35.
Facing the other: ethnography and ethics of alterity
Convenors:
Lorenzo I. Bordonaro, ISCTE, Lisbon
Elsa
Lechner, ICS, Lisbon
When ethnography
is acknowledged as a face to face personal interaction, its theory and practice
are challenged by intersubjectivity.
The question of knowing how such intersubjectivity alters our ideas
about anthropological understanding is also the question of how face to face
relations change the ethnographic enterprise towards an ethical praxis. Without
negating the power saturated context of all ethnography, this panel is engaged
in discussing the ways an ethics of alterity displaces differences of status
and power in the field. Accepting it as the basis of relations in the field,
means in a sense contesting the power unbalance implied in ethnography as a
‘scientific’ research, and displacing the classic dichotomy between
us who understand and them who are understood. Facing the other as an ethical
other questions the duality of subject and object, identifying the dialogical
encounter between subjectivities as the primary object of anthropological
practice. Ethnography then mutates into a hybrid object, a complex intertwining
of crossing subjectivities, transforming each other in a tentative reciprocal
grasping. As anthropology stops being an ‘othering’ machine,
ethical questions about the ethnographic enterprise and knowledge become more
visible and troubling. In dialogical relations we are constantly compelled to
legitimate our presence, and not in an abstract way recurring to scientific
alibis, but at a personal and subjective level. ‘What are we doing
there?’ we shall be asked. And ‘What am I doing here?’, we
shall ask ourselves. This panel is compelled to discuss the question of
intention and reflexivity in its crossroads to the question of disciplinary
identity.
Ethnography as a
socio-cultural practice
Ivo Quaranta, University
of Bologna
What am I
doing here? Reflections from fieldwork in Guinea-Bissau
Lorenzo I. Bordonaro, ISCTE,
Lisbon
‘Do your
parents think the Samaritans are primitives?’: Ethic challenges of an
ethnography of marriage in a minority community in Israel
Monika
Schreiber-Humer,
University of Vienna
Anthropologies dans le champ:
recherche, intervention et participation sociale dans les contextes
contemporains
Francesco Vacchiano,
Dipartimento SAAST, Turin and Centro Frantz Fanon, Turin
A Meeting of Minds?
An exploration of intersubjectivity at work in making plans for
and with Gypsies
Sal Buckler,
University of Durham
Marcin Brocki,
University of Wroclaw