The Gaze and the Gesture: Hypervisible Insiderness and the Politics of Recognition in Somali Ethnography

Abstract

Ethnographic scholarship increasingly recognizes the complexity of researcher positionality, yet often overlooks how visibility reshapes field relations. This article reconceptualizes positionality as a situational practice shaped by embodiment, recognition, and collective assessment. Based on seven months of fieldwork among diasporic Somalis in Turkey, it introduces two concepts: hypervisible insiderness and qowmiyadda. Hypervisible insiderness captures how presumed belonging whether through race, religion, or comportment intensifies scrutiny and compels performances of authenticity. Qowmiyadda, an emic Somali politics of conduct, regulates legitimacy, access, and ethical engagement through culturally legible practices. Together, these concepts advance a decolonial autoethnographic methodology that challenges epistemic erasure, reconfigures the understanding and enactment of insider status, and foregrounds emic knowledge and lived experience. As a result, they help reclaim epistemic space within Somali Studies and autoethnography.

Introduction

Ethnographic scholarship has long grappled with the question of researcher positionality—who gets to tell whose story, and from what vantage point. Early typologies in ethnographic scholarship distinguished between insiders who leverage lived experience to co-construct knowledge (Hayano 1979; Merton 1972), outsiders who navigate cultural distance and may lack access to local nuance (Agyeman 2008), and outsiders-within who occupy spaces that are simultaneously familiar and foreign (Collins 1999).

These models laid the groundwork for understanding how identity shapes access and interpretation, yet they often treated positionality as a relatively stable attribute. This assumption of fixity is echoed in how researcher identity has frequently been framed in rigid terms, relying on binary constructions that cast the researcher as an “us”—male, white, academic—studying a “them”—racialized, marginalized, outside the university (Dahl 2012).

Such binaries obscure the layered and shifting nature of researcher identity. For instance, Clifford and Marcus (1986) highlighted the tensions white researchers face in cross-cultural work, questioning assumptions of neutrality and objectivity. Ganga and Scott (2006) expanded this critique by showing how identity markers such as age, class, and gender mediate field relations and shape how researchers are perceived.

More recent methodological work continues this shift, emphasizing the fluid, intersectional, and context-dependent nature of positionality (Day 2012; Osanami Törngren and Ngeh 2018). Mason-Bish (2018) advances this thinking by arguing that positionality is dynamic and relational, shaped not only by the researcher’s identity but by how that identity is interpreted and responded to in the field. Extending this line of inquiry, Bukamal (2022)identifies three dimensions of positionality: the researcher’s self-perception, participants’ perceptions, and actual position, and frames their interplay through “insider–outsider ambivalence” (328), the tension of being a professional insider yet cultural outsider.

Drawing from and extending this work, I argue that positionality must be understood not only as fluid and negotiated but as something navigated under communal gaze and shifting affective currents, particularly when the researcher is embedded within both the community and the discipline under study. As a Somali ethnographer, the field is not an external terrain but a space of intimate entanglement. In a context where insider knowledge is often presumed but rarely conceptualized, I propose a decolonial autoethnographic methodology that reconfigures both how fieldwork is conducted and how the field itself is imagined. Through vignettes from fieldwork, this approach examines how hypervisibility, recognition, and accountability are negotiated, shaping and contesting the epistemic contours of Somali Studies.

This article unfolds across five distinct sections, each building toward a decolonial rethinking of ethnographic practice. The opening section situates my fieldwork within the migratory trajectories of Somali communities, establishing a methodological grounding shaped by intersectional identity, diasporic memory, and embodied experience. This foundation foregrounds the researcher’s dual role as both participant and observer and sets the stage for a reflexive engagement with intra-community dynamics.

The second section explores hypervisible insiderness intensifies scrutiny and compels performances of authenticity. Here, trust and legitimacy are contingent on embodied alignment with communal expectations. The third section turns to qowmiyadda, an emic Somali politics of conduct that I center as both an interpretive framework and methodological guide. It directs attention to how belonging is enacted through relational fluency, moral comportment, and culturally legible practices. In doing so, it deepens the analysis of how legitimacy is earned, withheld, and continuously negotiated within diasporic Somali spaces.

Building on these insights, the fourth section shifts to embodied practice. It traces how strategic performances of identity expressed through language, dress, humor, and affective labor, shape access and vulnerability in the field. These dynamics reveal how positionality is not merely declared but enacted under communal gaze, where the researcher’s body becomes a site of epistemic interpretation and ethical accountability.

Finally, the conclusion reframes positionality as a situated and intersectional practice, advancing a decolonial autoethnographic methodology that foregrounds insider knowledge, reflexivity, and recognition. It asserts the value of emic epistemologies and embodied negotiation as central to ethical, decolonial engagement.

Decolonial Reframing: Somali Studies as a Site of Epistemic Contestation

The stakes of this relational approach are particularly urgent in Somali Studies, where external frameworks have long marginalized insider perspectives, privileging distant objectivity over embodied knowledge. In Somali Studies, Ioan Myrddin Lewis (1930–2014) is widely recognized as a foundational figure whose work helped institutionalize the field within the social sciences. His influential texts A Pastoral Democracy (1961) and Blood and Bone: The Call for Kinship in Somali Society (1994) have long shaped dominant narratives about Somali social and political life.

