Mustafa Akcinar, Daniele Cantini, Aymon Kreil,
Shirin Naef, and Emanuel Schaeublin
This report was first published on the blog AllegraLab. Many thanks to the administrators of the blog who allowed us to reproduce it here.
The conference No Country for Anthropologists? Ethnographic Research in the Contemporary Middle East, which we co-organized and hosted at the University of Zurich in November 2018, addressed major concerns of all researchers working nowadays in this region. In many Arab countries the popular uprisings of 2011, with their reverberations across the entire region, were followed by an authoritarian backlash. As a result of this, research activities came under the increased scrutiny of politically repressive governments. Political polarization and military conflicts in numerous countries created new obstacles to conducting ethnographic fieldwork. The tragic case of the Italian PhD-candidate Giulio Regeni, who was brutally murdered in Egypt in 2016, remains in everybody’s thoughts. The issues at stake concern researchers working for universities situated both in the Middle East and elsewhere. Many face strong pressures to avoid sensitive topics and often almost insurmountable obstacles when it comes to obtaining research permits. In spite of these difficulties, the knowledge provided by ethnography, resulting from the immersion of researchers in different social contexts and a dialogic process of producing knowledge with local interlocutors, seems more needed than ever before. Ethnography opens up perspectives on the region that go beyond geopolitical speculations, statistical data, or decontextualized testimonies of the victims of repression and conflict.
The difficulties anthropologists face nowadays
are hardly new, as Daniele Cantini recalled at the beginning of the conference,
referring to Evans-Pritchard’s reluctance to undertake fieldwork in Arab
countries given the constant risk of being perceived as a spy.[1]
After Arab countries gained independence from direct colonial rule, the role of
anthropologists became even more questionable in many places. In 1971, the Algerian
government went as far as banishing the discipline, then labeled as a colonial
relic, in favor of sociology as a tool for social engineering.[2]
Furthermore, conflicts in the region in which Western powers were heavily
involved fueled further defiance towards anthropologists from these countries.
Nevertheless, there were also periods of opening. The 1990ies and the 2000s
were times in which it was relatively easy to do research in many Arab
countries—most notably in Egypt, which became an important hub for anthropologists
working on the region. The first two years following the Egyptian revolution,
from 2011 to 2013, constituted a climax for many anthropologists in Egypt, offering
unprecedented freedom to conduct research on sensitive issues such as poverty
and political structures. Against this background, the backlash after the
military seized power again in 2013 appears even more brutal. Since then, similar
authoritarian tendencies have gained momentum in other countries of the region,
as for instance in Turkey. Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen,
civil war has made fieldwork an almost impossible endeavor.
As a result, a number of academic discussions
of fieldwork conditions in the Middle East have taken place in recent years.
The conference No Country for Anthropologists? followed this trend. For
three days, it gathered researchers working with ethnography from Switzerland,
Belgium, Germany, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Sweden, Canada, the United
States, Iran, Lebanon, Palestine, Pakistan and Turkey, offering a venue for
lively discussions about the difficulties met while doing research in volatile
contexts and the possible means to overcome them. A detailed report on the
talks held at the conference has been published in the Bulletin of the Swiss Society for the Middle East and Islamic Cultures. Therefore, we do not intend to
give a full account of these three days, but rather wish to share some of the reflections
that resulted from our discussions during and after the conference. The
diversity of the speakers—in terms of their institutional affiliations,
seniority, objects of interest and theoretical orientations—allows us to
articulate four core dilemmas for ethnographic work in the contemporary Middle
East: What should we do when access to fieldwork locations becomes impossible?
How can we maintain the autonomy of anthropology when facing the frequently stifling
discourses on the Middle East dominating official politics and the media? How should
we deal with physical threats on fieldwork sites? And lastly, how can we
elaborate and cultivate a shared language with our interlocutors in the field?
Four Dilemmas for Ethnography in the
Contemporary Middle East
A first dilemma we face is writing about countries or regions to which anthropologists have almost no access anymore. Getting barred from places and being forbidden to meet interlocutors is obviously a serious problem for anthropologists. Yet how can we continue documenting the situation of people living in countries to which we have no direct contact to anymore?
