Anthropology in Action

Conrad W. Watson describes fieldwork as ‘a period of particular heightened intensity’ (1999a: 2) in the introduction of Being There (1999b). The authors of this volume were by far not the first, nor the last, anthropologists questioning and critically reflecting on what it is that they are actually doing when being there in their respective fields. For Watson and others (Borneman and Hammoudi 2009; Geertz 2004; Hollan 2008), this was primarily an epistemological question, following ruptures in the discipline's identity after the Writing Culture Debates of the late 1980s. Forced to rethink their fieldwork practices, anthropologists saw their understandings of theory-building and knowledge production follow suit. However, the complexities and challenges of ethnographic fieldwork also confronted and still confront many anthropologists with intricate questions of inequalities, power structures and violence that not only need to be theorised but also navigated in the everyday practice of fieldwork.

Despite the recent theoretical debate over the importance of addressing emotions in fieldwork, most European undergraduate programmes in anthropology still lack methodology courses that specifically focus on the emotional impact of doing research. In this article, I draw from my research with activist parents of autistic children in Portugal to explore the affective dimensions of fieldwork experience. In particular, I give an account of how I have dwelled on the emotional challenges that I faced, how these have resulted in vehicles of understanding and affected the analysis of my work as an anthropologist. While fieldwork experience always entails unexpected and surprising emotional challenges, I argue that as anthropologists we can surely benefit from more tailored support networks, safer spaces for discussion, and better pastoral care.

This article addresses the challenges and reflections of a junior anthropologist while developing research on the delicate topic of reproductive health and infertility in Maputo, Mozambique. Based on participant observation notes, entries in fieldwork diaries, and interviews, and assuming the character of a reflexive ethnographic account, the article concerns personal and research challenges and opportunities experienced during the preparation and development of a research project and a PhD thesis. While reflecting more broadly on processes of knowledge production, history and colonial relations, and on the writing of a scientific account, it provides insights into the pragmatics of research in medical anthropology by detailing the everyday life of doing ethnography, including networking, bureaucratic processes, boredom, the exploration of new fieldwork landscapes, and positionality dilemmas.

Having become interested in the uprising of the Hirak movement and its denouncement of a ‘cancer epidemic’ in the Moroccan Rif, I ended up having what appeared to be a shattered experience, one broken by refusals to speak, miscommunication and bureaucratic barriers. Upon returning home, the very same silence that had surrounded my fieldwork then emerged as a resourceful tool with which to make sense of an opaque history. In this article, I will therefore consider silence as a social object that we encounter during fieldwork, as a positional issue and as an epistemological space. In this sense, engaging with what appears to be at the margin of everyday speech requires consideration of silence as something that is made powerful precisely by its being left unsaid.

This article analyses the challenges posed by carrying out ethnography with migrants experiencing mental distress and living in conditions of multiple marginality (social and existential). Drawing on the notion of crisis, I consider the experience of disorder as an ethnographic object reflecting the intersection between the individual and the collective. This article examines how ethnographic practice can be applied to, and is altered by, the study of these experiences, asking: How are we, especially as first-time fieldworkers, affected by unsettling encounters? How do we react and respond to the crises of others? What use can we make of our own experiences of crises by developing new ways of practising fieldwork?

During the COVID-19 lockdown, as households were kept separate in a bid to contain the coronavirus, morally underpinned dynamics of fission and fusion occurred, privileging the ‘nuclear family’, which is taken here in two senses: the conventional social unit of a couple and their children, on the one hand, and the togetherness promoted by the nuclear industry in North West England, on the other. Whilst Sellafield's Nuclear family fused with its host community in an outpouring of corporate kindness and volunteering, singles bereft of nuclear families were fissioned off from social life, which led to a corrective debate in the Netherlands. Drawing out analogies from a modest comparative perspective, I posit the nuclear family as a prism affording insights into the corporate, governmental and personal management of intimacy.

Since the military coup on 1 February, more than 800 people, including children have been killed and more than 6,000 people have been arrested. The death toll and number of incarcerated women is sharply increasing during the crack down on protesters by security forces; yet, little is known about the specific challenges and opportunities encountered by women activists while imprisoned. Through analysis of semi-structured interviews with five women who have been detained in connection with the military coup, this report sheds light on the torture, sexual harassment and poor prison conditions that they face.

Citizenship in Question: Evidentiary Birthright and Statelessness. Benjamin N. Lawrance and Jacqueline Stevens (eds), Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017, ISBN: 9780822362913, 312 pp., Pb. £19.99, $27.95

Geontologies: A Requiem for Late Liberalism. Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016, ISBN: 9780822362333, 218pp. Hb. $99.95 / Pb. $25.95

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