Yet Lewis’s (1994) scholarship was produced within a colonial framework, facilitated by his close ties to the British Somaliland Protectorate. This positioning not only granted him privileged access but also aligned his research with the epistemic and political priorities of the colonial state. As Lewis himself acknowledged, his fieldwork was supported by the Colonial Development and Welfare Fund, and he described his relationship with the administration as one of “fantastic benefit,” despite its political entanglements (Geshekter 2001, 61).

The influence of Lewis’s interpretive lens is not merely historical. Contemporary scholarship continues to reproduce patterns of privileging external authority over Somali epistemologies. Dominant narratives often rely on canonical texts and frameworks established by Lewis, leaving little room for perspectives grounded in Somali lived experience. Hoehne and Luling (2010, 6) describe this enduring influence as a “career problem,” asking: “How can scholars contribute meaningfully to Somali Studies beyond the scope already laid out by Lewis?” This question underscores a persistent gap: the marginalization of Somali epistemic agency constrains the possibilities for truly decolonial scholarship. Echoing Spivak’s (1993) seminal critique and Aidid’s (2015) provocation, “Can the Somali Speak?” these dynamics compel us to ask whether Somali voices can meaningfully reshape academic discourse or if they are inevitably mediated by structures of expectation and constraint.

In response to this epistemic erasure, I follow Smith’s (2012) call to reclaim both my narrative and that of my community, centering emic knowledge. By emic, I refer to knowledge and social norms understood from within the cultural system, perceived, enacted, and contested by insiders themselves. This stands in contrast to external, comparative (etic) approaches that often abstract or flatten lived experience (Harris 1964; Pike 1967).

Yet centering emic knowledge does not imply that insiderness automatically confers epistemic authority or unmediated access. Scholars have long interrogated this presumed privilege, noting that insider status is also marked by surveillance, expectation, and uneven power (Kusow 2003; Motzafi-Haller 1997). By foregrounding Somali voices and reflexive ethnographic practice, I aim not merely to supplement dominant frameworks but to reframe Somali Studies itself: as a methodological and epistemic reorientation that interrogates how knowledge is produced, validated, and constrained. This methodological commitment to emic knowledge also prompts a reconsideration of who is able to produce, access, and legitimize knowledge in Somali Studies.

This reframing raises critical questions about insiderness: What does it reveal about how positionality is experienced, embodied, and contested? Which forms of understanding are made possible—or foreclosed—when the ethnographer moves through trust, suspicion, solidarity, and distance? And how might these navigations reshape not only access to the field, but the very terms by which Somali social life becomes knowable?

These questions unsettle the assumption that proximity alone yields insight, opening space for a more reflexive autoethnographic practice, one attentive to the politics of recognition, the instability of positionality, and the contested terrain of knowledge production.

The myth of uncomplicated insiderness has long been dismantled. Narayan (1993) reminds us that even so-called “native” anthropologists must navigate complex hierarchies and relational tensions, demonstrating how the insider–outsider dichotomy, rooted in colonial epistemologies, continues to oversimplify field realities. This paradox is not unique to Somali Studies; it reflects broader postcolonial dilemmas. Dirlik (1994, 328–329) articulates the contradiction sharply: “When exactly. . . does the ‘post-colonial’ begin? When the Third World intellectuals have arrived in First World Academe.” His question exposes the limits of institutional inclusion, where mere presence fails to dismantle the colonial logics shaping knowledge validation. Recognition within the academy may signal inclusion, but fieldwork introduces a different set of pressures: how the researcher is perceived within the community.

Visibility, rather than resolving these tensions, generates its own complexities, reshaping power relations, expectations, and the terms of engagement. Even as an insider, what Anderson (2006) calls a Complete Member Researcher (CMR), visibility does not guarantee trust and carries ethical demands unique to the field. It becomes a politics of recognition: a performative, contested process in which being seen shapes access, legitimacy, and accountability. Hypervisible insiderness requires the continuous enactment of belonging, amplifying the burden of representation and revealing how positionality is always in flux.

Contextualizing the Field, Situating the Researcher

This study emerges from a broader inquiry into the migration trajectories of diasporic Somalis following the outbreak of civil war in Somalia in 1991, a conflict that disrupted lives, scattered communities across the globe, and reshaped identities while fragmenting families (Cohen 2023; Féron and Voytiv 2021). In the years that followed, many Somalis who found refuge in Western countries acquired citizenship, enabling onward migration (Moret 2018).

While the United Kingdom was an initial destination for many (Nielsen 2004; Van Liempt 2011; Kleist 2007), Egypt emerged as a notable waypoint in 2006 (Al-Sharmani 2010). By the late 2010s and early 2020s, Turkey had grown into a significant hub for diasporic Somalis (Yasin Abdi 2023), shaped by President Erdoğan’s 2011 visit to Somalia (Harte 2012), reinforced by geopolitical entanglements (Abdi and Galal 2024), and animated by intergenerational aspirations across shifting diasporic landscapes (Abdi and Kleist 2025). Understanding these transnational trajectories contributes to diaspora studies while also reflecting my dual engagement as a scholar and as a member of this dispersed community shaped by ongoing mobility and displacement. Like Motzafi-Haller (1997), whose work is informed by her Israeli-Iraqi heritage, I approach this topic as a Somali researcher exploring questions shaped by lived experience. I am compelled by inquiries such as: Where is home in a world where Somali mobility seems perpetual? What does belonging mean in a context defined by displacement and transnational movement?