Marina de Regt recounted how she attempted to keep contact with her interlocutors in the besieged city of Al-Hodeida during the war in Yemen. Relying on networks and background knowledge accrued during previous research projects, she was able to record local testimonies of the ongoing violence and situate them in a wider context. The necessity of describing the Yemeni situation from the point of view of the inhabitants seems beyond question. This is precisely the context-based knowledge that ethnography is particularly good at producing. The problem at stake equally concerns researchers carrying the nationality of the countries they study, as Ratiba Hadj-Moussa explained with reference to Algeria, where the politically agitated regions in the south have become more and more difficult to access. As security apparatuses and surveillance started to constitute a danger both for herself and her interlocutors, Hadj-Moussa resorted to using the telephone, Skype, Youtube, and Facebook in order to keep contact with her interlocutors, obtain insights into the current situation, and keep her observations and reflections going. “Fieldwork in ruins does not imply the ruin of the field”, as she put it. At the same time, the sheer impossibility to conduct fieldwork in such a scenario raises questions touching on the core of our discipline. This led Hadj-Moussa to ask whether—in such cases—we should speak of “ethnographies in the process of disappearing.”
Indeed, how can researchers experience
sufficient “implication”[3]
if they conduct fieldwork at a distance? Here, we refer to the kind of
implication that forces us to rethink our research questions and our categories
of analysis in order to adjust ourselves to the preoccupations of our
interlocutors and the issues they are concerned with in their lives. Missing
immersion could easily make us disregard the social context of the data we
gather and lose perspective on the issues that we are studying. This risk
becomes even more acute the longer we are absent from the place of inquiry.
A second dilemma we face, is dealing with
topics that are at the core of intense geopolitical gambles or of heated
debates on the national scene. How can anthropologists address the topics in question in a way that leaves
enough autonomy for a distinctive anthropological take on a situation? In the
current academic environment, researchers are under pressure to adjust their
inquiry topics to policy objectives and to media debates. This problem is
particularly striking when it comes to the Middle East, a region which easily
elicits inflammatory debates in Europe.
Emanuel Schaeublin observed for instance that debates on Islamic charitable institutions in Palestine have come to be dominated by security concerns and allegations that they serve as conduits for “terrorist funding.” An ethnographic perspective on the issue makes it possible to situate the work of these institutions in people’s lived practice of Islamic giving and to show how pious generosity is part of everyday interactions between neighbors and relatives. Conducting research on Turkish mosques in Switzerland, Dominik Müller illustrated how Swiss media debates on the role of mosques in politically mobilizing Turks in the diaspora affected his relation to his interlocutors, and the vision they had of him as a non-Turkish researcher interested in their ways of practicing Islam. In Turkey itself, Leyla Neyzi, Hande Sarikuzu, Erol Saglam, and Mustafa Akcinar faced a variety of problems at different levels of the research process related to the suppressed role of minorities in the country’s narrative and the authoritarian turn of the government. As a result of political shifts, Shirin Zubair was compelled to leave Pakistan for some time and faced important career setbacks after attempting to teach gender theory in Lahore.
In such cases, the alternative either entails finding
alternative venues for discussing the topic at stake from a different perspective
or using these debates as a heuristic device to better understand certain
situations and contexts. However, when the situation worsens and leads to
violent confrontations, these ways of proceeding may not be a sufficient
guarantee for the safety of researchers and of their interlocutors.
A third dilemma we face is how to behave in
moments of intense polarization. When conflicts turn violent, trying to keep oneself apart from the
fighting is not always easy during fieldwork. Circulating back and forth
between adversaries for research purposes often becomes impossible. Furthermore,
when words become weapons, there is no place for a neutral stance and refusing
to take a side can appear as treachery, cowardice or criminal indifference.[4]
Appeals within anthropology for “engagement” do not necessarily solve the issue
either. Which side should one choose, and on which basis? Further, what consequences
does this decision have for the analysis?
While conducting research on the independence
movement in South Yemen during 2014 and 2015, Anne-Linda Amira Augustin
witnessed the political turmoil of a country on the verge of war. In this
situation, she felt compelled to go “to those [she] could trust” and to join
the political movement she was studying as an activist.[5]
This example is significative in our eyes, as it shows how violent events
compel us to rely on existing networks to insure our safety and how this
influences our take on the conflict. As for Younes Saramifar, his research
focuses on Shia militias fighting in different parts of the Middle East. He
conducted research on them as an ethnographer embedded in their military
structures, occasionally observing open fighting. However, as Aymon Kreil asked
when discussing his paper, in face of the sheer brutality and confusion of war,
trying to infuse the violence and chaos of combats with meaning can appear as a
specific kind of misrepresentation, especially if taking side signifies granting
a sense of value to war.
