Since at least the mid-1980s anthropologists have been wrestling with the implications of critically examining their own positionality in research. Yet, one of the often underexplored dimensions of this reflexive turn has been the very real possibility that a researcher’s identity and/or self-positioning in the field might lead to disappointing results, serious impasses of communication, or even outright failure in research. Can something still be learned from these cases? How might an anthropologist’s missteps nonetheless lead to new knwoledge, either about their subjects or themselves? What happens if they do not? Drawing on insights from their interactions with on-line diasporic Muslim communities, Islamic schools in India, American ritual magicians, and theology students, panelists offer insights into how they have responded to erstwhile failures in ethnographic practice.
In this paper, I present the ways I navigate issues of ethics and relationality in my digital ethnographic research on the women of my community, the Dawoodi Bohras, and the need to contend with positionalities during this process. On one hand where my status as a member of the community and social media content production provides access, relatability, and understanding, it also places certain expectations and demands, particularly for the outcome of the research. This process is also complicated by the fact that the Bohras as a minority Muslim community maintained privacy for fear of persecution which has resulted in very little research on the community and that there are also concerns for revealing knowledges that the community wishes to keep private. I discuss how I navigate these sensitive ethical concerns through the method of refusal and embodying an ethics of care which prioritize researcher, participant, and community concerns.
Based on my ethnographic experience exploring the pious space of an Islamic school and the mundane caregiving practices among young Muslim women in north India, I reflect on my experience with my interlocutors to uncover power relations and the politics of refusal embedded in this ethnographic practice. I reflect on how my ambiguous insider-outsider position in an ‘at-home’ ethnography affects my relationships with my interlocutors and the ethics of compromise therein. How does the cultural capital of my interlocutors' Islamic knowledge compare with my acquired capital of western education? Arguably, the complex maneuverings of identities, politics of knowledge, capital and refusal surfacing in ‘native ethnographies’ require further explication, and which remains the core concern of this paper.
Drawing on fieldwork with contemporary magic users in the greater Los Angeles area, this paper focuses on questions and anxieties that arise when the research requires a scholar to bring their personal life into the field. The magic users I engage with are well versed in psychotherapeutic language and often describe their own magic in this language. Engaging with this work in earnest meant not just opening up my personal life to the magical rites and practices, but wrestling with the efficacy of this magic. This paper explores the questions that arise about the role of the researcher and their responsibilities to the groups they research. It argues that the tension and discomfort of this proximity produces valuable insights into the nature of anthropological work on modern magic. The audience will be asked to experience this firsthand by participating in a shortened version of one of these rituals
Specific pedagogical issues arise when students come from religious backgrounds, such that when we speak of teaching the anthropology of religion, we are also speaking of these students as research *subjects*. This paper draws insights from a doctoral seminar I have taught to theologians. The first challenge is to introduce the students to a different *way* of producing knowledge. The sensibilities necessary to produce text-based knowledge – a penchant for solitude, an eye for distinction and separation – do not serve well for a production of knowledge that requires ongoing interaction with people and a tolerance for ambiguity. Premature closure is a frequent habit, learned from producing knowledge from texts that have definite beginnings and endings, that religiously committed ethnographers often have to struggle to overcome. Having the students themselves do open-ended fieldwork can serve as a kind of safeguard against premature conceptual closure, both in the fieldwork and writing/representation phases.
| Eric Hoenes Del Pinal | ehoenes@uncc.edu | View |