Between 2021 and 2022, I conducted seven months of fieldwork in Istanbul and Ankara. I combined participant observation with 39 semi-structured interviews with Somali migrants of different ages, genders, and citizenship backgrounds, ranging from 18 to 55 years old. Interlocutors included citizens of North America, Scandinavia, and Saudi Arabia. Two Somali gatekeepers—both passport holders employed in consultancy and diplomatic roles—proved vital in facilitating introductions and contextual insights. Participation was voluntary, with informed consent obtained from all participants. No financial compensation was offered, and pseudonyms are used throughout.

As a Somali, Black, Muslim woman and immigrant, my intersectional identity shaped the research process in multiple ways. I occupied a dual role as both insider and researcher, navigating the delicate terrain between shared cultural familiarity and academic inquiry (Abdi 2026). My fluency in Somali, English, and Danish—alongside working proficiency in Arabic, Swedish, and Norwegian—enabled me to build trust and rapport across diverse participant groups.

These positional negotiations were also shaped by intergenerational memory: I am the descendant of a grandmother who endured Italian colonization and severe hunger in Somalia. Her displacement, alongside my own migration to Denmark, informed how I moved through the field, not as a neutral observer, but as someone attuned to the affective residues of loss, survival, and longing. I carried her stories with me, not as data, but as a compass: they sharpened my sensitivity to silences, to gestures, to the politics of what is said and unsaid. My own migratory trajectory complicated notions of return and belonging, making the field not a site of origin, but one of negotiation, tension, and partial recognition.

Methodological Grounding

In response to enduring epistemic constraints rooted in colonial knowledge production, I turn to autoethnography, a form of “ethnography within” (Chin 2016) that embeds personal narrative in broader historical and cultural contexts. Traditional ethnographic approaches, which often rely on detached observation (Agar 1980; Atkinson 2006), have frequently distorted Somali lived experiences. As a former refugee, I weave personal history into academic inquiry, tracing the mobility trajectories of diasporic Somalis with nuance and sensitivity.

Autoethnography allows me to explore what Luvaas (2019, 250) calls the “embodied messiness of lived experiences,” positioning myself as both subject and object of inquiry. Autoethnography has been described as oscillating between evocative forms, which foreground personal experience and narrative fidelity (Ellis and Bochner 2000), and analytic forms, where the researcher develops theoretical insights as a Complete Member Researcher (Anderson 2006).

My approach lies between these modes, but I grapple with the unruliness and vulnerability of autoethnographic practice, its resistance to neat categorization and its demand for emotional exposure. This tension prompts me to question the stability of conventional methodological boundaries. While “moderate” autoethnography seeks to reconcile analytical rigor with narrative depth (Wall 2016), such frameworks often obscure the colonial and institutional power relations embedded in knowledge production, thereby perpetuating the marginalization of postcolonial voices.

In this context, autoethnography becomes more than a method, it is a mode of critical self-reflection and epistemic resistance, enabling me to confront identity, belonging, and my role as a researcher through lived experience. To address the limitations of conventional approaches, I propose a decolonial autoethnographic methodology, one that foregrounds lived experience, resists dominant epistemologies, and reconfigures not only how fieldwork is conducted but also how the field itself is imagined, constructed, and claimed.

Decolonial autoethnography (Chawla and Atay 2018) marks what they describe as a “postcolonial turn,” re-centering the researcher and her story as an act of reclaiming narrative authority and resisting epistemic erasure. This empirical grounding sharpens my critique of colonial and hegemonic frameworks that continue to shape Somali Studies and informs an approach rooted in situated, embodied knowledge.

Through this lens, I illuminate the intricacies of “intra-community membership” (Ademolu 2023, 6) and the nuanced dynamics of positionality, including how age, gender, language, kinship, and social hierarchies shape access, trust, and belonging in the field. By privileging insider perspectives and lived realities, this methodology not only traces Somali mobility and belonging but also asserts epistemic agency within Somali Studies.

Insider, Interrupted: Hypervisible Insiderness and the Communal Gaze

This section introduces the concept of hypervisible insiderness to describe how presumed cultural proximity, signaled through markers such as language, dress, age, gender, or ethnographic familiarity, can intensify scrutiny and pressure to perform authenticity. Drawing on fieldwork vignettes, lived experience, and methodological reflection, I explore how this dynamic unfolds within situated contexts shaped by communal expectations and interpretive gaze. These accounts show that proximity does not itself guarantee trust; rather, positionality must be actively enacted in alignment with communal moral codes. Membership thus entails relational accountability, requiring continual negotiation and ethical responsiveness.

