Gender and Genre in Ethnographic Writing (Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology) 3030717259, 9783030717254

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN LITERARY ANTHROPOLOGY

Gender and Genre in Ethnographic Writing Edited by Elisabeth Tauber · Dorothy L. Zinn

Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology

Series Editors Deborah Reed-Danahay, Department of Anthropology, The State University of New York at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY, USA Helena Wulff, Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

This series explores new ethnographic objects and emerging genres of writing at the intersection of literary and anthropological studies. Books in this series are grounded in ethnographic perspectives and the broader cross-cultural lens that anthropology brings to the study of reading and writing. The series explores the ethnography of fiction, ethnographic fiction, narrative ethnography, creative nonfiction, memoir, autoethnography, and the connections between travel literature and ethnographic writing.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15120

Elisabeth Tauber · Dorothy L. Zinn Editors

Gender and Genre in Ethnographic Writing

Editors Elisabeth Tauber Faculty of Education Free University of Bozen-Bolzano Bressanone-Brixen, Bolzano, Italy

Dorothy L. Zinn Faculty of Education Free University of Bozen-Bolzano Bressanone-Brixen, Bolzano, Italy

Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology ISBN 978-3-030-71725-4 ISBN 978-3-030-71726-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71726-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: ideabug, Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Series Editors’ Preface

Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology publishes explorations of new ethnographic objects and emerging genres of writing at the intersection of literary and anthropological studies. Books in this series are grounded in ethnographic perspectives and the broader cross-cultural lens that anthropology brings to the study of reading and writing. By introducing work that applies an anthropological approach to literature, whether drawing on ethnography or other materials in relation to anthropological and literary theory, this series moves the conversation forward not only in literary anthropology, but in general anthropology, literary studies, cultural studies, sociology, ethnographic writing and creative writing. The “literary turn” in anthropology and critical research on world literatures share a comparable sensibility regarding global perspectives. Fiction and autobiography have connections to ethnography that underscore the idea of the author as ethnographer and the ethnographer as author. Literary works are frequently included in anthropological research and writing, as well as in studies that do not focus specifically on literature. Anthropologists take an interest in fiction and memoir set in their field locations, and produced by “native” writers, in order to further their insights into the cultures and contexts they research. Experimental genres in anthropology have benefitted from the style and structure of fiction and autoethnography, as well as by other expressive forms ranging from film and performance art to technology, especially the internet and social media. There are renowned fiction writers who trained v

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as anthropologists, but moved on to a literary career. Their anthropologically inspired work is a common sounding board in literary anthropology. In the endeavour to foster writing skills in different genres, there are now courses on ethnographic writing, anthropological writing genres, experimental writing, and even creative writing taught by anthropologists. And increasingly, literary and reading communities are attracting anthropological attention, including an engagement with issues of how to reach a wider audience. Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology publishes scholarship on the ethnography of fiction and other writing genres, the connections between travel literature and ethnographic writing, and internet writing. It also publishes creative work such as ethnographic fiction, narrative ethnography, creative non-fiction, memoir and autoethnography. Books in the series include monographs and edited collections, as well as shorter works that appear as Palgrave Pivots. This series aims to reach a broad audience among scholars, students and a general readership. Deborah Reed-Danahay and Helena Wulff Co-Editors, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology

ADVISORY BOARD Ruth Behar, University of Michigan Don Brenneis, University of California, Santa Cruz Regina Bendix, University of Göttingen Mary Gallagher, University College Dublin Kirin Narayan, Australian National University Nigel Rapport, University of St Andrews Ato Quayson, University of Toronto Julia Watson, Ohio State University

To the memory of Helena Malinowska Wayne (1925–2018)

Acknowledgements

To state how this volume has relied on the contributions of many other people is not a perfunctory gesture on our part: from the inception of the symposium that led to its development all the way to the actual publication process, we are grateful for the cheerful, supportive and constructive participation of many persons. First, we would like to thank the members of the Scientific Committee of the Malinowski Forum for Ethnography and Anthropology (MFEA) for their guidance in preparing the symposium we held in September 2019 in Bolzano: Andre Gingrich, Chandana Mathur, Valeria Siniscalchi, Jaro Stacul and Marilyn Strathern. Special acknowledgement goes to Marilyn Strathern, who has been as rigorous and unflagging as ever throughout the entire process, from first written words (the symposium abstract) to spoken words (as discussant at the symposium), and back again to written words (her Afterword here). We could not have gotten the event off the ground without the financial support of the Faculty of Education at the Free University of BozenBolzano and the logistical assistance of Silvia Cunico, a student collaborator. The atmosphere in Bolzano was perfect for an intense, collegial discussion among the writers you find in this volume. We should also mention Almut Schneider, who gave us precious input in the early stages. At the symposium’s conclusion, we had the chance to take the participants to the Malinowski Villa in Oberbozen, thanks to the generous hospitality of grandchildren Rebecca M. Stuart, Lucy Ulrich and Patrick Burke. We are so honoured that they have shared their family legacy with us, from

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this home to their intangible memories. At Palgrave, we first of all thank the Series Editors for receiving our proposal with interest, and the prodding of an anonymous reviewer helped us clarify our vision for this book and provided us with many useful suggestions. It was a pleasure working with Mary Al-Sayad and Madison Allums, who followed the first phases of the publication project, and as it came to fruition, we have appreciated the efficient support of Elizabeth Graber, Liam McLean and Sham Anand. Finally, we thank our other friends and colleagues for their interest and support in our work, but most especially, we thank our families for their patience and care as we ourselves have sought to balance our own gendered positions and the work of writing for this book and editing it. Matera and Viums January 2021

Praise for Gender and Genre in Ethnographic Writing

“This remarkable volume draws us into a gripping conversation regarding the process by which lived experience is transmuted into ethnographic writing, reminding us forcefully that matters of authorship and its rightful acknowledgement remain to be settled. Delineating both how ethnographic accounts are written from multiple positions of marginalisation and how they are subsequently read, it vividly shows us a field that continues to abound with disparities of power.” —Chandana Mathur, Maynooth University, Ireland “A timely and ambitious book that shows how issues of gender are far from exhausted. The introduction is compelling, providing a wideranging plot in which a novel examination of Malinowski’s collaborative work with his wife Elsie Masson may lead to an exploration of dialogic and collaborative ethnographic research and writing. Based on their varied ethnographic experiences, the contributors provide thought-provoking insights into how recent anthropology of gender has contributed to this trend in ‘writing culture’.” —Signe Howell, University of Oslo, Norway

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Contents

Prologue Lucy Ulrich and Rebecca M. Stuart

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The Graphy in Ethnography: Reconsidering the Gender of and in the Genre Elisabeth Tauber and Dorothy L. Zinn

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Towards an Anthropological Appreciation of Silence as an Ethnographic Key: Homely, Instrumental, Ethical Nigel Rapport

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Feminist Ethnography in a Women’s Shelter: Self-Reflexivity, Participation and Activism in Ethnographic Writing Marina Della Rocca Can There Be Feminist Anthropology in Turkey?: Histories, Continuities, and (Dis)Connections of Gender and Genre Hande Birkalan-Gedik

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Uncertainty, Failure and Reciprocal Ethnography Paloma Gay y Blasco

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Thin, Cruisy, Queer: Writing Through Affect Omar Kasmani

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Incorporated Genre and Gender: Elsie Masson, Her Writings, and Her Contribution to Malinowski’s Career Daniela Salvucci

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Afterword Marilyn Strathern

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Index

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Notes on Contributors

Hande Birkalan-Gedik (Ph.D., Indiana University) is Professor of folklore, anthropology and gender studies and Former President of the Anthropology Association, Turkey (2010–2014). Currently, she is leading a DFG-project at the KAEE-Goethe University: ‘Traveling Theories’: Die Geschichte der Anthropologie in der Türkei (1850–1950). Her research deals with the anthropology of Europe/Turkey, the history of anthropology and feminist anthropology/ethnography. Marina Della Rocca (Ph.D., Free University of Bozen-Bolzano) is an Anthropologist and a feminist activist who has worked as an antiviolence operator supporting women who have suffered from domestic violence. Her research focus is on the intersection between gender-based violence and migration and on the advocacy of migrant women who are survivors of domestic violence. She has conducted postdoctoral research on perceptions of gender-based violence and empowerment among migrant-origin women. Paloma Gay y Blasco is a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews and has published extensively on Romani issues and collaborative anthropology. She has written three monographs (Gypsies in Madrid: Sex, Gender and the Performance of Identity, 1997, Berg; How to Read Ethnography, with Huon Wardle, second edition 2019, Routledge; Writing Friendship: a Reciprocal Ethnography, with Liria Hernández, 2020, Palgrave). xv

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Omar Kasmani is a post-doctoral Research Associate in social and cultural anthropology at the Collaborative Research Center Affective Societies at Freie Universität, Berlin. His research is situated across the study of religion, queer and affect theory and pursues ideas of postmigrant be/longing, queer temporalities and public intimacy. His monograph on queer affect and saintly bonds in Pakistan is forthcoming from Duke University Press. Nigel Rapport is Professor of Anthropological and Philosophical Studies at the University of St Andrews, and Founding Director of the St Andrews Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies. He has been elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE), and of the Learned Society of Wales (FLSW). His most recent book is Cosmopolitan Love and Individuality: Ethical Engagement beyond Culture (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019). Daniela Salvucci (Ph.D., University of Siena) is Sociocultural Anthropologist. She is a Junior Lecturer at the Free University Bozen-Bolzano, where she currently works on cultures of mountain people from a comparative perspective and on the history of the Malinowski family in South Tyrol. She has carried out ethnographic and archival research in Italy and Argentina on kinship and family cultures, rituals and indigenous territories in the Andean region, cultural heritage and the history of anthropology in South Tyrol. Marilyn Strathern is Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology at Cambridge. Her research career began with work on kinship and gender relations, with a Melanesian emphasis, and she is most well known for The gender of the gift (1988). She was subsequently involved in anthropological approaches to assisted conception, intellectual property, audit cultures, as well as interdisciplinarity. A recent book is Relations: an anthropological account (2020). Rebecca M. Stuart is a Freelance Translator, Editor and Writer living in Berlin. She works primarily in the cultural sector—both high and low, translating for numerous film festivals as well as historical museums. Elisabeth Tauber is an Associate Professor for social anthropology at the Free University of Bolzano. Working with semi-nomadic Sinti, she has been publishing on gift-economies, gender, marriage, mnemonic practices and nomadism. More recently, she has been focusing on humannon-human relations in high alpine contexts. With Paola Trevisan, she

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edited La Ricerca Folklorica 2019 Archive and Ethnography: The Case of Europe’s Roma and Sinti (19th–21st century). Lucy Ulrich lives in Basel and is an Editor and Translator, specialising in financial markets and banking. She was a journalist for a number of years and then worked at the Bank for International Settlements and the International Monetary Fund. Dorothy L. Zinn is Professor of Sociocultural Anthropology at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano. Her research has focused on the political economy of Southern Italy, patronage-clientelism, migration and multicultural society. She is co-founder of the Malinowski Forum for Ethnography and Anthropology. Her monograph Raccomandazione: Clientelism and Connections in Italy appeared in English in 2019 with Berghahn Books.

