A Chinese woman’s journey to the “west”: Ethnographic knowledge production amid ambiguous power dynamics

Abstract

This article is a reflexive critique from a female Chinese anthropologist who conducted ethnographic fieldwork examining why Chinese immigrants have purchased local coffee bar businesses and how they manage their everyday racial/ethnic encounters in Bologna, Italy. It provides a new narrative of ethnographic knowledge production from the perspective of a non-Western woman amid ambiguous power dynamics in the metropolitan West. It examines the advantages and disadvantages of the ethnographer’s intersectional positionality, which affected her access to the field, interactions with interlocutors, and embodied experiences throughout multiple ethnographic encounters. It argues that none of the putatively disempowering notions, including racial/ethnic identity, gender, age, marital status, were necessarily barriers to the ethnographic knowledge production. This critique goes beyond the Euro/American frameworks of white/non-white and native/non-native binaries in understanding ethnographic knowledge production and further contributes to understanding the situated and relational nature of ethnographic knowledge and the process of its production.