Growing up Somali in Denmark, I learned early that visibility is not neutral. My family belonged to a conspicuous minority frequently targeted in public discourse. In 1997, the tabloid Ekstra Bladet launched the “Foreigners” campaign (Fenger-Grøn and Grøndahl 2004), spotlighting Somalis as emblematic of failed integration. A Danish politician once suggested that Somalis should be sent home—he wouldn’t mind, he said, if we were dropped by parachute. I was eight. Although I did not fully grasp these comments as a child, I saw the pain they caused my mother and gradually understood that Somalis were portrayed as a homogenous, negatively defined group. Our dark skin, clothing, and my mother’s lack of formal education rendered us “the difficult ones” (Fadel et al. 1999), easy to vilify and difficult to integrate.

After 9/11, it was my Muslimness that became even more hypervisible. At age twelve, my headscarf became a focal point in Danish media, associated with oppression and violence (Andreassen 2007). My body became a site of politics—debated by politicians, scrutinized in public, and symbolically burdened with meanings I did not choose. These early experiences of racialization and hypervisibility shaped my understanding of identity and belonging in Denmark, where being a representative of a Black Muslim minority required constant negotiation of visibility and marginality.

Years later, as I prepared to conduct fieldwork in Turkey in 2021, I carried these embodied experiences into my scholarly assumptions. Immersed in the literature, I was encouraged to believe that my identity as a Somali woman with Danish citizenship, a Muslim, and a mother would facilitate access and foster empathy (McQueeney and Lavelle 2017) within the “imagined community” of my participants (Anderson 1991). I initially assumed that my Somali identity would grant me full insiderness (Dahl 2012; Hayano 1979; LaSala 2003; Merton 1972).

My first encounter with a diasporic Somali in Turkey was with Mohamed, a middle-aged man I met at the reception of the Hampton Hotel in Kayaşehir, Istanbul. He was visiting the city with his brother for what he described as “vacation and check-ups.” Mohamed was from Djibouti, where Somalis and Afar form the majority ethnic groups. We spoke in Somali and shared regional ties, yet he repeatedly emphasized that he was not Somali like me. His insistence revealed that shared language does not automatically confer belonging or insider status.

Colonial legacies continue to shape diasporic self-understanding in subtle but enduring ways. The borders separating Djibouti, Somalia, and Somaliland were drawn by European powers with little regard for ethnic or linguistic continuity. Mohamed’s insistence that he was “not Somali like me” reflected these inherited divisions where national identity, shaped by colonial cartography, overrides shared language and cultural familiarity. In this context, Somali was not a unifying medium but a terrain of differentiation.

Language, I began to realize, was a subtle but powerful marker of positionality. One that could both invite and exclude. I had assumed, like Ademolu (2023), that shared ethnicity and language would facilitate recruitment and foster connection. Yet, just as his British accent marked him as an outsider since he “sounded like the Queen. . . and that’s the furthest from Black” (ibid., 13). Speaking Somali fluently did not erase the perception that I was “from outside.” Mohamed’s repeated insistence that he was not Somali like me echoed the kind of stratification Ademolu describes, where speech signals class, education, and political orientation as much as cultural affiliation. In both cases, language was not merely a communicative tool, it was a site of distinction, shaped by colonial histories, diasporic politics, and embodied positionalities. Presumed insider status, rather than offering seamless access, demanded constant negotiation.

Mohamed’s tone throughout our conversation was instructive, almost paternal. He talked, and I listened. My young age positioned me as someone in need of guidance, reinforcing a generational hierarchy (Ghaffari 2019). I was not only “from outside” linguistically and nationally, but also generationally. Gender and age further shaped how I was read in the field. As a young woman, I was expected to be deferential and teachable. My Somali fluency did not shield me from these expectations, as it intensified them. The assumptions placed on me became more visible, literally. It was not just about language; it was about performing respectability in gendered terms. In these moments, I became aware that “insider” is not a fixed category secured by Somali identity or fluency, but one defined through intersecting expectations of gender, age, and respectability.

The politics of dress made these expectations even more explicit the following day. I saw Mohamed standing outside the hotel, smoking his morning cigarette. He was speaking with another Somali man dressed in a dark blue robe and Black kufi, prayer beads in hand. I wore a sweatshirt and jeans. As I sat down, they both waved at me. Mohamed introduced us and left quickly.

The man, Raage, had lived in Sweden, England, Somalia, and Kenya before migrating to Turkey. After a brief conversation, he agreed to an interview, then paused. He said that since he was planning to connect me with other diasporic Somali men, and since he was supporting my research project, he wanted to give me some advice as his “sister.” He told me that he respected my choice of clothing, and that it did not bother him, something he attributed to his upbringing in Sweden. Raage noted that some men might not sit across from a “naked” (cariyaat) woman, a term he defined as wearing tight-fitting clothes with hair uncovered. This exchange highlighted that my Blackness and Somali ethnicity did not automatically confer insider status; rather, perceptions depended on dress, demeanor, and performative “Somaliness.” Like Ismail (2022), whose familial ties shaped her entry and exit from the field, I found that kinship and community expectations were not just gateways but constraints.

