Ethnography: Rethinking from the Interstice

The way we are situated in the world matters.

“I wish I could take you back home. You are not a Burmese anymore,” my mother groaned in a dismal tone. In Burmese, her demeanor would be described as “ukyone maya” meaning not being able to gather one’s feelings. At first, I was not sure if I heard her correctly. We were standing by a busy entrance into the security checkpoint for international departures. She was on her way back to Burma (Myanmar) after visiting me for a month in New York City for my college graduation. In 2012, having just turned 20, I left my hometown Yangon after winning the US Diversity Visa lottery and passing through a series of medical checkups and immigration interviews. Aside from weekly phone calls and occasional video chats, her visit in 2017 was the first time we saw each other in four years. I hadn’t even “fully” immigrated to the US then; my green card still labelled me as an “alien.” Before I could make sense out of what she meant, her wheelchair attendant arrived and pushed her away into the airport security checkpoint.[1]

As a graduate student being trained in the US, I am required to prove my mastery on existing theories and knowledges, most of which tend to focus on and stem from the western hemisphere, and my ability to understand them, utilize them, (re)produce them, and even embody them in the making of my scholarly identity. However, I find myself speechless when asked the question of whether I know about my home country ethnographically. I find it hard to answer the question, “So when did your fieldwork start?” about my research in Burma. I struggled to formulate a typical anthropologist’s “arrival story.” Burma, once my home, now feels somewhat foreign, when it’s framed as a field site. It is as if the stories I tell of the people were not “lived” but only details to contemplate some intellectual theories upon.

My social location in this world is not a singular experience. The assemblages of experiences I share with my mother, with my professional and personal communities help define the fuzzy boundaries of that location. My social location is therefore both freeing and clutching.

What does it then mean to be an ethnographer studying a community she imagines to be home?

I like thinking of ethnography as a form of storytelling in much the way that Carole McGranahan suggests, we are to retell the stories that have been shared with us by the people in our fieldwork, who may or may not be able to tell those stories first-hand. When retelling those stories, we must also do them justice. Clifford Geertz (1973) emphasizes ethnography as a form of “thick description.” To do ethnography is to thickly describe a cultural phenomenon or “a text” anthropologists read over the shoulder of the native. A difference between a twitch and a wink could only be explained with a thick description (Geertz 1973). This demand to thickly describe something is not an easy task; positioning oneself in certain locations and learning how to see, think, and act from that position are prerequisites for thick descriptions. Ethnography therefore is not merely a positivist research tool, it questions the “objectivity” that is usually associated with hypothetical-driven research (Keane 2003). If chemists use beakers to contain chemicals and make compounds, anthropologists use our bodies as vessels to acquire knowledge from the people we work with.

In an effort to reproduce those knowledges in thickest-possible descriptions, Alpa Shah (2017) reminds us of the risks of potential contamination of emotions or “emotional intrusion” from our personal worlds to our fieldwork. Shah urges that “we must work ever harder at alienating ourselves from our worlds to dive into those of others” (54). Lila Abu-Lughod (1986), on the other hand, theorizes “halfie” ethnographers as locating in a “special kind of position” producing knowledge while being “both inside and outside the communities they write about” (xv). The chronotopic dichotomies between here/there and now/then become murky for native/halfie ethnographers. Shah’s (2017) call for self-alienation may be a much-needed step for ethnographers with no prior background or personal ties to their fieldwork. For native/halfie ethnographers, this also means alienation from our worlds in and of themselves—as “our worlds” would overlap with or at times more precisely in “those of others.” Then, to do native/halfie ethnography means to be able to move fluidly in and out of those two social worlds. Perhaps, the only way to reconcile the contradictory and disorienting need for both self-alienation and awareness of our own social locations as native/halfie ethnographers would require rethinking ethnography as a theory and a way of life. (I echo many other anthropologists who call for this theoretical move such as Lila Abu-Lughod, Carole McGranahan, Rita Astuti, among others.)