Prologue Lucy Ulrich and Rebecca M. Stuart

Talk delivered by at the 4th Biennial Symposium Anthropological Talks in South Tyrol “Gender and Genre in Ethnographic Writing” September 2019

Family Chatter Good morning. I’m Rebecca Stuart and my mother was Jozefa Malinowska, Bronio’s oldest daughter. And I’m Lucy Ulrich. My mother was Helena Malinowska, Bronio’s youngest daughter. RS At this point, we would like to give credit to Lucy’s mother, Helena Malinowska Wayne. We have garnered some of our information from a very interesting talk she gave in the early 1980s to the Anthropological

L. Ulrich Basel, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] R. M. Stuart (B) Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 E. Tauber and D. L. Zinn (eds.), Gender and Genre in Ethnographic Writing, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71726-1_1

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Society of Oxford on the key women in Malinowski’s life, entitled ‘Bronisław Malinowski: the influence of various women on his life and works’ (1984). It was later published in the society’s journal and subsequently by the American Anthropological Association (1985). We can only talk about Bronio’s relationship with women ‘according to family legend’ since neither of us ever met our grandfather. But we certainly heard a lot about him from our mothers. Because Lucy’s mother was Bronio’s ‘favourite’ child, while my mother, Jozefa, was her mother, Elsie’s, they had somewhat different perspectives on their father, to put it mildly. I believe that, while Helena revered her father, my mother, Jozefa, in many ways resented him—feeling that he was not present enough after our grandmother started to become ill, and then for virtually abandoning her to take care of her two younger sisters after their mother died. There is no doubt that the most formative influence on Malinowski’s attitude towards women was his mother, Józefa Ł˛acka. She guided his early education and, as Helena wrote: ‘She was a woman of outstanding intellect, great determination, and utter devotion to her gifted son’ (Wayne 1985: 529f). After Malinowski’s father died when Bronio was only 14, he and his mother lived in various flats in Cracow, surviving on her widow’s pension. As Helena goes on to write: ‘A constant problem was Bronio’s health. (…) He had especially severe trouble with his eyes’ (ibid., 530). For much of his schooling, ‘he was an external student, working at home, having for much of the time to lie in a darkened room, his eyes bandaged. His mother took him through his schoolwork in all his subjects, including Greek and Latin, which she had to learn in order to be his guide’ (ibid., 530). Even my grandmother Elsie said of her husband’s relationship to his mother: ‘[letter 17th August 1918] I am sure she was far, far more important to you than most mothers are to sons because you thought and worked together’ (Wayne 1995, Vol. I). LU We know very little about our grandfather’s love life when he was a very young man. But as we grew older, our mothers let slip hints making it clear that they did not believe chastity was a virtue he practiced with any enthusiasm. In her talk at Oxford, my mother goes into some detail about his relationship with a South African woman, Annie Brunton. They met while

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Bronio was studying in Leipzig, and all but lived together for a while in London. To observe the proprieties, Bronio kept rooms nearby in which he worked and kept his belongings. Helena says, ‘One can say that it was Annie Brunton who brought Malinowski bodily into the Englishspeaking, English-reading world from the relative obscurity of the Polish language. I needn’t stress what a difference that made to his entire career and to the dissemination of his ideas. It gave him a world stage’ (Wayne 1985: 532). Despite Mrs. Brunton’s importance in Bronio’s life, my mother never mentioned her to me. It was in Australia, in 1915, that our grandfather met the next woman of importance in his life: Nina Stirling, the beautiful daughter of Sir Edward Stirling of Adelaide. To quote Helena’s paper, ‘…they fell in love and he proposed, too hastily. I think it was his first engagement’ (Wayne 1985: 533). Note the use of ‘I think’. And then, in 1916, Bronio met Elsie Masson, our grandmother. A friendship grew as she helped him with his Trobriand field notes; it grew into love and they began to discuss marriage. However, Elsie’s parents, Sir David Orme Masson and Mary, Lady Masson, did not approve. A scandal ensued when a family friend, Sir Baldwin Spencer, found out and made public the fact that Bronio was engaged to Nina Stirling and had had several further flirtations in Melbourne. Flirtation was the term Helena used, but she told me (I suppose when she felt I was old enough to hear this without having the vapours) that the relationships with those women and with Elsie almost certainly involved sex. Bronio does seem to have been a thoroughly inconstant lover. When he proposed to Elsie, by letter, in 1918 he had still not broken off his engagement with ‘poor’ Nina, as my mother always referred to her. It was Nina who finally ended the engagement. Bronio and Elsie married in Melbourne in 1919. In August 1920, Bronio and Elsie’s oldest daughter, Jozefa, was born in Scotland; in January 1922, Wanda followed, in France; then came my mother, Helena in May of 1925, here in the South Tyrol. Although my mother tried to include both her long-dead parents in her children’s lives, it was Elsie who became a real person to us, despite having died twenty years before my birth and more than 22 years before my brother’s. Helena said in her Oxford talk that her father kept up a steady correspondence with his daughters after their mother’s death. She also says that he was uncertain whether they were really intellectual material and

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felt that they should aim for practical, non-academic careers. For Rebecca’s mother, Jozefa, for example, he envisaged social work in a hospital. She became a successful journalist and editor. But the only two stories I ever heard of Bronio interacting with one of his children was when my mother told me that she had once said to him, ‘Daddy, what an ass you are’ and that he had written about it rather admiringly in one of his books. I was small enough to have been fascinated that he was not angry about it and horrified that she had been so cheeky to her father. My mother’s other story was confirmed by my aunt Jozefa. When Bronio was angry with one of his daughters, he would ask: ‘Do you know how much you cost me?’. His somewhat penurious youth seems to have left its mark. Bronio was, to us, a photograph in a leather frame showing a tiredlooking man at a desk. We knew he had done important work and we knew quite a few of his former Ph.D. students, who used to come to visit us from time to time. The visiting anthropologists would tell us how proud we should be of having had such a man as a grandfather. But I did notice that those who had also known my grandmother would then often add, with a light in their eyes, how wonderful and interesting she had been. As we grew older, and as my mother began going through her father’s papers at the LSE and elsewhere, we learned more about Bronio as Mummy rediscovered aspects of her father. She once brought home something she had found in a box of papers at the LSE, feeling guilty that she had stolen it, but certain that it was not important. It was an unsmoked cigarette, squashed flat, that Bronio must have left among his papers. She lit it to see if it still tasted of anything, which it didn’t, and then remarked that she had forgotten how much her father had smoked. I was in my early teens, and an avid anti-smoker, so Bronio fell a few notches in my estimation. We grew up hearing about his hypochondria, which extended to one of his daughters—Wanda—who was slim even as a young child. Bronio decided she was sickly, even though she was perfectly healthy. Mummy’s sympathy with Wanda came through loud and clear, and her two young children thought our grandfather had been pretty foolish not to notice that Wanda was a perfectly healthy child. If I may allow myself a moment of pop psychology, it may be no accident that photos of Bronio and Wanda as babies show two strikingly similar infants.

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RS Although our grandfather certainly loved his wife very much and suffered greatly because of her multiple sclerosis and early death at the age of 45, he continued to have affairs. He may have been faithful to her while she was still healthy, but he certainly was not once she fell ill. Helena once said that while she was going through her father’s papers she began to list all the women with whom he had affairs. She said she had, so far, eighteen names on the list. And that was only the women for whom she had, as she put it, name, rank and serial number. Malinowski certainly had affairs with some of his students. We know that, after Elsie died, he had an affair with Audrey Richards, whom he wanted to marry. She turned him down, as she knew that she would never be able to make a name for herself in anthropology if she became Mrs. Malinowska. The three Malinowska girls all regretted her decision as they were fond of Audrey. I remember … a generation later … visiting her in England as a young teenager and feeling an immediate bond of affection. LU Audrey remained an important figure in our lives acting as a kind of grandmother to my brother and me. We miss her to this day. RS To come to the last key female figure in Bronio Malinowski’s life— Valetta Swann, known universally in the family as ‘the wicked stepmother’, as in a fairy tale. Malinowski married Valetta in 1940. They had met in 1933 … Elsie was still alive, but gravely ill … and had begun an affair. The Malinowski girls disliked Valetta; Helena used to tell her children that while Elsie was dying of pneumonia and multiple sclerosis in their rented house in the village of Natters, near Innsbruck, Valetta was lurking in the neighbouring village, waiting for Elsie to die. The feelings of a desperate and angry ten-year-old ring through those words fairly clearly. Bronio was so aware of the fact that his daughters loathed Valetta that he did not tell them of the marriage until after the fact. The daughters’ loathing was only intensified by Valetta’s behaviour after Bronio’s death. As he died intestate and as his daughters were still very young … Jozefa was not quite 22 years old, Wanda was 20, and Helena one day shy of her 17th birthday, Valetta took possession of a number of things that should, at the least, have been shared with the three. My mother Jozefa’s mouth used to tighten whenever Valetta’s name came up. And she told me, as Helena did her children, that Valetta took,

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and sold, our Polish great-grandmother’s silver. According to my Aunt Helena, as soon as the war ended, Valetta sent her brother to collect it from the bank vault in London where Bronio had stored it before he left for the US. It would have been nice to have inherited some of that silver, just as a way of marking our Polish ancestry. Helena and Jozefa were also enraged many years later by the publication in 1967 of ‘A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term’, saying that Valetta’s very selective abridgement of Bronio’s diaries, and her approval of some very dubious translation, had clearly been aimed at boosting sales by making the book sensationalist. LU When I asked my mother once why Bronio had married Valetta if she was so nasty, her answer was that she was very attractive to men, i.e. sexy, although she was not pretty. It was said in a tone of contempt. RS We can’t be certain of Malinowski’s feelings towards all these women. Expressing emotions was not something men of his era and class were trained for. Those feelings towards women undoubtedly covered a wide spectrum, from filial love and respect towards his mother to a somewhat distant love towards his three children, and everything in between. But we do know … by looking at and reading about the women themselves … that he was attracted not to the kind of women whom men of his era and class were expected to marry—educated and skilled in certain arts, but nonetheless mostly accepting of their status as secondary to their husbands. Instead, Bronio chose women of independence and spirit, who were in many cases willing to defy the dictates of society and tradition.