As Motzafi-Haller (1997) and Narayan (1993) note, “native” ethnographers must navigate the competing demands of community expectations and academic inquiry, tensions that surfaced vividly in this moment. I then asked Raage whether he would have said the same if I were a white researcher. Raage reassured me that my identity was different because I was a Somali woman, a Muslim woman. But, he stressed, saying I was Muslim was not sufficient—I should also show my faith. I didn’t challenge Raage’s view directly, though it unsettled me—revealing a quiet tension between belief, practice, and belonging. Instead, I asked whether he would have asked a white researcher about her attire. He replied that there was no need, because “they’re so manipulative. They come to us wearing niqab and burqa and say Salaam Alaikum, which they’ve been practicing for the last six months.” I asked, “But if I too changed my attire just to gain access to people’s homes, wouldn’t that also be manipulative and hypocritical?” Raage smiled and said it was about respect. When I entered people’s homes, I should follow their rules; it was really that simple. He emphasized this was only advice, and ultimately it was my choice, yet he underlined the importance of conducting my research and meeting new diasporic Somali families.

One late afternoon, I accompanied Abdikaafi, a male interviewee, to a local mosque in Ankara. On the crowded bus, he glanced at my upper body and muttered, “Maybe they won’t be happy to talk to you.” I was wearing a white T-shirt and a long skirt. I replied that it was probably too late now since we were getting off soon. He pointed to a veiled Somali woman sitting nearby and said, “That is what they want from me. When people see me, they will know instantly that I am one of them” In that moment, I realized that my clothing functioned as what Entwistle (2015, 45) calls an “insignia by which we read and come to read others,” signaling that I might not conform to local expectations of cultural or religious dress. These perceptions were not only racial—they were also generational. Among younger Somali diaspora members, my sweatshirts, T-shirts, and jeans passed unnoticed; among older members, the same attire marked me as distant from communal norms.

Clothing became a form of disidentification, where seemingly neutral choices shaped how I was read, morally, culturally, and socially. Navigating this tension required active engagement. Performing hypervisible insiderness meant more than speaking Somali; it meant aligning with embodied expectations rooted in communal histories and gendered respectability. By the time Abdikaafi and I arrived at the imam’s office, two men were already seated, their expressions unreadable. Abdikaafi introduced me to one of his “best friends,” but before I could speak, questions came rapidly and without pause: “Why are you here?” “What do you want?” “Who do you work for?” One even asked if I was secretly recording the conversation.

Caught off guard, I realized I had not prepared for this level of scrutiny. My integrity was under question, and although I responded as best I could, I felt exposed—clutching my handbag without noticing until one of the men pointed it out, a gesture that only deepened their suspicion. The encounter reminded me of conversations with my uncle, who often critiqued my work as a researcher. He insisted that my curiosity and questioning reflected a lack of Somaliness, rooted in having internalized the white man’s ideas—a process he described as gumeysigii maskaxeed, or mental colonization.

My uncle described colonization as both territorial and epistemic, what he called gumeysigii maskaxeed, or mental colonization. This concept reflects a Somali genealogy of decolonial thought, where the colonization of the mind is not just historical trauma but an ongoing struggle over how and what we are allowed to know. In this sense, gumeysigii maskaxeed aligns with Maldonado-Torres’ (2007) coloniality of being, in which colonized subjects are dispossessed not only of land and labor but also of ontological legitimacy.

Coloniality is not simply external domination; it operates through epistemic hierarchies, shaping how knowledge is received and internalized. My uncle’s words, his insistence that I had absorbed the white man’s ideas, reminded me that even thinking can be a site of colonial occupation. I did not always know how to respond, and yet I still wanted to think differently, more carefully, and more rooted.

The scrutiny I faced in the imam’s office highlighted that insider status is never automatic. Unlike ethnographers who navigate knowledge from a presumed distance, I discovered that what I thought I knew was also being negotiated. I had assumed that being Somali granted me epistemic access, but that moment unsettled even this assumption: “Somali” is not a fixed category, but one shaped through multiplicity.

Conducting research while visibly Black further revealed that access, even among co-ethnics, is contingent. It is negotiated through performances of cultural familiarity, trust, and moral comportment. Kusow (2003) similarly notes that being Somali does not automatically confer insider status; accent and racial markers can position a researcher as an outsider, requiring careful navigation. While he emphasizes cultural legibility, my experience underscored deeper epistemic suspicions, echoes of colonial legacies, that shaped how authority and knowledge were received. Coming to terms with these suspicions became part of my journey: despite a desire to resist and “decolonize,” I was still seen as reproducing the very legacies I hoped to escape.

Across these experiences, hypervisible insiderness emerges as both fluid positionality and performative demand that requires continual calibration of my selfhood in relation to communal expectations. I was not merely recognized as “one of us”; I was parsed through unspoken codes of belonging: when to defer, how to speak, what silences signify, and how bodily comportment signals moral alignment. Presumed proximity intensified the stakes, making authenticity less about access and more about accountability, relational, affective, and often fraught.

Qowmiyadda and the Practice of Somali “Politics”

Mohamed told me that Somalis are open, as long as one does not approach them with pen and paper to sign. He cautioned that some diasporic Somalis may not consider their practices “strange” or worthy of research, and that I should show that I am part of qomiyyada by demonstrating why these practices mattered through presence, not explanation alone.

Qowmiyadda refers to a collective category of people who share a cultural background. Beyond marking group membership, however, the term also carries internal expectations about proper behaviour. Within this framework, qowmiyadda operates as what I describe as a ‘Somali politics of conduct’: a system through which cultural norms, shared values, behavioural expectations, and hierarchical relations are administered and evaluated among members.

