Salvage ethnography

ABSTRACT

In a reflection upon Alexander's (2024. The Asian Gang Revisited: Changing Muslim Masculinities. London: Bloomsbury Publishers.) The Asian Gang Revisited, I highlight challenges with “revisits”. They rest on a colonialist anthropological assumption: that you can go back to your tribe, and as a primitive community you’re welcome to assume that they are largely stuck in place. It’s thereby easy enough to reevaluate your claims. Alexander provides us with a powerful solution to this troubling problem: “Salvage ethnography”. This approach suggests both treasures and wreckage. Salvage creates real challenges for explanation, but also evokes an archaeological approach fruitfully deployed in other epistemic communities. It opens the possibility for a broader archaeological ethnographic practice that can help us think through what we should do with data yielded from methods that might not get us to the truth but may achieve understanding.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethnography
• revisits
• Asian
• gang
• methods
• ethnicity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For the American reader: “Asian” in this context refers to the British case, meaning primarily Pakistani and Bangladeshi men who tend to be concentrated in poorly paid occupations, earn significantly less (in the same jobs) to their white counterparts, and have the highest rates of in-work poverty and child poverty in Britain. It is also inexorably tied to their Muslim religion.