References Wayne, Helena. 1984. “Bronisław Malinowski: The Influence of Various Women on His Life and Works.” Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford 15 (3): 189–203. ———. 1985. “Bronislaw Malinowski: The Influence of Various Women on His Life and Works.”American Ethnologist 12 (3): 529–40. ———. 1995. The Story of a Marriage: The Letters of Bronislaw Malinowski and Elsie Masson 1916–1920. Vol. I. London: Routledge.

The Graphy in Ethnography: Reconsidering the Gender of and in the Genre Elisabeth Tauber and Dorothy L. Zinn

On Sunday 24 April 1927 Elsie Masson wrote to Bronislaw Malinowski from Gries, a district of Bozen/Bolzano in Italy: Dearest One, I have just been doing the copying and have got as far as I can – into the middle of the song including the part about rejuvenation – and now I am stopped for want of paper. I had to use backs for the last pages but they are good backs and I know you don’t mind aesthetics if it is otherwise all right. In making my résumé about rejuvenation I did not include the whole myth about how mankind lost the power because I thought it was leading too far away from the sex subject. By the way, a thought occurred to me à propos of old age – I don’t think that anywhere in your mss.[manuscripts] have you mentioned ‘the return of age’ in women. Perhaps you have no special texts about it, perhaps the natives

E. Tauber (B) Faculty of Education, Free University of Bolzano, Bolzano, Italy e-mail: [email protected] D. L. Zinn Faculty of Education, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Bolzano, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 E. Tauber and D. L. Zinn (eds.), Gender and Genre in Ethnographic Writing, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71726-1_2

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have not got any very definite attitude about the matter, but you should, I think mention it … Monday 25 April. … I have finished the ms. and shall post it tomorrow. I feel very nervous till I get your judgment on it. (Wayne 1995, 91)

He responded enthusiastically to Elsie, finding her observations ‘excellent’ (ibid.), even if he ignored in his response her clear, friendly invitation to look at the issue from a female perspective, a perspective that was taken up by Annette Weiner fifty years later (Weiner 1976). This omission points to the central question of this volume: in what voice (inside or outside the academy)‚ can female as well as non-white male, can cultural sensemaking processes be described? Which authors are read, what authority is ascribed to which text? As ethnographers, we know that one of the great challenges after returning from fieldwork is to write down the experiences, relational networks and meanings from other worlds. How do we write which ideas and what do we write? This is as much a question of language creation and style as it is of the ideas we use to describe other ideas. In the words of Marilyn Strathern, ‘it matters what ideas one uses to think other ideas (with)’ (1992, 10). This book is inspired by the (working) relationship between Elsie Rosaline Masson and Bronislaw Malinowski, whose intimacy, love and mutual fascination and admiration lasted until Elsie’s death in 1935. Their correspondence (Wayne Vol I and II, 1995) bears witness to this. Furthermore, the Malinowski grandchildren Lucy Ulrich and Rebecca M. Stuart tell us in the prologue that she was described by their grandfather’s former students as an immensely inspiring woman. For us, the inspiration of Elsie Masson and her exchange with Bronislaw Malinowski is, in a sense, tied to the place of our academic activity. At the time she exchanged letters with Bronislaw, from 1922 to 1935, Elsie mainly lived in South Tyrol. The impetus behind the Malinowski Forum for Ethnography and Anthropology (MFEA) harks back to this biographical and local peculiarity in the couple’s lives (cf. Salvucci et al. 2019). For the Malinowski Forum, Elsie is a central figure whose role in Malinowski’s work and our discipline is given special consideration. The present volume is the result of discussions from the biennial symposium ‘Anthropological Talks in South Tyrol’, under the aegis of the Malinowski Forum since 2017, which in autumn 2019 focused on ‘Gender and Genre in Ethnographic Writing’. This theme stemmed from a conversation during the 2017 symposium that discussed

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Malinowski’s ethnographic legacy (Tauber and Zinn 2018). The subsequent symposium of 2019 was inspired by Frank Heidemann’s suggestion to consider not only ethnographic fieldwork but also the question of graphy, i.e. the process of ethnographic writing1 . The issue of writing as a research activity also chimes with both the fragmented and fully worked texts of Elsie Masson’s reflections on writing. We should also note her campaigning journalism before her marriage (Masson 1915), which Daniela Salvucci is elaborating in her contribution, her political engagement in both Australia and, later, South Tyrol, where she meticulously observed the colonial domination of the predominantly German and Ladin-speaking region by Italian facism, not to mention the important role she played in her partner’s writing. At the same time, through her biography, we are reminded of the era of the rise of political feminism in Australia, one of the first countries to grant women the right to vote in 1908 and access to medical schools for the first time in 1889 (Melbourne University, Young 2004, 450–451). In a sense, Elsie Masson acts as a guiding figure in our book: a talented and dedicated woman who, without holding an academic position herself, through her own early publications and as an editor and co-thinker helped shape her husband’s work, as we read in Salvucci’s contribution. However, we do not know if Elsie Masson would ever have wanted to be seen in this light. The chapter by Salvucci sheds light on the figure of Elsie Masson and her relationship to ethnographic writing, both in her accounts of Australia’s Northern Territories and in her complex role in Malinowski’s production of ethnographic texts. As Masson corresponded with Malinowski during his field stay in the Trobriands, she referred to his future ethnography as a ‘descriptive book’—a characterization that would come over the next two decades to be hurled disparagingly at some of the women we will consider below. In addition to emphasizing Masson’s own combination of keen observation, engagement and well-crafted writing, Salvucci notes that the Masson-Malinowski couple shared literary sensibilities, and in fact, Salvucci highlights the prominent role Masson played in the writing of Malinowski’s Argonauts and perhaps even some of his other texts. The ethnographic genre was, evidently, more fluid at the time. What happened to make Malinowski move in the direction of insisting upon ethnography as a scientific endeavour, and how did this clash with his style? Reading in Ulrich and Stuart’s Prologue about Malinowski’s mother and the other strong women in his life, one might be tempted to read his asseveration

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of ethnography’s scientific quality as an ambivalent exorcism of the feminine in his writing, a question we leave open. Whatever the case may be, by placing attention on Masson’s work in her own right, Salvucci responds to Schrock’s call for ‘challenging the historical and ongoing lack of recognition for important contributions of feminist ethnographers’ (Schrock 2013, 15), adding yet another woman to the genealogy of under-recognized foremothers. Elsie Masson was by no means the sole example of a male anthropologist’s wife living in her husband’s shadow (Tedlock 1995). Her role as the partner of one of the founders of modern social anthropology reflects a socio-political and academic tension that we are convinced we still have to confront, albeit under new conditions. While certain structural inequalities in terms of academic careers between white women and men seem to have been overcome (and even this is opinable), our main focus in this book is the question of the stylistic possibilities of ethnographic writing in the context of gender, academic power, the authority of ethnographic voices and anthropological theorizing. Somehow there is a paradox here; Masson influenced Malinowski in terms of content and style, thereby helping to establish a well-known academic style in our discipline. At the same time, it raises the question: Who is it that emerges as ‘authorized’ when a wife is writing or contributing to her ethnographer husband’s work? That is, who is bestowed with the status of an author, to have her work recognized? But we also mean ‘authorized’ in another sense, the more perfunctory one of being allowed, as historically, many women, indigenous and people of colour in anthropology have not been able to place their works alongside those that are regarded as canonically ethnographic. At times, they either pursued such writing covertly, in parallel with their ‘hegemonically academic’ work; at other times, they were kept on the margins of an academic system that would have enabled them to write in the relative comfort of guaranteed material necessities. In the prologue by Ulrich and Stuart, we read that Audrey Richards turned down Malinowski’s proposal of marriage, knowing that as Mrs. Malinowska, she would no longer have the chance to be taken seriously in academia. One hundred years after Malinowski, the opportunities for white women have changed radically. But questions of style, rhetoric, gender and authority remain relevant today: many white female anthropologists, women of colour, men who do not live up to the heteronormative white-male image, as well as female ethnographic research partners have been at the foreground of looking for different forms of expression

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that are capable of thinking and writing the other. In doing so, they break through established academic writing conventions (see Paloma Gay y Blasco and Omar Kasmani in this volume) to bring in culture and gendervariant voices. Do these authors still risk being discredited, as Anne Tsing needed to assert in 1993? Two ways of being discredited have loomed particularly large: First, these scholars can be classed with the semi-professional wives of male scholars and administrators who write popular accounts of their travels; second, they can be classed as radical ‘sisters’ who ignore the tenets of scholarship in formulating a political creed. (Tsing 1993, 224)

