The Ethnography of Resistance Then and Now: On Thickness and Activist Engagement in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

This article seeks to convey some of the theoretical frameworks and commitments that characterize how anthropologists have approached the ethnography of resistance. Using our individual biographies as a point of departure, we describe and contrast the intellectual influences that shaped our ethnographic engagements as well as the unanticipated dilemmas we each faced with regard to writing, thick description, and accountability to research participants and their struggles. Our narratives reveal a continued interest in ethnographic thickness while at the same time pointing to new challenges that emerge from the growing interest in engaged or activist research paradigms. Our experiences show that studying actors engaged in political struggle calls for rethinking the pedagogy and practice of ethnography. We conclude by considering steps we can take within our institutions to support such reflexivity and engagement in ethnographic work.

Keywords:

• Resistance
• Engaged Research
• Activism
• Ethnography
• Cultural Critique

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Jane Anderson and Julie Hemment, co-organizers of the workshop “Challenges in the Ethnography of Activism”, 12 April 2013, as well as all the participants and our invited guests, Arturo Escobar, Charles Hale, and Jeff Juris. This paper has benefitted greatly from conversations during and after the workshop. We also thank the National Science Foundation, OISE-0968575, “Cultural Heritage in European Societies and Spaces”, for funding of Helepololei's fieldwork.

Notes

1 See, for example, the journal Cultural Anthropology's online “Hot Spots” edition on “Occupy, Anthropology and the 2011 Global Uprisings”, http://www.culanth.org/?q=node/641.

2 Jonsson (2012) makes a provocative critique along these lines arguing that Scott's (2009) analysis of peasant resistance against the state marginalizes the self-understandings of peasants.

3 For a highly useful analytical framework for the study of hegemony, see Comaroff and Comaroff (1991).

4 For an especially lucid analysis of liberal political theory and the way it shapes thinking on both freedom and resistance, see Mahmood (2005).

5 See Ortner (1997) for a more elaborated discussion of thick cultural analysis and its relevance to the study of political agency.

6 See “Epilogue” (Urla 2012a) for a fuller account of these events.

7 Tsing (2005) has made a similar argument. Lamphere's (2003) call for anthropologists to become savvier in dealing with the media is especially relevant in this regard.

8 Joseba Zulaika's experience in writing about political violence in the Basque country is a good example of the risks that can arise. See Zulaika and Douglass (1996) and Zulaika (1995).

9 For some examples of projects attempting to circulate ethnographic research to larger audiences, see The Open Anthropology Cooperative (http://openanthcoop.ning.com/) (accessed July 21, 2013), the open-access journal Hau (http://www.haujournal.org/index.php/hau/index), and the popular blog: Savage Minds (http://backupminds.wordpress.com/).

10 Stine Krøijer in Holbraad and Pederson (2013) shows how even in planning meetings, activists at the Copenhagen Climate Summit used techniques for decision-making that decoupled individuals from action proposals to produce a constant state of desired “indeterminacy” that not only insulated protesters from possible criminal charges, but also created an open space for fluid ideologies and tactics.

11 See, for example, the collection of essays in the AE Forum: IRB's: Bureaucratic Regulation and Academic Freedom, American Ethnologist 33 (4), November 2006.

12 See Shweder (2006) for an informative account of the University of Chicago effort to exercise the legal right of universities to restrict the reach of IRB.

13 For an activist ethnographic approach to the neoliberalization of the university, see Shear and Zontine (2010).

14 The initiative was made possible by a Mellon Foundation Mutual Mentoring Grant (2013–2014), University of Massachusetts Amherst.

15 As described in the proposal “Laboratory for Transformative Practice in Anthropology” by Jane Anderson, Sonya Atalay, Jackie Urla, and Whitney Battle-Baptiste.

16 We borrow the term collaboratory from the Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory (ARC) at UC Berkeley. See Collier (2007). Founded on a critique of the “individual project model” that informs most anthropological inquiry, the ARC is focused on fostering collaboration among researchers following a design studio process.