Abstract
A letter written to a young ethnographer of the Global South sharing advice on navigating the challenges faced when studing the Global South.
Keywords
Dear Young Ethnographer,
When we got your email, we immediately wrote to each other. We were touched by the way you reached out to us for advice about the challenges you are facing and the confusing reactions you received about your project. Oh, how we have been in situations like that! We started remembering how lonely it can sometimes feel when you are trying to make sense of and deal with feedback on your work.
It might be helpful, young friend, to remember that spaces that cater to academics like us who study the “rest” rather than the “West” are relatively recent innovations! Unfortunately, this still counts as progress for disciplines like ours that sadly remain U.S.- and Euro-centric. Thankfully, there have always been and continue to be scholars—usually people of color and often women—who draw attention to colonialism, imperialism, transnational slavery, international migration, and other constituents of Western modernity that are, by definition, global in scope. Spaces that consider the world beyond the Global North that you and other “Global South ethnographers” are helping to carve out within the academy are important and consequential.
Whether you wear the label “Global South ethnographer” with pride or discomfort, you are likely to find yourself in situations where consumers of your research are primarily curious about what’s different in your work. Usually, the more obvious the difference, the better. It makes your audience feel good that they are worldly, learning about what happens “out there,” as a case to be added to existing theoretical frameworks that permeate the academic, political, and cultural lives they share. And this is the paradox at the heart of the Western-based audience for the Global South ethnography: While they are genuinely interested in knowledge about the world beyond the West, they often want these findings presented in a way that fits within their pre-existing templates for how they already believe the rest of the world to work. Without even realizing it, they are often on the lookout for familiar and reassuring characters and tropes from what Talal Asad would call the recurring “dramas” of the Global South. Where are the masses of suffering slum dwellers? The despotic authoritarian rulers? The beleaguered refugees? The democratically-minded liberal activists? The oppressed women? Where is the “they” that is clearly distinguished from the “we”?
However, what happens when you are studying people that do not fit within your audience’s notions of safely distant Global South characters, and who may even be similar to your audience, but just set in faraway places? Well, this creates an uncomfortable affect in the room. You will find that it is hard to create an unproblematic “we” with your audience because you are studying people that your audience either cannot (or does not want to) recognize. You have shaken their Western-based sociological templates such that the comforting sense of “we” that differentiates your audience from a geographically and culturally distant “them” is no longer easily maintained.
There are a few things you might want to do. Be patient. One thing that we have found helpful is to frame our research by naming what the audience is likely to expect up front. And then, slowly, walk them through why you are doing something different. You will have to find new ways of constructing the “we,” in part by calling out the troubled affect in the room. By inviting the audience to sit with discomfort. By unpacking your positionality, so they are not left guessing. And, maybe most importantly, by finding others interested in the thrill of entanglements rather than the comfort of binaries. It may seem unfair to carry this burden, but your work captures the geopolitics of knowledge production in ways that will enable you to build new communities of inquiry. Keep reaching out to people as you did with us, build your community through conversations, and develop words for the experiences you are having about your research process that will surely help others in the future.
Much affection,
May and John