Yet it is not only a matter of the women that Tsing describes here: the operations of ‘the matrix of domination’ (Hill Collins 2000) have worked equally to exclude men of colour and non-heteronormative men, whose own gender positionalities have been inscribed within complex hierarchies of race, class, ableism and sexual orientation. For this reason, drawing on an awareness fostered through scholarship by women of colour and concepts of intersectionality, we would like to underline that ‘gender’ in our discussion is not limited to the category ‘female’, especially that of white women. The watershed moment in anthropology for a meditation on our writing practices was, of course, the publication of Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986). This was a work that brought to the fore a focus on genre and craft in ethnographic writing, but it riled the feminists of the time in its complete lack of attention to issues of gender and feminist precursors in experimentation. Feminists were particularly frustrated over the outpouring of white-male angst about writing, making experimentation and reflexivity the new trend, whereas women, people of colour and some white men had long been held back when such genre bending was belittled. In A Thrice-Told Tale (1992), Margery Wolf makes it clear that she does not share the postmodern critique of the form of ethnographic writing. By comparing her own three narratives of an event during her fieldwork—short story, field notes and essay—she criticizes the focus on form as exclusionary and unethical, accessible only to ‘first-world academics with literary inclinations’ (Wolf 1992, 138). For Wolf, experimentation with literary forms only makes sense as long as it can be made accessible to a broad readership, but never for the sake of art itself. We would add that ethnographic writing after returning from fieldwork is

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always and for everyone experimentation and a search for the right form according to the specific context. The critiques of Writing Culture emerging in feminist anthropological circles culminated in Behar and Gordon’s landmark volume, Women Writing Culture (1995). A number of anthropologists, both women and men, practiced a style of writing and reflection that deviated from the established norm long before the reflexive turn of the 1980s. Yet the integration of stylistic deviations into a new canon takes time and cannot be explained without reference to academic social, political, economic and historical contexts. That a subjective, positioned attitude and content as well as style preceded the reflexive turn is therefore nothing unusual. It was there, but no one in the academic mainstream noticed or took it up. Is this not similar to the dynamics of the emergence of a scientific fact so vividly described by Ludwik Fleck (1975 [1935])? With this in mind, we may again cite the work of Margery Wolf, who used literary elements to describe the ‘private’ life of a Taiwanese family she lived with (1967). Focusing on women, she examined kinship and family relationships, challenging the dichotomy between private and public and anticipating postmodern reflection at length. In an interview with Lisa Rofel, she recalls her experience with the review of her second major work, Women and the Family in Rural Taiwan (1972): The first review of Women and the Family was pretty mean. I was hurt. It made me realize that I was fishing in the big guys’ ponds. I either had to quit writing anthropology or to quit reading reviews. This may sound silly, but it took me a long time to take myself seriously as a scholar. (Rofel and Wolf 2003, 597)

We note how, well before Wolf, many such ethnographic works from the 1920s and 1930s disappeared deep within the closed stacks of major libraries, only to resurface in their online catalogues. It is to the credit of a scholar operating in the field of rhetorical studies, Risa Applegarth‚ that these early works have resurfaced to draw attention to how they defied a mainstream positivist and objectivist genre‚ to display instead an obvious tone of autoethnographic, fictional or fragmented self-reflection. While prominent anthropologists feared, or sought to prevent, a ‘feminization’ of the discipline, such as Kroeber (cited in Applegarth 2014, 28), it is precisely these ‘feminized’ authors who had a stylistically avant-garde character.

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To what extent have conditions changed today, some three and a half decades after Writing Culture, and a quarter of a century after Women Writing Culture? In what new directions might this intersection take us? Both of us completed our doctorates in a post-Writing Culture period, by which time the insights of the volume had become orthodoxy; much less widespread, though, were the arguments of Women Writing Culture. Looking back from our vantage point today, we felt that it was time to renew a disciplinary reflection on the multi-stranded interconnections of gender and ethnographic writing, without wanting to reinvent the wheel, as Margery Wolf (Rofel and Wolf 2003) reminds us. To discuss this, we brought together, in the intimate gathering of our symposium, a heterogeneous group of anthropologists, both established and early career scholars, women and men (for gender is not only about ‘women’), from different origins and intellectual traditions. With this introductory essay and the chapters that follow, we continue a tradition of paying homage to the work of many, especially women, who have variously drawn attention to the gendered history of ethnographic writing (Behar and Gordon 1994; Visweswaran 1988, 1994, 1997; Schrock 2013). Today, we argue, despite some excellent occasional reflections, the disciplinary conversation explicitly looking at gender and writing past and present appears more muted than in its heyday of the early-to-mid 1990s, as the silence surrounding Applegarth’s book would seem to testify2 . Indeed, not one of the over fifty short essays in a recent collection, Writing Anthropology (McGranahan 2020), considers the issue of gender. Have the insights of past critiques and experiments been absorbed to the point where discussion is no longer needed? Has the question of gender in writing been superseded? To what extent does it make sense to still think of ethnographic writing in terms of gender, and if so, what might be the relevance of gender to ethnographic writing today? We present a series of contributions that, each in its own way, is the continuation of those previous insights, and this introductory essay lays out some questions of the gender of genre and gender in genre.

Genre and Context Literary studies tell us that genre cannot be considered independently from social context. As abstract, socially recognized forms of the application and use of language, genres are embedded in contexts just as language is embedded in and constitutes social realities (Hyland 2002,

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114). Moreover, as we have learned from Bakhtin, genres mediate ideology, thereby constituting ways of seeing the world, and diachronic transformations in genres are related to social change (Bakhtin 1984, 1986). Being a woman, African American or First Nations person inherently entailed moving outside a particular context, on the margins, the peripheries of inner academic circles. Sponsored by foundations but never given established academic positions, this led to expression in new genres that we now recognize as thoroughly contemporary. Edbauer (cited in Applegarth 2014, 28) describes the establishment of a text in the academic canon as conditioned by readers, authors, contexts and requirements, and calls this phenomenon ‘rhetorical ecologies’ (Edbauer 2005). We can currently observe such a phenomenon in academically recognized languages and styles. Rhetorical ecology develops in parallel with central and peripheral discourses, authors of the global North and the global South, de- and postcolonial writing practices, and national linguistic hegemonies. For example, we can see a reproduction of English-language writing styles. Linguists observe with concern the increasing dominance of English in academic culture and the loss of stylistic and linguistic diversity within different national traditions. The far-ranging epic writing of Italian scholars is increasingly squeezed into the tight corset of English-language essay writing, and French anthropologists are conversant in English to a much greater extent than they were thirty years ago. This phenomenon encompasses more than language and genre; it strikes at the heart of anthropological self-understanding, namely what can be translated and how, and whether are there possibly concepts that are not translatable from one culture to another (Rubel and Rosman 2003). Genre also encompasses different academic writing cultures in different academic languages and national contexts, as Ribeiro and Escobar (2006) have shown in their attention to world anthropologies. Sonia Ryang rightly states that: …the matter is not simply about the use of a particular language as a communicative tool between the author and the reader. The privileged use of a particular language involves privileging of concepts and categories historically and epistemologically defined by that language, thereby simultaneously subjugating concepts and categories defined by other languages. (1997, 36)

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Language(s), concepts, categories and genres risk being homogenized within the framework of a linguistic imperialism and a global matrix of domination. We ourselves refer exclusively to English-language literature in this introduction, something that was a conscious decision. Although we both draw on multilingual contexts and teach at a trilingual university, we decided to focus on the dominant academic language in order to look at developments and trends at the centre of events. This decision is not one of exclusion—we have both published our important work in German, Italian and French—but one that responds to the dynamics of negotiating power over language and genre in the academic enterprise (Nic Craithd 2016). As for the rest of this volume, although it is in English, most of the authors are not native speakers of the language, even if they are fully conversant with Anglophone anthropology and ethnographic traditions. In many ways, Hande Birkalan-Gedik’s chapter provides a counterpoint to the overall Anglophone emphasis by exploring the specific historic relationship between gender and genre within Turkish ethnography. However, Birkelan-Gedik also invokes her training in Anglophone academia, which embeds her own anthropological and feminist socialization in a non-Turkish academic context, thereby enabling her to analyse a Turkish nationalist process of diversity exclusion. In this specific political and academic space of sameness, within its own matrix of domination, ethnographies included women by moulding them into a patriarchal and masculinist model of the Turkish state. Even so, Birkalan-Gedik shows how inspiration and intellectual stimulation triggered by the Writing Culture and Women Writing Culture debate, arriving in Turkey with a considerable time lag, clashes with an academic resistance to feminist textuality that in Turkey finds itself in stark contrast to feminist activism. Her question whether to take this ‘“weak textuality” as a drawback or an unconventional, yet down-played feature’ reverberates female strategies of survival: ‘“strongly activist” and “weakly textual” ethnographies as strategies to remain “alive” within academia’ as Birkalan-Gedik writes, bring us close to approaches so familiar to women and minority groups. As noted above, it seems that the genres and ideas with which we describe other ideas have essentially become interwoven into a single web of relations in the history of ethnographic writing. Clifford Geertz points out how ‘the ethnographer “inscribes” social discourse, he [sic] writes it down. In so doing he [sic] turns it from a passing event, which exists only in its own moment of occurrence, into an account, which exists in its

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inscription and can be reconsulted’ (Geertz 1973, 19). The inscription of social discourses and the complexity of life is also related to our artistry and, as Virginia Woolf called for, the use of ‘every quality of brain and spirit’ (quoted by Nigel Rapport in this volume). Certainly, it is nothing new to observe that aesthetics, complexity, discourse and perception are never neutral. In literature, women have had to assert themselves against male critical power by making gendered power dynamics their literary subject. Nigel Rapport follows these traces, using Virginia Woolf as a model, with, at the same time, scepticism about what can be said literarily or even ethnographically without detracting from the complexity of life. Rapport has silence per se in mind as a feminine and structural phenomenon, the silence that is there, not transformed and not made visible, sayable, discussable through resonance with the world. He proposes an anthropology of silence, again following Virginia Woolf, a homely silence. Silence and solitude as closely related individual complexities become, in Rapport’s anthropology, a mission through which we can learn to understand being human. The privilege of silence into which he retreats in his fieldwork with farmers in England is an inner world that allows him to make no mistakes, no not-right statements. The habitus of silence refers to the practice of porters giving space to the other as another expression of the same. Nigel Rapport’s contribution engages with the perspective of inscribed discourses of female experiences of silence to reflect on these across two different ethnographic contexts. And his text becomes an experiment in style and content in which he finds himself in good female company.