Such choices are not self-evident and should
not be seen as such. Even cases in which deciding what side to take may seem
easy at first sight due to the shared set of values between “liberal-minded”
researchers and their interlocutors, can be intricate. With regard to Egypt for
instance, both the Egyptian political scientist Rabab El-Mahdi and Egyptian
political activist Philip Rizk denounced the misappraisals provoked by
identifying the liberal youth as the main actor of politics following the 2011
uprising, a tendency to which many researches were prone due to the master
narrative of liberal democracy expanding to the world in different waves and to
personal affinities alike.[6]
Further, as Nida Kirmani noted during her presentation at the conference Pillars of Rule: The Writ of Nation-States and Dynasties
in South Asia and the Middle East, also held in Zurich a few months
later, the meaning of political causes can differ according to national
contexts: denunciations of Islamophobia, for instance, which belong to the
progressive agenda in Trump’s United States, are part of the ethnonationalist
discourse in Pakistan, pushing for Indian Muslims to join the country.[7]
Thus, the question remains open of how to position ourselves politically and
analytically with a view to narratives and themes that take on very different
kinds of political significance in different contexts. This situation appears
to erode the common ground needed for an ethical and realistic kind of engaged
anthropology.
A fourth dilemma we face is the possibility to
elaborate a common language with our interlocutors.There
are strong trends pushing for the development of collaborative anthropology, a
way of doing inquiries in which our interlocutors, including local academic
scholars and faculties, participate in all steps of the research process.[8]
In her keynote address to the conference, Jessica Winegar emphasized the
necessity of transcending the borders of the discipline by including a larger
plurality of voices within it. In a similar vein, Shirin Naef argued for an anthropology dialoguing
with debates going on within the Islamic tradition when studying bioethics in
Iran, in line with recent arguments by Johan Rasanayagam.[9] These dialogues, which
were mostly carried out with scholars of law, jurisprudence, theology and medicine,
have largely shaped her sociological and anthropological enquiries and
perspectives. However,
as Naef reminded us, this endeavor also presents difficulties and challenges,
such as misunderstandings and misrecognition, which are important to
acknowledge in order to overcome them.
Emilie Lund Mortensen argues for instance that
her encounter with the Jordanian secret police, and the fear this encounter
induced in her, increased her ability to enter into dialogue with her
interlocutors. Working with Syrian refugees who feel that they are under constant
surveillance and move through the city as invisibly as possible, Lund Mortensen’s
direct experience of the secret police created a space of shared knowledge with
her interlocutors. Lamia Moghnieh explained that the vocabulary of trauma,
which came to define the experience of war in Lebanon in the eyes of external
observers and NGO personnel, obscures moments of resistance or practical
assessments of situations which are at the core of what she terms as
“living-in-violence.”[10]
Her insight compels us to reconsider the meaning of empathy, which tends to
focus solely on suffering.[11]
Understanding different sources of strength and resilience that our
interlocutors tap into should equally be part of the endeavor. Moreover,the kind of intimacy necessary for
collaboration can sometimes be difficult to bear psychologically, as Erol
Saglam argued for the case of his fieldwork among Rumeyka-speakers in Northern
Anatolia. Their language is a dialect of Greek but many of its speakers are
strong supporters of chauvinistic trends of Turkish nationalism. Suspicion
prevailed first towards him, as the practice of the local Greek dialect is
stigmatized by its speakers themselves. Saglam’s problems during fieldwork
remind of issues of “cultural intimacy” which anthropologists often face when
trying to address topics about which their interlocutors reluctantly discuss
with strangers.[12] In
Saglam’s case, ethnography on the topic he chose meant to become intimate with
people whose prospects about society were often diametrically opposite to his
own. Eventually, leading back to the issue of polarization, Erol Saglam, Hande
Sarikuzu and Anne-Linda Amira Augustin all raised the question of how to
analytically deal with rumors relying on a violent othering of political
adversaries which was shared by all their interlocutors and which made these
stories credible in their eyes. Indeed, rumors help to learn about people in
conflict and their “social imagination of violence,” as Sarikuzu phrased it, even
if they are not a reliable source for corroborating factual evidence.