To participate in qowmiyadda, I had to immerse myself in the community’s rhythms, especially those shaped by women. Access wasn’t granted through observation alone; it had to be earned through relational fluency. Mohamed’s insistence that I forgo note-taking and instead invest in embodied engagement underscored qowmiyadda’s dual function: both a mode of cultural recognition and a methodological compass. It required that I listen before asking, participate before interpreting, and build trust through the cadence of everyday life.

Qowmiyadda carries both epistemological weight and methodological significance. As an object of analysis, it offered a culturally grounded framework for interpreting Somali social life, not through abstract categories, but through the relational codes that structure everyday interactions: who speaks, who defers, who is trusted. As a methodological tool, it guided my movement through the fieldshaping decisions about when to speak, when to remain silent, how to dress, and how to read the room. It attuned me to the politics of access, accountability, and legitimacy within diasporic Somali communities.

Like Kusow (2003), who reflected on how gender shaped his shifting insider status, I found my own gender to be a double-edged condition. At the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in spring 2021, curfews and home-schooling restrictions limited my ability to initiate contact. Consequently, my early interactions were primarily with male members of the diasporic Somali community. These encounters became my entry into the field, where being a woman both opened doors and drew scrutiny.

While existing literature often frames Somali culture as patriarchal, with men occupying positions of authority and gender roles described as complementary (Kleist 2010), what I encountered in the field felt less like cultural abstraction and more like a confrontation with my own biography. Raised in a conservative, matriarchal household composed entirely of women: my mother, my grandmother, and my five sisters, I came to masculinity not through familiarity, but through absence. My father and nine of his brothers died the same way: bullet wounds from the civil war. My grandmother buried ten of her eleven sons. This fatherless upbringing shaped my orientation toward gendered authority, not as something inherited, but as something mythologized and occasionally adversarial.

So, when Raage and Abdikaafi offered ‘instructions’ on how to perform gender in diasporic Somali spaces, it was not merely a cultural encounter. It was a reckoning. Their expectations of gendered deference clashed with the assertiveness I had inherited from the women who raised me. I was not simply navigating patriarchal norms; I was negotiating a dissonance between communal expectations and the embodied legacy of a matriarchal survival ethic.

If hypervisible insiderness describes the pressures of presumed belonging—where proximity demands continuous performance of authenticity—then qowmiyadda illuminates the relational codes through which that performance is interpreted and evaluated. Qowmiyadda highlights the everyday negotiations of identity, respect, and social positioning that shape who is considered legitimate in Somali diasporic spaces. More than a cultural norm, qowmiyadda functions as a dynamic system of relational accountability, governing which community members may speak, be heard, and be trusted.

While I followed Mohamed’s advice to leave “the book and pencils behind” and memorize my research questions, I resisted modifying my clothing, convinced that honesty about who I was mattered more. That refusal had consequences. I experienced sexual harassment, for instance, when one man suggested moving our interview to my hotel room. But gender performance extended beyond appearance, entangling broader cultural codes like the flirtatious jokes and marriage proposals I encountered during fieldwork, which I initially misread. My age and Western upbringing complicated my interpretation of Somali kaftan (humor); what I saw as inappropriate or literal was often intended as playful innuendo. This dissonance, between my reading and the culturally legible humor others recognized, revealed a deeper gap in understanding. Only later, after publishing my reflections in Denmark’s largest science media outlet (Abdi 2021) and receiving backlash from Somali readers, particularly women, did I grasp that I had breached the unwritten rules of Somali “politics,” where discretion often outweighs disclosure, and humor functions not merely as entertainment but as a relational and political grammar, signaling belonging, critique, and boundaries through shared codes.

As Franck (2022, 9) notes, humor is a relational practice grounded in shared codes and insider knowledge—"a way of saying without saying.” But it is also political: a mode of ironic truth-telling and refusal, a way of navigating precarity without surrendering to it. I began to sense how Westernness, not as ideology, but as interpretive noise, had dulled my ability to hear what was being said between the lines. It wasn’t that I lacked empathy, but that I was tuned to a frequency that made Somali humor harder to grasp. Perhaps my uncle’s critique of gumeysigii maskaxeed (mental colonization) was less about betrayal and more about dissonance: a reminder that Somaliness is not just spoken, but felt. And qowmiyadda, as I came to understand it, is precisely the terrain where such feeling is cultivated, where humor, discretion, and trust converge to signal who belongs, who defers, and who is understood.

Yet while I stumbled on attire and humor, I easily met cultural expectations around language. In line with Somali etiquette, I never addressed women or men by their personal names, but always as aunties and uncles as a sign of respect. I accepted Raage calling me “sister,” not because we were kin, but because language and shared culture created a sense of community. These practices were not superficial labels but forms of qowmiyyada enacted through speech.