Blurred Genres and Boundary Work In the 1920s, as the discipline began to professionalize—Malinowski’s first chapter from The Argonauts of the Western Pacific is only one example of this—women‚ people of colour and indigenous people were increasingly marginalized in academic anthropology (cf. Applegarth 2014, 26–27). Although Margaret Mead and Ruth Bunzel, writing as late as 1960 in The Golden Age of Anthropology, were still convinced that our discipline welcomed women and members of minorities, the early years of academic professionalisation showed that while there was rich participation by them in ethnographic research, many women, people of colour and indigenous scholars still did not obtain access to academic positions. These authors include Elsie Clews Parsons, Gladys

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Reichard, Ella Cara Deloria, Ruth Underhill, Ruth Bunzel, Clara Lee Tanner, Zora Neale Hurston, Esther Schiff Goldfrank, Erba Gunther, Hortense Powdermaker, Edward Dozier (Tewa Pueblo), William Jones (Fox), Gladis Tantaquitgeon (Mohegan), Louis Eugene King and Arthur Huff Fauset to name but a few (ibid.). Furthermore, despite the indisputable prominence of Franz Boas, widespread anti-Semitism and antinon-white sentiment characterized the nascent professionalized discipline in the US (ibid., 39, 61). Many female researchers fished for one research grant after another, while their white-male colleagues established themselves in secure academic positions. As Risa Applegarth points out, in many disciplines, the demarcation between professionals and amateurs has proven to be a working strategy to secure the privileges associated with academic positions (ibid., 2). One possible way of drawing a dividing line between professionals and amateurs was through the academic fixing of stylistic forms of ethnographic writing. However, although some dividing lines have shifted, these practices of inclusion and exclusion are by no means a thing of the past. In her contribution, Paloma Gay y Blasco shares how an anonymous reviewer questioned whether Writing Friendship (2020), her manuscript co-authored with Liria Hernández, should be read as a scholarly text. This experience is no exception. Although we would like to assume that some things have changed since the 1920s and 1930s—when there was an attempt to prevent the feminization and ‘indigenization‘ of the discipline—recent research shows that we continue to reproduce structural inequalities and practice content exclusion within the European and American academies in the early twenty-first century. Voices on the peripheries write vehemently against the silence and silencing: an outraged Zoe Todd (2016), for example, points to a range of grievances, including the exclusion of Inuit knowledge and philosophy from ‘ontological’ discourse on climate change, or male and white dominance in structured academic positions in the UK. Georgina Stewart (2017) uses critical discourse analysis and concepts from M¯aori philosophy to respond to Eurocentric social science that continues to reproduce itself following the work of Mauss. Indigenous scholars and feminists are adding their voices through new publishing outlets, but the inner circle seems to remain untouched. The publication landscape has changed, and the opportunities to also have one’s voice heard in central forums have become different, not least through digital worlds. A stirring experience for many of us was the broad debate over publication practices in the

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journal HAU that spawned, as a major consequence, an incredibly vocal critique (at least in cyberspace) of white-male dominance in anthropology, indicting publication and citation practices for reproducing a hegemonic elite.3 From all these peripheral perspectives, it becomes clear that we still have an epistemological problem with indigenous and female knowledge in the broadest sense. The process of inclusion/exclusion, which Thomas Gieryn (1999) has called ‘boundary work’, has never been interrupted, even if genres and genders have been given more leeway. Boundary work remains a core business of every academic discipline, and our book aims to contribute to reflecting on and re-exploring new boundaries and possibilities. Feminist ethnography, it has been suggested, is itself a genre (Visweswaran 1997). As feminist ethnography developed through thirdwave critiques, engagements with poststructuralism, postmodernism and postcolonial/subaltern studies all opened new pathways for experimentation in the process of writing. As Ruth Behar has recently noted, ‘Every ethnographer reinvents the genre of ethnography when sitting down to write’ (Behar 2020, 49). This is also true on the level of writing that, collectively, establishes traditions, as Hande Birkalan-Gedik points out with regard to the case of feminist ethnography in Turkey. Birkalan-Gedik herself trained in the US, and she indicates how she attempted to incorporate some of the stylistic devices, post-Writing Culture, into her own work. And yet, agency in writing ethnography, as in any other genre, is not free from relations of power and structural constraints impinging on the conditions of production. As Women Writing Culture most forcefully argued, the writings of a number of women anthropologists in the first half of the twentieth century anticipated some of the forms of experimentation celebrated in Writing Culture. However, Risa Applegarth’s ‘rhetorical archaeology’ of US anthropology, already mentioned above, moves the dating back even further, to works dating from the 1880s, and expands the historiography of experimentation within the genre to include men of colour alongside white women and indigenous authors. In any case, the writings of all of the figures variously remembered are characterized by sundry features that suggest the theme of gender. As a caveat, we should state that we do not subscribe to an essentializing position, one that might argue that all experimentation is gendered ‘female’, or that women ethnographers are inherently experimental in their approaches‚ or at least‚ more experimental than men. By the same token, we do not want

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to suggest that all men in the history of anthropology have been averse to pushing the envelope of the genre, or that their gender necessarily determines a conventional writing style. And yet, in examining the host of ethnographic texts that can be defined as non-canonical or genre bending, we can point to various features in writing that have, in recent decades, been conscientiously theorized by scholars whose work is informed by and imbued with thinking about gender. One key element relates to descriptive modes of writing, which EvansPritchard, referring to Margaret Mead, derogatorily labelled as ‘chatty and feminine’: This [Coming of Age in Samoa] is a discursive, or perhaps I should say chatty and feminine, book with a leaning towards the picturesque, what I call the rustling-of-the-wind-in-the-palm-trees kind of anthropological writing, for which Malinowski set the fashion. (Evans-Pritchard 1951, 96)

The fact that Evans-Pritchard criticized Mead’s style here, while holding Malinowski responsible for it (recalling Masson’s comment above) probably also has to do with the occasionally difficult relationship between Evans-Pritchard and Malinowski (cf. Morton 2007). Such a style has also characterized descriptive, often first-person accounts produced by wives of anthropologists, as opposed to their husband’s ‘objective’, thirdperson ethnographies (Visweswaran 1988; Tedlock 1995). Countering a masculinist association of ‘science’ and the ‘rational’ with male writing, Catherine Lutz’s contribution in Women Writing Culture contests the dichotomy between theory and description and a parallel duo of ‘scientific’ and ‘artful’ (Lutz 1995). She observes: Theory has acquired a gender insofar as it is more frequently associated with male writing, with women’s writing more often seen as description, data, case, personal, or in the case of feminism, ‘merely’ setting the record straight. (ibid., 251)

On the basis of this division, Lutz claims, the work of women anthropologists (whether or not they have been attributed disciplinary standing as anthropologists) has been devalued and its contribution to the canon downplayed. According to Lutz, postmodernism in anthropology, with its attendant stylistic features, has likewise been coded feminine. To what extent does Lutz’s contention still ring true today? Although it is beyond

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the scope of this essay, it would be interesting to verify to what extent present-day scholars are saving more descriptive or experimental works for when they have secured their academic position, as often seemed to be the case in the past. In our own, anecdotal experience in hiring commissions, we are finding that new generations of scholars are comfortable with presenting ethnographically informed, non-academic publications on their CVs. It may be that now, decades later, ethnographers have incorporated the lessons of Writing Culture as part of their authorial habitus. Having done so, one might suggest that they have managed to push the envelope of the genre to such a degree that Lutz’s dichotomy has softened and artfulness is no longer a taboo. And yet, does the subgenre of the ethnographic novel—or, as we see increasingly today, the “(ethno-)” graphic novel—hold the same effective value in the academic job market as a more canonical representative of ethnography? Like Lutz, Lila Abu-Lughod (1990) has also treated the theory/description duality as a gendered distinction, placing it alongside other dichotomies: professional/unprofessional, abstract/concrete, citational/personal observation and subjective/objective. Taking up this latter pair, another crucial dimension of arguably gendered writing has been the problematization of objectivity. Certainly, feminist anthropologists were rankled by Writing Culture’s pretence to be at the forefront of debunking omniscient narration, textual constructions of (masculine) authority and objectivity. They were quick to point out how, already in the early twentieth century, the works of Zora Neale Hurston, Elsie Clews Parsons, Ella Cara Deloria, and Gladys Reichard offered alternative textual models. In contrast to the monological narrator’s voice that dominated ethnographic works of her period, Zora Neale Hurston (1935, 1938), for example, employed a polyphonic style. However, following Writing Culture and interest in the scholarship of Bakhtin, the attempt to render texts more dialogic or polyphonic has become much more mainstream. Other devices that ethnographers have employed to break with the oldschool style have included confessional forms and first-person narration, these emerging as part of the well-known reflexive turn. Today, few anthropologists would bat an eyelash at them. The whole question of subjectivity and objectivity entailed in reflexiveturn discussions led to an increasing awareness of the embodied nature of the ethnographer’s existence in and out of the field. Already in works like those of Zora Neale Hurston and Ruth Landes (1947)‚ precursors