Rethinking ethnography as a way of life, not a method, asks for a heightened awareness of anthropologist’ own social locations and ways in which those locations disrupt and situate us in our fieldwork. This theoretical move is neither to highlight differences between us/them nor “to adapt [ourselves] to the strange ways of thinking and feeling of primitive [sic] people” (Boas 1940), but to intensify our awareness of our bodily and affective encounters. No matter how much we desire to capture a sense of homogenous understanding about the world, an assemblage of our scholarly works produce a heterogenous compilation of images. Particularly, as anthropologists who study ways of life, our profession is already “metapragmatic,” to borrow linguistic anthropologist Michael Silverstein’s term. That is to say, we study a way of life in which we are perpetually partaking, in confluence with its effects and conditions.[2]

On January 30, 2020, in Centennial, Colorado, I took an oath of allegiance to the US and became a naturalized citizen. For the past 8 years, I held onto my Burmese citizenship as if it were proof of my emotional belonging to home. Knowing that I’d have to renounce my Burmese citizenship once I became naturalized, I hesitated. However, the news about the detainment of anthropologist Andrew Johnson in Thailand made me reflect on my hesitance. Together with my advisor Prof. Carla Jones, I decided that it’s best for me to become American. The worst that could happen to me now in the field is to be permanently blacklisted by Burma, a price I traded for my safety in my own homeland. I am now no longer an “alien” on paper, but one can never naturalize the feeling of alienation.

On the following day, I woke up to the news about the updated US travel ban in which immigration is limited from particular countries. Burma is one of them. My university now lists Burma as a “high-risk” country for researchers and a series of special recommendations are to be followed by American researchers travelling there. Whereas I now possess certain privileges as a US citizen, this news further complicates my feelings about Burma as not merely a field site but my social and emotional home. What about for native/halfie ethnographers who cannot simply become Americans just as I did to receive political protection in their home countries? Even my former status as a permanent resident didn’t guarantee my safety in the field. Native/halfie ethnographers encounter unique mental and legal challenges when preparing for the fieldwork. Yet, a discussion is still to be made within anthropological community about the native/halfie ethnographers’ social locations and their politically sensitive research in their home countries. Last semester, I learned about a support group acronymed ECR for graduate students who do “emotionally challenging research” in the Department of Sociology at CU Boulder.[3] Yet, there’s no similar mental health or legal counselling support for graduate students in anthropology, a discipline that requires 12 to 18 months of fieldwork, let alone a support group that addresses native/halfie ethnographers’ unique challenges as mentioned.

The formal changes impact my legal status of belonging and consequent protection from potential political threats. It also shifts how others perceive me as capable of knowing Burma as home and/or a field site. Most importantly, it (con)fuses my feelings about physical displacement and emotional intrusions of home. Anthropologist Rita Astuti (2017) reminds us to “take people seriously” in doing ethnography, but first we must also take seriously of ourselves entrapped in a space that is neither completely ours nor completely theirs.

Special thanks to those thinkers who are with me in this special but entrapping space: Juan García Oyervides, Mike Mena, Anusha Ànand, among others.

References

Abu-Lughod, Lila. (1983). Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Abu-Lughod, Lila. (2000). Locating Ethnography. Ethnography 1(2): 261-267.

Astuti, Rita. (2017). Taking People Seriously. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7(1): 105-122.

Boas, Franz (1940). The Aims of Ethnology, in Race, Language, and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.  

Geertz, Clifford. (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.

Keane, Webb. (2003). Self-Interpretation, Agency and the Object of Anthropology: Reflections on a Genealogy. Society for Comparative Study of Society and History 45(2): 278-299.

McGranahan, Carole. (2014). What is Ethnography? Teaching Ethnographic Sensibilities Without Fieldwork. Teaching Anthropology 4: 23-36.

Shah, Alpa. (2017). Ethnography? Participant Observation, a Potentially Revolutionary Praxis. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. 7 (1): 45-59.

Silverstein, Michael. (1976). Shifters, Linguistic Categories, and Cultural Description. Meaning in Anthropology, ed. Keith Basso and Henry A. Selby. Albuquerque: UNM Press.

Notes

[1] Within the circle of Burmese immigrants, wheelchair assistance service is popular for immigrant parents with limited English skills when travelling alone for a variety of reasons. For instance, the wheelchair assistance will help my mother get to her departure gate without having to navigate a busy international airport like JFK.

[2] In this way, can we even say all anthropologists are by training “halfies”? Or is this term “halfie” already entrapping?

[3] For some reasons, even this group is not highly publicized nor findable on the university website. I learned about it from a friend in the Sociology Department.