Urgent Ethnography: Destabilizing Anthropological Spectatorship and Forging Global (Non-)Solidarities

Abstract (English)

Urgent developments are often seen as the limit case for ethnographic methods. Anthropologists have advocated for the unique value and insights offered by ethnography since the discipline’s emergence as a “field science” (rather than a strictly library or armchair endeavor), but the qualities attributed to “good” ethnography—long-term engagement, genres of realist reportage, and social embeddedness that asymptotically allows a researcher to represent the “native’s point of view” on its own terms (or to cultivate the dispassionate habits of perception necessary to become a reliable “native ethnographer”; Finn 1996; Hoefel 2001; Cotera 2008)—have made ethnography seem ill-suited to deal with urgency. The implicit or explicit demands that ethnographers be credentialed experts whose accountability is primarily to a corporate university (Moten and Harney 2013), department, funding agency, peer reviewers, publishers, prior genealogies of scholarship, and other gatekeepers (Boggs et al. 2019) can further undermine both the coherence and authority of the traditional anthropological spectator, even more so when engaging with urgent realities (Scheper-Hughes 1995; Sahlins 2000[1966]; Moodie 2009; Varma 2018; Soto and Ssorin-Chaikov 2020). Within these layered regimes of institutionalized anthropological value, solidarity is often made to be at odds with the expectations of “rigorous” scholarship.

This panel reflects on the historical, institutional, and interactional structuring of the seeming impossibility of ethnography to engage with urgency—and why individuals and groups continue to try anyway. We draw on anthropology and/of journalism (Postero 2007; Cotter 2010; Moodie 2010; Cody 2023),(auto-)ethnography of institutions (Strathern, ed. 2000; Greenberg 2024), anthropology of social movements and the state (Trouillot 1991; 2003; Postero 2017), abolitionist university studies (Moten and Harney 2013; Boggs et al. 2019), and migration studies (Fassin 2011; Castles, de Hass, and Miller 2014[1993]; The Critical Refugee Studies Collective et al. 2022) in addition to reflections from scholars with multiple, complex professional identities as journalists, policymakers, public intellectuals, and university academics. We ask: How do forms of evenemential urgency (event-based developments that compel a sense of crisis and demand timely action or response), engineered urgency (structures and systems designed to enforce scarcities of time and other resources), and experiential urgency (the felt sense of a development as being unavoidable or necessary to immediately engage) come into being individually or in tandem? How do they structure the social worlds anthropologists engage across sites and scales, including our own? How can ethnography support engagement with urgency in ways that go beyond “slowing down” or revealing urgency to be as socially constructed as any other temporality? And what other intellectual domains might anthropologists engage to build greater accountability (TallBear 2014; Whyte 2020) and new solidarities (Liu and Shange 2018) through our engagements? This panel brings together an institutionally and ethnographically diverse set of papers and perspectives to explore these questions.