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did not erase their embodied subjectivities as ethnographers. We cite Risa Applegarth (2014), again, for her detailed analysis of the rhetorical strategies used by early women in the discipline through a genre she categorizes as ‘field autobiographies’; in this, she includes Gladys Reichard’s Spider Woman (1934). Moreover, Applegarth also discusses how Ella Deloria and Zora Neale Hurston, themselves members of the groups studied, subverted the purportedly objective authority of whitemale anthropologists by appropriating the genre of ‘folklore collections’. As Applegarth notes, ‘the “native ethnographer” is an impossibility in Malinowksi’s version of fieldwork’ (Applegarth 2014, 112). In spite of her analytic merits, the fact that Applegarth is a scholar outside the discipline is apparent in her lack of reference to autoethnography, which embraces both of these types of writings. While there is no definitive agreement on the definition of autoethnography, Deborah Reed-Danahay—one of its most prominent proponents—has emphasized that the term refers both to ‘autobiographical writing with ethnographic interest’ and to works by ethnographers studying their own group (ReedDanahay 1997, 2). Reed-Danahay situates the growth of autoethnography within the context of a revival of life history in anthropology since the mid-1980s, concomitant with postmodern questionings of identity and position; in our view, however, Caroline Brettell justly highlights the role of feminism, alongside postmodernism, in having ‘directed our attention to the autobiographical dimension of the anthropological encounter’ (1997, 224). We editors‚ too, as ethnographers from a subsequent generation, have benefitted from these trends: within our ethnographies today, we are able to take for granted that we can ‘place the self within a social context’ (Reed-Danahay 1997, 9). For example, when Dorothy Zinn wrote her monograph about South Tyrol (Zinn 2018), she included an excursus with recollections from her own childhood in South Texas to situate how she experienced ethnolinguistic division in Italy’s Germanspeaking province. She did so with little concern that this might be seen as a navel-gazing operation, convinced instead that it contributed to a clearer understanding of her position and how her perception of South Tyrolean society was connected to her own biography. From the 1990s on, the visibility of the ethnographer’s self flourished even further, not only with general reflexivity, but also through a specific attention to the body in the development of anthropologies of the senses and the concomitant treatment of sensual dimensions in ethnographic writing. Such an attention to all of the senses helps us to counter the

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privileging of vision and visual metaphors that have long been the standard in ethnographic writing, and which have long been associated with a dominating, male gaze. As Constance Classen (1998) has pointed out, modern Western culture has associated the ‘lower’, non-visual senses with the female. Paul Stoller (1989, 1997), who has championed sensuousness in ethnographic writing, observes how it not only improves our descriptions for reader, but also better grasps central metaphors and ways of experiencing and remembering in many societies. However, the theme of embodiment has still other ramifications on an epistemological level, as Stoller notes, citing feminist and post-structuralist critiques of phallocentric Cartesianism (ibid). Negating the possibility of an objective, ‘god trick’ view, Donna Haraway has insisted on a notion of situated knowledge, based on what she calls a ‘feminist embodiment’ (Haraway 1988). Similarly, and also related to the discussion of autoethnography, Lila AbuLughod (1991) recognizes the crucial nature of positionality. Haraway’s situated knowledge has to do with truth claims and a broader problematization of positivism; along these lines, in much feminist and queer writing, we find the writing dwelling in uncertainty and how to render it textually, a theme that emerges in the essays in this volume by Paloma Gay y Blasco, Nigel Rapport and Omar Kasmani.

Writing for Whom? Historically, and to a greater extent than among their male counterparts, a number of women writing ethnography have been viewed as ‘popularisers’ in their writing style, their publication venues, or both. Salvucci notes how Malinowski himself was interested in reaching popular audiences, and Elsie Masson seems to have played a role in the style he adopted. Indicting a gendered prejudice, scholars have commented on how ‘popular’ genres of ethnographic writing have been devalued in the academic economy, both historically and in contemporary times. But what does popularising mean stylistically, and for whom might we popularise? This question raises the issue of audience, which is a factor that is part-andparcel of a genre, for as Threadgold notes, genres specify ‘typical modes of address and possible positions for an audience’ and must be understood ‘both as models for making texts and, once made, as models for understanding them’ (Threadgold 1997, 96–7). One level of popular audience would, of course, be the general public ‘back home’, more apt to enjoy a work devoid of the trappings of a conventional scientific text and graced

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with a literary sensibility. One thinks here of Margaret Mead, of course, who wrote in a way that made her ethnography accessible to lay people, as in Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), or Ruth Benedict’s writerly Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946). But the public popularity of women authors, including Margaret Mead herself, was considered an indication of their lower academic credibility (Tedlock 1995; Lutekehaus 1995). Many commentators have noted how such writing has been disparaged as not sufficiently scientific (see Evans-Pritchard above), and it has generally not been particularly helpful for gaining job security within the academy (Abu Lughod 1990; Lutz 1995; Visweswaran 1988). The ethnographic fictions and factions of some anthropologists, such as Ella Deloria’s Waterlily (1988) or fieldwork memoirs like Elisabeth Fernea’s Guests of the Sheik (1969) have followed yet another avenue to accessibility. Although many of the female authors mentioned were not included in the academic canon, they have had influences on multiple changes to the ethnographic genre. These women have contributed significantly to a public anthropology, both within the disciplinary confines of academia and through their insertion of ethnographic descriptions into the public sphere. What we emphasize as increasingly important today—reflecting on forms of communication with a wider public, genre and the question of sharing our knowledge, as well as permitting bridge-building to the non-academic world—was practiced by many of these early women writers. In the history of anthropology, the risk to one’s career of publishing a popular work has been palpable, for many of these women have published their works with pseudonyms: the case of Laura Bohannan is emblematic, with her Return to Laughter (1964) written under the pen name of Elenore Bowen Smith. Presently, we are witnessing a blossoming interest in these non-canonical forms, favoured in part by the ease of circulation through self-publishing, online platforms and blogs.4 Ethnographers have also gone beyond the standard academic formats of the journal article or monograph to convey ethnographic material and insights within popular containers: Mead, again, was a primary example of this as a prolific public intellectual, publishing in newspapers and magazines, including women’s magazines.5 In contemporary anthropology, Scandinavian ethnographers have been particularly effective in establishing a public presence (Eriksen 2006). Indeed, Helena Wulff (2016) has made a strong case for the value of such writing and the positive spillover effect it has on academic writing. In addition to conventional print media, digital media have become important channels for educating

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and engaging a general public, particularly with blogs and social media accounts—what George Marcus has called ‘commons of various sorts’ (Marcus 2012, 429). At another level of audience, ethnography has the potential to embrace publics that can use ethnographic knowledge in order to guide action. Writing of this sort would include reports for non-governmental organizations and policy makers, an activity in which anthropologists are increasingly involved. But ethnography can also guide action by addressing practitioners directly, as we see in the example provided in Marina Della Rocca’s chapter in this volume, which relates how she wrote up her ethnography of women’s shelters and the migrant women who turn to them. Della Rocca is attentive to ways she can reconcile feminist principles with the construction of a Ph.D. thesis, a classic genre for an academic audience—one in which ethnographic writing is arguably most rigid, part of the rite of passage that proves a novice worthy of admission to the scientific community. Della Rocca recounts her efforts at making her work understood by the operators in women’s shelters; moreover, she emphasizes how her ethnographic writing was permeable to the terminology used by the operators themselves, drawing on a shared feminist epistemology that itself has political implications for the work they do. In this sense, Della Rocca stands in the tradition of feminist ethnography, whose understanding of research is that it should be socially and politically relevant for its research subjects: she explicitly refuses a neutral observation point—the ‘god trick’—and instead adopts a stance that is both committed and oppositional. This leads us to yet another potential audience, that of the research participants themselves. Indeed, Paloma Gay y Blasco’s co-author Liria Hernández is very explicit in reclaiming the right to be able to read what is being written about her. Just as with the piece by Marina Della Rocca, Gay y Blasco’s contribution raises sensitive questions that Judith Stacey (1988) already explored forty years ago. The promise of a feminist ethnography of equality and reciprocity can be misleading and threatening to research subjects; keeping this promise may not be feasible. As with a feminist ethnography’s assumption of universal female experiences leading to a fading out of power relations between researcher and research subject (Lila Abu-Lughod 1990), the promise of reciprocity is tricky. Gay y Blasco’s chapter takes us through her own ten-year process of working with Liria Hernández, in which she has to deconstruct ethnographic thinking and writing in order to relearn it. It is the non-academic anthropologist

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Liria who‚ through her presence as co-author‚ shows the academic Paloma how the anthropological world works. The radical nature of the genre is an exemplar of Donna Haraway’s ‘being at risk’, in that Gay y Blasco allows her own framework to be shaken up. In this sense, her contribution in this book is also an ethnography of the mechanisms of a discipline that is driven by competition and fierce rivalry with and demarcation from the outside world. Although addressed decades ago, dilemmas of the privileged voice continue to preoccupy feminist researchers today. How can we simplify technical language and meet the responsibility for the representation of research subjects (cf. for example Frank 2000 or Lather and Smithies 1997)? At the same time, how can we address the specificity of the research subject, the local context and culturally situated knowledge with sensitivity? And how can we meet the self-conscious demand of research subjects who want to be actively involved in the process of analysis and writing? As Elizabeth Enslin narrates, challenged by her Nepalese sister-in-law, she rethought her writing in the context of feminist practice, avoiding the use of disciplinary jargon, paying attention to the concerns of the participants in order to enable them to contribute to ‘a written work reflecting a collective, dialectical process of building theory through struggles for change’ (Enslin 1994, 545). We also find this action and practice orientation from the legacy of feminist perspectives to be particularly strong in the case of Turkish feminist ethnography, which Hande Birkalan-Gedik tells us (this volume) has a weak textual counterpart. Nonetheless, works with a strong applied or activist dimension have not always been held in the highest regard academically: in her critique cited above, Catherine Lutz (1995) argued that they have occupied a subordinate ‘female’ slot in a gendered division of theory and practice, whereby they have long been seen as the academy’s stepsister. Much more recently, however, there is an increased legitimacy of anthropology ‘at home’. With scholars performing ‘third mission’ service from within a university, or as anthropologists who are finding work outside of academia or are serving in research and consulting roles while they seek a tenured position, applied work and activism in ethnographic writing have gradually gained in status (Tauber and Zinn 2015). Yet within the academic world itself, ‘public’ genres, such as journalism, creative nonfiction and ethnographic fiction still do not have the credibility and credential-building capacity of conventional ethnography. That is, within

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academic institutions—and it is especially explicit with contemporary evaluation processes—the energy and effort expended in such writing are by no means regularly rewarded with recognition towards tenure and promotion. If we may attribute genders to these genres, we find an interesting reversal of the public/private dichotomy discussed at length in secondwave feminism, where ‘male’ is associated with the public sphere, and ‘female’ with the private (or domestic) sphere (Rosaldo 1974). What we find here is that ‘public’ genres of ethnographic writing are symbolically aligned with the feminine, devalued with respect to the ‘private’ academic sphere, a masculine-gendered boys club. There are some timid steps, however, to bring about change in this regard. The same universities that follow hiring and promotion procedures attributing fewer merits to public, popularising texts are increasingly called to justify their ‘relevance’ to stakeholders and to society at large. While we should be aware that this development bears the risk of tethering research to extra-academic agendas, unduly limiting the freedom of research, it does have a positive potential for creating an incentive to give such works visibility. Tuning into this zeitgeist, in 2017 the American Anthropological Association published a report in which they recognized the problem posed by public genres for career evaluation and offered a set of guidelines for hiring and tenure committees on how to evaluate public outreach writings and applied texts of various sorts.6 In Italy, where we work, the agency that evaluates university research outputs, ANVUR, recognizes the value of activities like ‘public engagement’ and ‘social-cultural impacts’ in its periodic research assessments; however, this opening has not yet affected directly and concretely the academic careers of individual scholars.

