflections on studying genetic research in Pakistan

Abstract

Health‐related ethnography undertaken in a context marked by social inequalities and colonial legacies requires critical attention to power imbalances in the fieldwork. In this paper, I draw on my own experiences from studying genetic research in Pakistan. As a Danish‐born female researcher with roots in Pakistan, I have followed genetic researchers and families dealing with genetic conditions in Pakistan. Through examples I unearth how encounters in the field were shaped by complicities of being in‐between the Danish and the Pakistani, of studying and doing international research at the same time, and of my inaction towards suffering families. I base my analysis on the notion that complicity manifests in a generative, and unavoidable, engagement with both complex structures of inequality and interlocutors. We can never fully understand the specificities or consequences of complicity—whether moral or epistemic—when entering, engaging with or representing our fields. However, by staying constructively with the tensions, instead of attempting to move beyond the discomfort that they might create, we can learn how to deal with the consequences and in that, build further the value of ethnographic activity.

Disclosing Otherness: Situated Knowledges and the Politics of Ethnographic Approaches to the #WeAreNotWaiting Movement in Type 1 Diabetes and Beyond

“…The reflection on the politics of my ethnographic approaches to the #WeAreNotWaiting movement, which is shaped by struggles around credibility and legitimization, is inspired and grounded in the work of Donna Haraway (1988), who points out that knowledges and methods are irrevocably situated, located, enacted and positioned, as well as Kim TallBear (2014) who emphasizes the importance of accountability in knowledge production. Discussions on positionality, participatory observation, and co-construction in ethnographic research are important to consider and are highly debated within contemporary ethnography methodology discussions (e.g., Yarbrough 2019 or Sheikh 2022). When conducting ethnographic research, researchers do not look at a phenomenon detached from the outside.…”

“…“[U]ncertainty about adequate means of describing social realities” (Marcus and Fisher 1986, 8), the worry of betraying the people that opened up their lives to the researchers, how the interlocutors react to potential critical analysis or dealing with one’s sympathy towards the researched community and emotions in empirical inquiries are part of almost all ethnographies (Newkirk 1996; Sheikh 2022; von Bose 2018, 62f; Wong 1998). When the researched field is constantly negotiating solidarity, “taking sides” or outsider research, when engaging with individuals and groups that might be in precarious situations because of their political engagement and that fight for epistemic legitimacy, these issues and the practice of reflecting on what an accountable “ethnographic attitude” (Haraway 1997, 191) can entail within the engagement in and with health activist communities is crucial and call for particular attentiveness of the ethnographer.…”

Complicity: Methodologies of power, politics and the ethics of knowledge production

“…If we use the term ‘expatriate’ more figuratively, to describe not only a withdrawal from one’s own country but a withdrawal from one’s place of dwelling more generally, we could argue that Sheikh (2022) describes a situation in which she is doubly expatriated: Sheikh, a ‘Danish‐born female researcher with roots in Pakistan’ discusses the complicities of being ‘in‐between the Danish and the Pakistani’: sometimes mocked for not being fluent in written Urdu, yet able to ‘disappear into the streetscape’ by accommodating to local dress (p. 41). Such descriptions resonate with those of Baada and Polzer but, in a second sense of ‘expatriate’ that will be familiar to many medical sociologists, Sheikh also describes being an expatriate sociologist dwelling amongst medical scientists—geneticists researching families with autosomal recessive conditions, in this instance.…”

“…Unlike Marcus, then, who ends the history of complicity at this general, ‘productive’, level, Sanders suggests that this is where the hard work begins. Situated on shared ground, we may make an ethico‐political decision to stand with one group or another—to oppose or support apartheid, in Sanders’s work—and this represents the possibility of a ‘constructive complicity’ (Spivak, 1999, p. 3; see also: Joseph‐Salisbury & Connelly, 2021, p. 182, Sheikh, 2022) in a narrow sense, wherein change can be made and we are consequently ‘open to judgement, whether critical or juridical’ (Sanders, 2002, p. 10).…”