These difficulties highlight a core dimension
of ethnographic research, the need to answer sometimes contradicting demands from
university and from one’s own interlocutors. On one hand, we have to contribute
through fieldwork to academic debates addressing questions in a jargon that is often
far from the preoccupation and language of our interlocutors. On the other
hand, once on site, we get entangled into networks of personal relations, which
have other requisites, such as friendship or hospitality. This situation
inevitably leads to “embarrassment,”[13]
an uncomfortable position where researchers are torn between conflicting
selves.[14]
It is worth recalling that most of the time unethical or dangerous behavior by
researchers arises from embarrassment. There is no plan B for failed fieldwork,
as its success is one of the main elements on which anthropologists build their
careers and by which they assess each other’s work. However, on a more positive
note, embarrassment is also productive, as it is precisely what allows us to
translate contexts and convey knowledge. How to maintain this tension
throughout the dialogical process of ethnographic research in a way that does
not do harm to any of the participants is perhaps the most important challenge.
Prospects for Anthropology in the Middle East
Bricolage is always part of ethnography and the
neat research protocols in textbooks and research projects by definition never
work as we are dealing with non-reproducible historical situations and not with
laboratory experiments. This supposes a great deal of incertitude and the
necessity of adapting methods to places and encounters.
The conference’s aim was not to provide ready-made solutions for ethnography in the Middle East. In any case, Jeffrey Sluka reminds us that“danger is not a purely ‘technical’ problem and is never totally manageable.”[15] Thus, David Shankland offered a rather grim portrayal of research prospects in the region. It seems that the willingness of British universities to deal with risky situations is diminishing, particularly when research involves undergraduate and graduate students working under the responsibility of their universities and their research supervisors. In response to pressures, Mehrdad Arabestani, who is based in Iran,emphasizes the possibility of “disidentification” from official discourses as a skill to conduct research, by which he means the strategical use of the ambivalence of official slogans and of the—occasionally contradictory—objectives set to researchers by state agencies. Nafay Choudhury explained how he tried to manage the deteriorating security conditions in Kabul by never announcing the times of his visits to the money exchangers who he was studying and by avoiding a regular and predictable rhythm of moving through the city in order to evade abduction attempts. Noah Arjomand on the other hand recounted how he was mixing profiles of different interlocutors when writing about Turkish and Syrian media workers, in order to avoid endangering them by making them too easy to identify.
Despite all these issues,
ethnographic implication in the field remains indispensable for our work.
Indeed, we never met someone who learned a language with audio methods. At a
certain moment, you need to be compelled to practice the language, you need to
be unsettled in your speaking habits, you have to experience yourself as
someone else, be it pleasant or not, as another person, who is also part of the
fieldwork. The good thing about ethnography is that it is flexible. The
problems it raises are often indicative of wider political shifts in the world.
Researchers unfortunately need to adapt to the violence accompanying these
transformations, while striving to create the best possible conditions for
ethnography in spite of the odds. [16]
Reflecting on the conditions of doing fieldwork enables researchers to go
beyond their individual cases, and to make historical and geographical
continuities (and discontinuities, of course) visible in the work of
anthropology more generally. Particularly when we need to make unsettling
choices, being able to articulate them among peers seems to be far from
anecdotical, and rather close to how anthropological knowledge is made.
[1] Edward
Evans-Pritchard, “Some Reminiscences and Reflections on Fieldwork,” Journal of the Anthropological Society of
Oxford 4, no. 1 (1973). Suspicions that
ethnographers could be spies are recurrent in research in Middle Eastern
countries. This is only partly explained by political tensions. For a more
detailed discussion of Evans-Pritchard’s reluctance to do ethnography in Arab
countries, see Paul Dresch, “Wilderness of
Mirrors: Truth and Vulnerability in Middle Eastern Fieldwork,” in Anthropologists in a Wider World: Essays on
Field Research, ed. Paul Dresch, Wendy James, and David Parkin (Oxford; New
York: Berghahn, 2000), 113-14.