Writing with Whom? Writing may take on various aspects of collaboration, whether among scholars or between researchers and their participants. With regard to the question of gender, we focus here on the different ways in which collaborative work with research subjects takes place in the production of ethnographic texts. The well-known concern here—the combined legacy of Writing Culture, feminist and postcolonial theory—is that standard practices in ethnographic writing, emerging from masculinist and colonial histories of studying ‘Others’, objectify Others through various aspects of textuality and the writing process itself. Experimentation in ethnographic

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writing has therefore included a careful attention to forms of representation, and within this, the degree of voice that research subjects have in the text. Collaborative approaches in the process of creating ethnographic writing have emerged, in part, as a decolonizing strategy (Lassiter 2005), and in part as the result of a feminist ethos. Not coincidentally, along with public and applied work more generally, collaborative approaches have increasingly come to the fore in ethnographic research projects. Although there is a feminist-inspired emphasis on practice, there is a suspicion in some quarters that experimentation in textuality is simply a makeover without deeper effects (cf. Harrison 1991). Collaboration does not necessarily mean co-authorship, though it well might. While it is somewhat artificial to separate out the research and writing aspects of doing ethnography, since our focus here is on writing, we hold to the division provisionally in order to examine collaboration in the process of writing the results for some particular audience, rather than dwell on possible collaborative features in doing research itself. Given that the world is, in many ways, more interconnected than in Malinowski’s day, it is one in which it is ever more likely that ‘they read what we write’ (Brettell 1993). The ethos of reciprocity has, in collaborative work, made it standard practice that we give our texts to the people with whom we worked. Both of us as authors have had to face the uncomfortable fallout of publishing a work when the people we have written about reacted to it. As women who have married into the groups we have studied, the personal has become an ethnographic political in ways that are not always easy to negotiate in writing. For Elisabeth Tauber (2007, 2014) in particular, writing became a balancing act between stylistic considerations for an academic non-Sinti audience, cultural considerations for a Sinti audience living with us who associates every form of writing with scepticism and mistrust, but also with expectations and political strategies (Trevisan 2008), and weighing what can be told and how when a non-academic audience is also reading on sensitive topics such as female peddling and begging. It is another matter, however, to involve our research participants in some fashion in the crafting of these texts. Often scholars will show drafts of their work in progress to their research participants, seeking their feedback for verification of the analysis, or simply as a means of eliciting further data. But the question of authorship remains squarely in the hands of the researcher, who may or may not incorporate this feedback

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to varying degrees. Moving a step further along the continuum, ethnographers may actively seek the involvement of the text’s subjects in order to disrupt their monologic voice, thereby yielding ‘dialogical ethnography’ (Lassiter 2000). While Lassiter applauds the intention and results of dialogical ethnography, pointing to its similarities with writings that can more substantially be defined as ‘collaborative’, he observes that ‘dialogic ethnography is ultimately about creating better and more nuanced texts for the academy’ (ibid., 610). It is here that he draws a distinction with collaborative ethnography, whose final goals more clearly embrace those of the collectivity studied. Lassiter points to the focus that collaborative, rather than ‘merely’ dialogical, ethnography places on dialogue regarding the production of the text itself. As he puts it, ‘Collaborative ethnography is thus, in the end, a moral and ethical undertaking, one that ultimately privileges the discourse between consultant(s) and ethnographer over a disciplinary discourse’ (ibid.). Marina Della Rocca’s essay incorporates many of these goals and insights, and she reviews the ways in which her feminist stance led her to involve the women’s shelter operators and migrant women in the writing of her thesis, more fully collaborative in the former case, and more dialogically in the latter. In the process, she creates a work that is highly autoethnographic, embodying feminist principles of reflexivity, dialogicity and ‘giving voice’. She seeks ways to render her academic text permeable to the women she is working with, especially the members of the association operating a women’s shelter, cultivating a ‘reciprocal contamination’ (p. 90). She allows for a degree of collaboration in the writing process itself, hence the decision to actively involve the DoRi association in the textual representation. The process is not always smooth, and Della Rocca exposes some of the bruises she picked up along the way, fully embodying the figure of Behar’s ‘vulnerable observer’ (Behar 1996). There are no hard-and-fast rules for such forms of collaboration, and the choices made have to grapple with various other factors in ethnographic practice. For example, this can be the appropriateness of guaranteeing anonymity versus acknowledgement of a degree of participants’ intellectual property within the ethnographic enterprise, or the value that a co-authored text may or may not have in the academic economy. Nor, in the rapture of a romantic vision of collaboration or friendship (see Lawless 2000), should we fall into the trap of presuming that our research participants themselves share such a view, against which Bruegemann (1996) cautions us. On the basis of her own difficulties in

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doing ethnography among the hearing impaired, Bruegemann concludes: ‘I do not think it entirely ethical that we unequivocally assume that they want to be involved, to collaborate, to respond, to co-construct representations with us’ (Bruegemann 1996, 33). On the other hand, in a more recent reflection, Sara Gonzales promotes the notion of ‘writing with community’. She states: By this I mean not coauthoring with community members but conducting research with community such that the writing which follows – collaboratively or singularly authored – is part of a broader effort to disrupt earlier colonial narratives and to decolonize the practice of researching and writing Native histories. (Gonzales 2020, 104)

Bearing in mind Bruegemann’s admonition, this kind of writing with community advocated by Gonzales might be one possible strategy within collaborative ethnography to effect a shift from the level of merely recognizing different knowledge and positions—a crucial insight of feminist standpoint theory (Harding 2004)—to a more active co-creation of knowledge. Ethnographers can take dialogism to yet another level when they create spaces of co-authorship that actually yield control over the text to a greater extent, enhancing the dialogical or polyphonic qualities of the text. It is in this sense, according to Lassiter, that we have a ‘collaborative’ text, or what feminist anthropologist Elaine Lawless has termed ‘reciprocal ethnography’ (Lawless 1993). Lawless places the emphasis on how this differs from conventional authorship: I am quick to point out that ‘reciprocal’, as I use it, refers to the emergent dialogue in field research that is then carried into the scholarly writing. The exchange of ideas and meaning is reciprocal—we learn from each other and no voice is privileged over the other. (Lawless 2000, 199)

The chapter by Paloma Gay y Blasco discusses the challenges and dilemmas of producing just such a truly collaborative work. Whereas Gay y Blasco defines it as ‘reciprocal ethnography’, using Lawless’s expression, the reciprocal nature of her work is even more radical, in that her interlocutor and co-author, Liria, mirrors her own ethnographic enterprise, studying and representing Paloma and her Payo (non-Gitano) world from her own Gitana positionality. Gay y Blasco’s chapter recounts

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the process of developing her collaborative book with Liria Hernandez, Writing Friendship (2020). The book they wrote follows a well-trodden path of life histories, of women writing about other women—think, for example, of Marjorie Shostak’s Nisa, Geyla Frank’s Venus on Wheels, or Ruth Behar’s Translated Woman 7 . As Gay y Blasco describes it, the book seems to represent an example of the feminist testimonial subgenre (Visweswaran 1997, 24), but it conducts a much more radical decolonization by helping make her subject/co-author’s own anthropology emerge, thereby ‘willing [hegemonic] anthropology to listen’. In this way, more than an ‘autoethnography’, the book is an ‘alterethnograpy’. In the process, Gay y Blasco situates herself squarely in dialogue with her co-author, and at the same time, she recognizes the situatedness of her experience of uncertainty. In the process of her reflection here, she yields a new metaphor for ethnographic texture: not the Geertzian ‘thick’ or the ‘thin’ espoused by Omar Kasmani in this volume, but ‘lumpy’.

Gender in Genre: From Writing About Women to Probing Gender One of the initial insights of feminism in anthropology was that, in the history of a discipline initially known as the study of man, the ‘second sex’ was oftentimes ignored or subsumed under the study of a universalizing category of males. Even so, some of the earliest works produced by women forebears in anthropology offered striking examples of ethnographic writing about women and gender-related issues, and it was an important merit of Women Writing Culture, foremost among other efforts to draw attention to this history.8 Whether or not all of those early works should be defined as ‘feminist ethnography’ is, for our purposes, a moot point, although Visweswaran advocates a definition of feminist ethnography that would include them, thereby contesting a widely held historiography that locates its origins in the second wave of feminism (Visweswaran 1997). Despite these valuable texts, women appearing as agents in ethnographic depictions remained relatively underrepresented, particularly with a professionalisation of the discipline that, as discussed above, coincided with a consolidation of male hegemony among its practitioners. Later in the twentieth century, though, second-wave feminist voices in anthropology started to comment on the problematic nature of ethnographic descriptions of women (Rosaldo and Lamphere 1974, v–vi; Reiter 1975). Certainly, it was necessary to recover the female

