Social Anthropology

Von Schnitzler, Antina. 2016. Democracy's infrastructure: techno‐politics and protest after apartheid. Princeton Studies in Culture and Technology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 256 pp. Pb.: US$27.95. ISBN: 9780691170787.

This paper explores how issues of trust and intimacy became entangled in the course of my fieldwork ‘at home’. The research focused on the contemporary secular coming‐of‐age ritual (‘youth consecration’), a ritual frequently referred to as family tradition, but which is closely associated with the former German Democratic Republic, and which also forms part of my own biography. I illustrate how my ethical doubts and anxieties emerged in the context of researching a society that has become infamously known as ‘Stasiland’. Yet because I was also a historical subject, I was aware of the parallels between the anthropological project and that of an unofficial collaborator of the former East German State Security (Stasi). These concerns emerged through a shared moral practice under state socialism in relation to a particular configuration of the public/private dichotomy. itself was a locus for connecting individuals, families and the state. As in other papers in this collection (see Goddard, Sedgwick, Stafford, Weston), tackling my own ethical di‐lemmas thus enabled me to understand the core of my research project – the intricate relations, based on intimacy and trust, between kinship, politics and the individual.

Not parallel but tangential: biography fits awkwardly with ethnography, doing well what ethnography does well to avoid. It cuts history to human shape, insinuates author into subject, reads cause in sequence, and turns the world into background. As ‘life writing’, biography rarely captures life: ethnography – immersed, immediate – does the job better. Participant observation opens up dimensions of behaviour and experience that the biographer, usually working second‐hand, can only dream of. Yet, as other papers in this collection argue, ethnography can benefit from a more concerted biographical approach. Without a grasp of character, history and circumstance, any account of human behaviour is stillborn. The constituents of meaning, the dynamic of emotions, and the unfolding of action are all biographical in shape and import. Without them we have only frames, scripts and abstract forces. The question is how far to mine the biographical seam. Does a mismatch between individuating narrative and self‐effacing folk theory disqualify? If the native disclaims a point of view, should the ethnographer construct one on his or her behalf? This paper considers the option in two contrasting Indonesian societies.

In 2013, my friend from previous periods of fieldwork, Deen Khan, suggested we photograph some of his favourite belongings and the few packed‐away memories that he had managed to retrieve from one of his stores at the time. Other Ladakhis were puzzled by Deen's extensive and haphazard collection, but he and I made a small ‘storyboard’ from some of the objects, which I explore in relation to Deen's unfolding biography from 2013 to 2017. The storyboard, as a collaborative endeavour, becomes a mechanism that foregrounds the material moorings of both biography and ethnography, brings them together in unanticipated ways and illuminates their many connections. In illustration, I show how references to partition drew connections between the state and its frontiers, relations among Buddhist and Muslim Ladakhis, and patterns of familial inheritance.

This essay considers the intersection of biography and ethnography through an anthropology of the house. It focuses on the multiple entanglements between houses, lives lived within them and the social contexts within which houses are shaped. If ‘good ethnography’ is the outcome, at least in part, of long‐term familiarity with the people and places that are its subject, the sense of being in a proper house rests on a comparable feeling of familiarity. Both of these rely on long‐term engagement, and are in this sense inherently biographical. To unpack the entanglements of personhood, kinship, temporality and the state that houses illuminate, I begin with my own engagement with Malay houses over several decades before discussing houses as ‘biographical objects’ and also as persons. I then examine connections and disconnections between houses and biography through a consideration of some less obviously ‘house‐like’ houses. Pursuing the analogy between ethnography and houses further, in the final part of the article I suggest that, if houses provide a productive opening for ethnography, they might also offer a starting point for a particularly anthropological kind of (auto)biography.

This article explores the entanglements of emotion and thought that are a pre‐condition to personal and professional engagements with place, particularly where temporal and spatial dislocations produce unexpected gaps and connections between the ethnographer and her or his research subjects. Personal memory and experience provide an awkward but necessary guide when exploring Argentina's history of violence and its connection to different kinds of survival and recognition that shape the interactions between different political and generational cohorts. I explore the contradictory ways in which memory and politics may contribute to defining and redefining historical subjects by focusing on the example of a victim of violence who does not fit easily within the commemorative and politicised delineations of what is considered to be a ‘lost’ and, sometimes, a heroic generation. Through this exploration, the article aims to reconnect the personal and the political through a dialogue between ethnographic and biographical encounters as discussed in the Introduction to this collection.

This article considers over 25 years of ethnographic fieldwork, conducted among members of a Japanese multinational corporation, their families and surrounding communities, as an entwining of informants’ and an anthropologist's biographies both across time and in widely dispersed locations: Japan, Thailand, France and on the US–Mexico border. The research also required analysis of the re‐contextualisation of relations of a particular set of interlocutors at multiple sites, further suggesting the productivity of long‐term ethnographic work that mimics the lives of informants, in this case within their global corporate network. It is suggested that the challenges shared by Japanese ‘salarymen’ and their families (and the anthropologist as participant) in managing lives and work (and research), including with different sets of ‘foreign’ co‐workers at different sites across the globe, for years at a time, created family‐like co‐dependencies. The relevance of felt relations unfolding under day‐to‐day conditions over a long period of time is further revealed in the article through a detailed ethnographic account of a traumatic event and its aftermath – the 11 March 2011 Great East Japan earthquake and tsunami – which profoundly, and tellingly, further entwined the lives of the anthropologist and his informants.

This special issue of places ethnography at its centre and considers how it is framed by the biographies of those involved. Probing some of the more unexpected connections that may arise between these parallel worlds, we discuss how collaborations between anthropologists and those they study inform the moral judgements and ethical practices that pervade the experience of fieldwork. What are the after‐lives of such encounters? What role does the materialisation of experience – for example, in houses, photographs, files and fieldnotes – play in the biographical narratives of anthropologists and of those they study? We explore these moral, material and political resonances and set out a new agenda for the biographical as part of the anthropological project.

With all the attention paid to empathy in recent years, sympathy has received short shrift. Yet it is sympathy that has the longer legacy in anthropology, both as a descriptor for certain ways of relating to the world, and as a moral passion that characterises something important about the relationship between ethnographers and those they study. By juxtaposing biographical accounts of the author's own research with a reading of 18th‐century texts from the Scottish Enlightenment on sympathy, this essay calls into question the assumption that sympathy arises from, even as it generates, culturally inscribed forms of empathy or closeness. I argue that what Malinowski called ‘the ethnographer's magic’ is (or can be) a sympathetic magic woven from biographical threads, depending for its efficacy on concealment and action at a proximate distance, rather than ‘shared experience’, identification with research participants, or affective appeals.

Corrigendum