[2]
Mohamed Madoui, “Les sciences sociales en
Algérie: Regards sur les usages de la sociologie,” Sociologies pratiques, no. 15 (2007); Kamel Chachoua, “La
sociologie en Algérie: Histoire d’une discipline sans histoire,” in Les Sciences sociales en voyage: L’Afrique
du Nord et le Moyen-Orient vus d’Europe, d’Amérique et de l’intérieur, ed.
Eberhard Kienle (Paris: Karthala, 2010), 141-42.
[3]
Michel Agier, “Ce qui rend les terrains
sensibles… et l’anthropologie inquiète,” in Terrains sensibles: Expériences actuelles de l’anthropologie, ed.
Florence Bouillon, Marion Fresia, and Virginie Tallio (Paris: EHESS, 2005),
178-80.
[4]
Abderrahmane Moussaoui, “Du danger et du
terrain en Algérie,” Ethnologie
française 31, no. 1 (2001); Kimberly Theidon, “Terror’s Talk:
Fieldwork and War,” Dialectical
Anthropology 26, no. 1 (2001).
[5] See also Anne-Linda Amira Augustin, “Rumours, Fears and Solidarity
in Fieldwork in Times of Political Turmoil on the Verge of War in Southern
Yemen,” Contemporary Social Science
13, no. 3-4 (2018): 7-8.
[6] Rabab
El-Mahdi, “Orientalising the
Egyptian Uprising,” Jadaliyya (2011),; Philip Rizk, “2011 Is Not 1968:
An Open Letter to an Onlooker on the Day of Rage,” Mada
Masr (2014).
[7] On the same topic, see also Rochelle Terman, “Islamophobia, Feminism and the
Politics of Critique,” Theory,
Culture & Society 33, no. 2 (2015).
[8] For a possible framework that
will help collaborative research between anthropologists in Iran, see for
example Shahnaz R. Nadjmabadi, “Conceptualizing
Iranian Anthropology: Past and Present Perspectives” (London: Berghahn
Books, 2009). Nadjmabadi also provides us with a history of Iranian
anthropology and its development to date.
[9] Drawing his inspiration from the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas on the ethics of
the Other, Rasanayagam argues for an anthropological knowledge founded on an
ongoing conversation in a non-objectifying way with an Islamic tradition that
observers should not endeavour to grasp as a whole. See, Johan
Rasanayagam, “Anthropology in Conversation with an Islamic Tradition:
Emmanuel Levinas and the Practice of Critique,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 24, no. 1 (2018).
[10] Lamia
Moghnieh, “‘The Violence We Live In’: Reading and Experiencing Violence in
the Field,” Contemporary Levant
2, no. 1 (2017).
[11] The concern with suffering arguably
occupies a crucial position in recent anthropology and Western
humanitarianism—on which, see Joel Robbins, “Beyond the Suffering Subject:
Toward an Anthropology of the Good,” Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute 19, no. 3 (2013), and Didier Fassin, Humanitarian
Reason: A Moral History of the Present (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2011). At the same time, recent ethnography on practices of giving in
Egypt document how Islamic discourse is able to sustain an ethics of giving and
mutuality that ascribes more importance to justice and duty than to empathy
with those who suffer—see Amira Mittermaier, Giving to God: Islamic Charity
in Revolutionary Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019).
[12] Michael
Herzfeld, Cultural Intimacy: Social
Poetics in the Nation-State (New York etc.: Routledge, 1997).
[13] Erving
Goffman, “Embarrassment and Social Organization,” American Journal of Sociology 62, no. 3
(1956): 269-71.
[14]
On the same topic, see also Christian Ghasarian,
“Les désarrois de l’ethnographe,” L’Homme
37, no. 143 (1997): 192-93; Dionigi Albera, “Terrains minés,” Ethnologie française 31, no. 1 (2001). For an excellent
ethnographic example of this tension, see Emilio Spadola, “Forgive Me Friend:
Mohammed and Ibrahim,” Anthropological Quarterly 84, no. 3 (2011):
737–756.
[15] Jeffrey
Sluka, “Participant Observation in Violent Contexts,” Human Organisation 49, no. 2 (1990):
124.
[16] Megan
Steffen, “Doing Fieldwork
after Henrietta Schmerler: On Sexual Violence and Blame in Anthropology,” American
Anthropologist Website (2017).
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