Diasporic kinship was enacted through my eedo, a Somali aunt who my mother introduced me to before I began fieldwork, and who arranged for me to meet her friends. One of them was Hafsa, who had recently moved from Canada with her children, while her husband, a doctor, stayed behind for work. At her home in Turkey, the sensory richness of Somali domestic life unfolded: the fragrant scent of cooking filled the air, children whispered and played, and Hafsa moved gracefully in a flowing dirac, a sheer, vibrant dress worn by Somali women, layered over a googarad, a wraparound underskirt. The care she put into her home and presentation was striking, not just in its beauty, but in what it signaled. Hafsa’s neighborhood, quiet and well-kept, reflected a different kind of diasporic experience. While many Somali migrants in Western countries live in marginalized areas, her setting pointed to access to middle-class life. Her domestic space, shaped by cultural aesthetics and social ease, illustrated how migration to Turkey can open pathways to dignity, visibility, and belonging (Abdi and Tiilikainen 2026). I had prepared carefully. I cut my nails, removed polish, took a ghusl bath, and dressed modestly, covering every part of my body except face and hands. When I sent a photo to my mother, she replied with a heart-eyes emoji, saying I looked like a “real Somali woman.” These embodied details mattered: they were not cosmetic adjustments but codes of belonging.^b

Still, belonging was fragile. During evening prayer, Hafsa handed me a veil, quietly pointing out that a few centimeters of ankle were visible. Her correction was more than sartorial, it indexed whether I could be read as a Somali woman who respected religious and communal codes. This moment echoed what Serrant-Green (2002), drawing on Agar (1980), calls “indexicality”: the assumption of shared identity that fosters trust but also polices boundaries. My researcher identity receded; what mattered was my gendered and generational positioning. As I bowed in prayer, I felt the duality of roles. I was both researcher and sister, insider and outsider, participant and observer. The rhythm of prayer evoked nostalgia, like slipping into a childhood coat that no longer fit. Yet Hafsa’s voice and the collective movement of women threaded me into belonging, even as I trembled with the awareness of performance.

This tension recalls Strathern’s (1987) and Adler and Adler’s (1987) observations on autoethnography: the ethnographer must both participate and observe, documenting while negotiating membership. Bukamal’s (2022) notion of insider–outsider ambivalence also applies: being Somali alone did not guarantee acceptance. Instead, I had to enact belonging through posture, dress, humor, and prayer, moment by moment. Narayan’s (1993) reminder that identity is never strictly “native” or “non-native” captures this oscillation. After the afternoon prayer, Hafsa gathered her guests for dinner. As the women caught up after long COVID isolation, I remembered my former mother-in-law’s words: “a woman is never a guest.” Rising to help Hafsa with the dishes, I was told: “You understand me better than my daughters.”

I became conscious of my own multiplicity: Somali and not, shaped by an individualist ethic yet drawn into a context where the collective mattered. Belonging was not a given, it was a performance, calibrated through humor, discretion, and embodied cues. Hafsa’s recognition of my understanding made clear that qowmiyadda is not simply inherited, but actively reproduced in everyday interactions. Proximity alone did not guarantee alignment; what mattered was the capacity to read and respond to the social grammar of diasporic life, negotiating belonging through gender, age, dress, and religious observance. In that moment, Hafsa positioned me not as a guest or researcher, but as someone who had learned to enact qowmiyadda.

This insight became central during fieldwork among diasporic Somalis in Turkey, where I confronted the paradox of hypervisible insiderness: familiar yet not fully trusted. My uncle’s question, “why study us, and for whom?” was not a rejection, but a call to reclaim epistemic space, echoing Maldonado-Torres’s challenge to decolonize the mind. Mohamed’s insistence on embodied engagement over note-taking reinforced qowmiyyada as both cultural recognition and methodological compass, demanding fluency in the relational codes of belonging: listening before asking, participating before interpreting, and earning trust through the rhythms of everyday life.

Seen and Recognized: Enacting the Politics of Recognition

By the time I returned to Turkey for my second fieldwork period, I had understood the lessons of strategic hypervisibility. At Ankara airport in April 2022, I felt a flutter of anticipation mixed with anxiety. Who do I want to be in the eyes of my research participants? The reflection echoes Makana’s (2018, 369) assertion that such self-positioning is among the most complex challenges of conducting qualitative research.

My previous fieldwork had already revealed how hypervisible insiderness can emerge through seemingly mundane choices, where to live, what to wear, decisions often gendered and fraught with epistemic consequence (Carapico 2006). Approaching the field with a detached stance had created barriers, underscoring the need for embodied, relational engagement. To signal belonging, I simplified my identity by answering only “Somalia” when asked about my background, foregrounding Somaliness over my Danish roots. Anticipating scrutiny around singlehood and womanhood, I chose to enact visibility rather than resist it, for example beginning interviews with male participants by sharing experiences of unsolicited marriage proposals. These disclosures were not merely reactive; they were strategic performances of vulnerability, aligned with communal scripts of modesty and relational openness.

In doing so, I prevented disidentification and built relatability. One male participant reciprocated by sharing his own experiences with unsolicited advances as a young boy, establishing trust and openness. In Ankara airport, I stood in the bathroom and changed from trousers and a T-shirt into a long dress and scarf, shedding markers of Western identity and aligning with local norms. This transformation was more than cosmetic; it was a deliberate act of immersion and protection. Narayan’s (1993) concept of the “enactment of hybridity” captures this process well: adapting identity markers becomes both a tool for access and a form of self-preservation.

