Im/material and intimate relations: Considering ethnographic methodologies for already-surveilled communities

Abstract

In this autoethnography of ethnographic training and methodologies, I reflect upon unaddressed tensions in a Los Angeles County gurdwara ethnography, pursued as an intellectualized response to the 2012 Oak Creek gurdwara shooting. I theorize the gurdwara (and other similarly sociopolitically located spaces) as “already-surveilled,” where intimacy in a US white supremacist context must also be seen as a forced relation with the state surveillance apparatus. Analyzing field notes from the classroom and gurdwara, I offer three possible approaches to ethnographic inquiry: participant observation, bearing witness, and embodied conviction. I argue that, without an embodied approach, ethnographic approaches fail to incorporate analyses of power and precarity (the material), particularly for communities of belief (the immaterial). Finally, I offer a model for generating theoretical and methodological frameworks from embodied practices of belief or conviction—in this case, Sikh praxes of relation, knowing, and belief that are witnessed across various gurdwaras.