Politicized and depoliticized ethnicities, power relations and temporality: insights to outsider research from comparative and transnational fieldwork

ABSTRACT

The insider and outsider positions in migration studies have conventionally been approached in terms of ethnic or national belonging. Recently scholars have problematized the essentialist approaches to these roles by arguing for the inclusion of multiple intersecting social locations that are at play in the constitution of researcher positionality. Less attention has been paid, however, on how different ethnicities are constructed and how they can become politicized and depoliticized at particular moments during the research process. This article discusses the fieldwork experiences of two “apparent outsiders” to the studied diaspora community. Drawing from our experiences in multi-sited and comparative fieldwork on the Kurdish diaspora, we argue that rather than taking insider and outsider positions as a starting-point to understand researcher positionality, scholars need to look at particular moments of insiderness and outsiderness to grasp how the researcher’s assumed ethnicity becomes politicized and depoliticized during ethnographic fieldwork.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethnicity
• positionality
• reflexivity
• outsider research
• transnationalism
• diaspora

Acknowledgements

Authors contributed equally to this article and are listed alphabetically. The authors also wish to thank the participants of “Ethnographic encounters” seminar organized at the University of Turku, 12th–13th May 2016, Professor Hilary Pilkington, Dr. Elly Harrowell and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Within the constraints of this article, we will only focus on the assumed ethnicity/national belonging and when relevant how it intertwines with assumed religious, social and political belonging.

2 The Kurdish language was banned in Turkey until the 1990s as a result of decades long assimilation policies by the state.

3 See US Department of State, “Foreign Terrorist Organizations”: http://www.state.gov/j/ct/rls/other/des/123085.htm.

4 The term “white Turk” is used to describe a person who is wealthy, educated, Westernized, urbanized or a person who has a privileged status in Turkey.

Additional information

Funding

The authors wish to thank Coventry University, Stellenbosch University, National Research Foundation of South Africa, the University of Turku, the School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS) and the Academy of Finland for financial and other support that enabled the completion of this article.