Khan (2015) shows that for Indian Muslim women, adhering to societal norms—without direct confrontation—can serve as a strategic navigation of patriarchal contexts. My decisions echoed this logic: choices about living arrangements and self-presentation shaped both my interactions and the reception I received. Such negotiations of respectability surface in other cultural contexts as well. In Iran, for example, living alone “represented an exception and a transgression of common cultural and social rules” (Ghaffari 2019, 133). Likewise, in my fieldsite, living alone could be read as promiscuous. To preempt such assumptions, I stayed with a local family rather than in a hotel. In this way, qowmiyadda did not simply describe the field, it helped me do fieldwork. It offered a grammar of knowing rooted in Somali epistemologies, where presence is not granted, but claimed. It also offered a culturally grounded approach to navigating access, accountability, and legitimacy within diasporic Somali communities.

One afternoon, seated in a café dressed in my summer dress and headscarf, the sun warmed my skin while I wrote. The aroma of spiced coffee drifted through the lively chatter around me. Nearby, two men whispered. “She must be Somali,” one said.

The other confirmed: “It’s in her blood” (waa dhiigeeda). Their words stirred a complex mix of pride and vulnerability. In alignment with scholars who emphasize lived experience “at the hyphen” (Wagle and Cantaffa 2008), I felt seen, yet I wondered whether recognition based on visible cues could ever capture the complexity of my journey.

When one invited me to join them and the other hesitated, it became clear that being “read” as an insider was less about knowing my story than about communal recognition shaped by visible cues of belonging. Despite my intention to focus on writing, I closed my laptop and joined them. One man was a businessman, the other a diplomat. One hailed from Istanbul, the other from Mogadishu, both attending a meeting with Somalia’s newly elected president during his visit to Turkey. When one of my interviewees canceled, I bluntly asked if I could tag along.

They looked uncertain. But the arrival of Abshir, one of my interlocutors, shifted the moment. A real estate agent who had swapped his four-bedroom apartment in Lund, Sweden, for a duplex with a sauna in Ankara, Abshir greeted me warmly. I introduced him to the others, and the tension gave way to laughter. In that moment, recognition replaced doubt and their circle opened to include me, exemplifying the ebb-and-flow dynamics Makana (2018) describes, where insider/outsider positions are continuously negotiated, and trust and suspicion shift in real time. “Four people can still fit in a taxi,” they declared, and the circle widened once more. A yellow cab, looking as though it had seen more than its fair share of accidents, arrived at the café. We pulled up outside a five-star hotel, and just as I stepped out of the battered taxi, five Black SUVs with Somali and Turkish flags on the front arrived as well. A SWAT-like team of Turkish men with weapons cleared the path for the president and his delegation. I stood there, looking on in awe as the president walked past me, smiling at this former refugee child from Somalia, visible, recognized, and momentarily belonging.

Conclusion

This article has traced the contours of hypervisible insiderness and qowmiyyada as both an embodied experience and an epistemic condition, where presumed cultural proximity intensifies scrutiny, demands authenticity, and renders the researcher accountable to communal norms. Visibility is never neutral; it is gendered, generational, and demands constant calibration of selfhood under communal gaze. Being ‘read’ as an insider is neither automatic nor stable, it is negotiated moment by moment, mediated by gender, age, comportment, and relational fluency.

The emotional labor of being seen and interpreted through shifting relational codes is central to my autoethnographic journey. Hypervisible insiderness charts the terrain of the ethnographer whose body is already inscribed with meaning, where recognition is contingent, belonging must be enacted, and the tension of being both known and unknowable shapes access and self-understanding.

Through qowmiyadda, I was not simply studying belonging; I was learning to perform it. These encounters revealed not just the contours of diasporic Somali life, but the layered selves I navigated within it. In this sense, decolonial autoethnography is not only a method of resistance, but a space of remolding, where the researcher is transformed by the very grammars they seek to understand.

Choosing qowmiyadda as both an emic concept and methodological stance enacts epistemic resistance. It refuses the translation of lived experience into frameworks that distort native logics and provides a culturally grounded grammar of relationality that illuminates the codes governing trust, legitimacy, and access within Somali diasporic communities. In this sense, the field becomes a space of performance and quiet reckoning, where the researcher is rendered legible through communal gaze.

Together, hypervisible insiderness and qowmiyyada do more than offer an analytic lens, they shape how belonging is understood and enacted. Access emerges as a choreography of relational cues, culturally legible performances, and embodied comportment. These dynamics show how some forms of understanding are opened through trust and solidarity while others are foreclosed through suspicion, distance, or misrecognition, delimiting what can be known and by whom. In this sense, access is not merely logistical, but epistemic shaped by the relational grammars through which Somali social life becomes legible. Such navigations do not simply grant entry; they reshape the very terms by which belonging, knowledge, and recognition are constituted.

For autoethnographers, these insights underscore the stakes of reflexivity: the researcher’s body and biography are constantly interpreted and contested, and these readings themselves become vital data. Decisions about dress, comportment, and self-presentation function simultaneously as method and constraint, shaping social scripts and epistemic authority.

Decolonial autoethnography is not a static reflection of identity, but a space of remolding, where the researcher’s body becomes both method and mirror, revealing the dynamic choreography of selfhood under communal gaze. It demands fluency, humility, and openness to transformation. Being perceived and held accountable becomes both data and a site of quiet reckoning revealing the contours of fieldwork and a more reflexive autoethnographic self.