Ethnography after anthropology

Abstract

For many today, extraction is a damning feature of all ethnography. Yet anthropologically minded ethnographers should not think of themselves as multinational mining corporations. The self‐estimation of any ethnographer, especially an anthropologically minded ethnographer, should be much lower and smaller, as low and small as tiny moles that make new connections by digging channels in the dark. Moles might not be the perfect analogy. They do, however, demonstrate to anthropologically minded ethnographers two important characteristics: they are fuzzy, and they spend an enormous amount of time digging. Ethnographers should be like moles, maintaining a sensitivity to where they tread and where they might dig, feeling compelled to dig deeper instead of staying on the open surface, and being open to a synesthesia of fuzziness.

Ethnographic responsibility: Replies to Herzfeld (AT 39[3])

“…On the one hand, bureaucrats interpret ethics from culturally particularistic perspectives, so that even among European countries significant differences in practice and constraints may arise. On the other, the bureaucratization of ethics reduces the space for ethnography, already under siege from those who would claim -mistakenly, in my view -that ethnography is necessarily 'extractive' and therefore must inevitably perpetuate colonial attitudes, whether or not it is decoupled from its parent discipline of anthropology (see also Parreñas 2023). Jakoubek and Budilová show how conscientiously conducted ethnography acknowledges the agency of informants, instead of reducing them to passive and faceless ciphers.…”