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presence, offering more accurate accounts of women in specific cultures and societies and the aspects that most regarded them. At the same time, however, from the 1970s on, the attention arising from secondwave feminism in anthropology no longer simply constituted what some commentators have sardonically called the ‘add women and stir’ approach (Moore 1988), but increasingly offered fundamental theoretical contributions arising from thinking about gender (exemplary ethnographies from this point of view are Strathern 1972 and Weiner 1976). Significant as it was, even this engagement with women and gender was not sufficient, as demonstrated by the intersectional critiques levied by women of colour and lesbian writers, prominent among these being the authors in Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa’s edited collection This Bridge Called My Back (Moraga and Anzaldúa 1981). Indeed, Behar observes that Women Writing Culture was not merely a reply to Writing Culture, but was equally inspired by Moraga and Anzaldúa’s book. The dominant forms of feminist ethnography came to realise the necessity of incorporating insights into racial and sexual positioning; reflecting back on Women Writing Culture, Deborah Gordon noted this of the younger anthropologists emerging in those years: They were also more prepared, as newer Ph.D.s, to use modes of academic writing that would allow them to participate in a feminism accountable to racial and cultural positioning. Antiracism became a discourse through which feminists in anthropology could borrow from and alter the notion of ethnographic dialogue that had been opened up by scholars interested in ethnographic writing. (Gordon 1999, 63)

Gordon regrets, however, that the intersectional dimension of class, emphasized by Moraga and Anzaldúa, was lost in the process—even in Women Writing Culture—and she reflexively draws attention to the effects of the nexus of nation and class in producing this effacement. Now, over twenty years later, as recent discussions of decolonization show, anthropologists are being called to account for their positionalities within the globalized late capitalist system. The dimension of gender has been a fundamental, albeit not all-encompassing, point of departure for rethinking ethnographic writing. Looking at gender in ethnographic writing with the benefit of third-wave feminism has opened the way

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to a textual engagement that brings together many strands of positionality, including class, sexuality and disability. In this sense, as Visweswaran writes: …a broader conception of the relationship of feminist theory to social movements means that women should not be seen as the sole subjects, authors, or audiences of feminist ethnography. Various forms of critical ethnography might thus be productively read as feminist ethnography (Visweswaran 1997, 593–94).

Ethnographic Writing, Masculinities And Queerness As issues of gender gained traction during the 1970s and 80s, gender as a focus for ethnography implied for many anthropologists women writing about, with or for other women. However, in the 1980s, and especially after Stanley Brandes’ Metaphors of Masculinity (1980), which was the first ethnographically explicit study of men, academic space finally opened up to research that addressed questions of masculinity and men, as well as questions of femininity and women. We should remind ourselves of the years at the beginning of the twentieth century, when effort was put into establishing the discipline in an academic context. The fact that men perceived ‘unfeminine’ women as a threat at this time falls into a historical context in which modern masculinity as an unmarked category was repeatedly challenged: ‘“Unmanly” men and “unwomanly” women (…) were becoming ever more visible. They and the movement for women’s rights threatened that gender division so crucial to the construction of modern masculinity’ (Mosse 1996, 78). However, the first works of critical examination of culturally shaped masculinity did not emerge in the 1970s, after the student movement had thrown overboard ossified systems of power and restrictive sexual ideas, but sporadically at the beginning of the 1980s. White men also did not have to defend themselves against cultural invisibility: as Matthew Gutmann (1997) notes, they were in dialogue with each other and always present in both anthropological theory and ethnographic descriptions. How and what to write about was negotiated in these inner circles. It is therefore quite understandable that the discussion of masculinity as an engendered and ‘engendering’, reality situated in historical and cultural contexts was slow to gain a foothold, only then—as Gutmann

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(ibid.) irritably notes—to examine masculinity in a paradoxical way with the exclusion of feminist theories. This tendency stands in stark contrast to Visweswaran’s call for a ‘broader conception of the relationship of feminist theory to social movements’ and the understanding of critical ethnography as feminist ethnography (Visweswaran 1997, 594; see above). Nevertheless, the disruption of hegemonic masculinity through ethnographic work on other masculinities has spurred the ethnographic theory debate as much as the feminist debate. The rapid growth of masculinity studies since the 1990s, inspired by feminist social constructivism, has put the spotlight on sub- and other-ordered masculinities, their social constitution through or in the absence of relational systems with women, sexuality, violence, rituals, as well as on male corporeality, which today allows us to look at a flourishing literature. Gutmann (2014) notes that through anthropological comparison of historical and contemporary gender relations, we are forced to acknowledge that they contain a deep diversity, tolerance and cooperation, often alongside and in simultaneous contradiction with the more commonly noted power imbalances and divisions. Comparison as the third pillar of the construction of anthropological knowledge is also important to Cornwall and Lindisfarne in their anthology Dislocating Masculinity (1994). Alongside feminist concepts, the ultimate aim of cultural diversity is to describe varied masculinities as well as their embeddedness in various cultural expressions of gender relations: ‘In so doing, we offer a new perspective for viewing gendered identities and subverting dominant chauvinisms on which gender, class, race and other hierarchies depend’ (ibid., 2). Twenty years later, Piscitelli and Simoni (2015) conclude that the main anthropological findings from the 1990s on masculinity and gender are still significant. In much of the ethnographic work on masculinities, stylistic experimentation in writing is implicit or not negotiated at all. This is not the case with Omar Kasmani, who in this volume makes intimate and masculine public spaces in Berlin accessible to the reader with a view through a finely woven veil of thin descriptions. Experiences of male intimacies are worked into the filigree linguistic texture of the fabric of relationships via stylistic experiments. The vulnerability of the ethnographer, whose own sense-making process differs greatly from white heteronormative masculinity, enters a different—now visible—in-between space, provokes,

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irritates and brings a context closer via a new form of ethnographic narrative. Through stylistic craft, he finds a form that accommodates and does justice to the specific ethnographic context of Berlin Neukölln. The ‘Späti’ next door becomes as familiar to the reader as the white sheets on the empty bed and the Sufi ritual. It combines creativity with facts and empirical description (cf. Ingridsdotter and Kallenberg 2018). Overall, we can say that feminist reflections on the analytical writing process in particular—writing and analysis belong together (Lykke 2014)—have led to a turn towards creative writing that distinguishes genre not as a stylistic device‚ but as part of the analytical process. We may consider Kasmani’s chapter within the queer sexualities and transgender themes that have comprised a rapidly growing field within ethnographic writing. These approaches have been developing since the 1990s, alongside wider social changes internationally, such as the rise of LGBTQIA + movements and the diffusion of ‘transgender’ as a category (Valentine 2007). Inspired by the thinking of scholars like Sarah Ahmed, Eve Sedgwick, José Esteban Muñoz and Judith Butler, the volatile, creative ferment arising from these quarters has also impacted writing styles to the point that an entire field of queer rhetorics has emerged in recent years (Cox and Faris 2015; Dadas and Cox 2019). Indeed, with a view to our own interests here, queering ethnographic writing is as much a matter of style as it is a choice of subject matter, which does not necessarily have LGBTQIA + themes as their central object. While we might be tempted to define Omar Kasmani’s contribution as ‘autoethnography’—which Jones and Adams (2010) declare to be a queer method—he looks explicitly, among other things, to Maggie Nelson’s notion of ‘autotheory’ (Nelson 2015), in which embodied experience is used to generate theory9 . Without wanting to encapsulate queer writing aesthetics within a rigid classification, we can note generally that a certain ‘messiness’ that seems to characterize it goes a step beyond the Writing Culture critique of (masculine) objectivity, disrupting the pretence to linear cohesiveness. This is reflected, too, in Kasmani’s use of a stylistic mode that attempts to capture a quantum aesthetic, as shaped by Karen Barad’s feminist-queer quantum physics. A branch of queer, feminist and postcolonial scholarship relates to a niche of works known under the heading of the ‘affective turn’ which has developed in recent years in anthropological writing. In ethnographic works lying within this affect orbit, we see a tendency to recover features traditionally coded as ‘female’—emotion, affect and interiority—and a

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grappling with how to render these in writing. Though the affective turn does not appear to be entirely new (Skoggard and Waterston 2015), we may well ask how often doing affect has translated into actual textual practice (cf. Beatty 2010). The chapters in this volume by Nigel Rapport and Omar Kasmani provide two stimulating meditations on this, although in different ways: while Rapport probes the possibilities of writing interiority through a consideration of silence, Kasmani proposes the model of ‘thin attachments’. In developing his own take on writing affect, he looks admiringly to Kathleen Stewart’s evocative works (1996, 2007), which have been highly influential in this vein of ethnography.

Conclusion Having expounded upon the motivations behind this volume and outlined what we find to be key issues and developments in our central theme, gender and genre in ethnographic writing, the last thing that remains for us to do here is to trace how what follows will unfold. While an anonymous reviewer of the book project suggested that the different chapters of this book might be considered variations on a theme à la Rachmaninov, seeing as we are based in Italy we tend instead (in a very Italian way) to think of the volume as a feast comprising several courses. We first serve up the prologue by two Malinowski granddaughters, Lucy Ulrich and Rebecca M. Stuart, which blends information from Malinowski’s daughter Helena together with assorted family memories, as an amuse-bouche for the reader. But even an amuse-bouche has its substance, and their Prologue leads us to some provocative reflections about the über-ethnographer Malinowski and his relation to ‘the other sex’. Nigel Rapport’s chapter exploring silence and interiority is a soup course that warms us and nurtures our insides. Drawing inspiration from women’s writing, Rapport brings examples from two of his fieldwork experiences in order to probe silence and ask how it should be rendered ethnographically. We follow this course with the contribution by Marina Della Rocca, a homemade pasta dish with contrasting seasonings that nonetheless work together. Della Rocca describes questions of writing that emerged in her ethnography of anti-violence shelters and the migrant-origin women using these services. It is a pasta made by hand with loving care, a collaborative feminist kneading and shaping of the pieces. The next chapter by Hande Birkalan-Gedik is a succulent meat dish, roasted in the fires

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of feminist engagement. Birkalan-Gedik addresses the history of feminist ethnography in Turkey, seeking to understand why feminists within anthropology have not picked up on the Writing Culture legacy to the extent that non-anthropologists doing ethnography have. The next course comes from Paloma Gay y Blasco, who serves us a Payo (non-Gypsy) dish laden with Gitana spice. Her reciprocal ethnography makes visible a Gitana perspective on the Payo world, including that of Paloma as a Paya academic. The outcome is a paragon of culinary fusion. The essay by Omar Kasmani is not one of those trendy hipster dishes that he disparages in the bourgeois-bohème cafés of Berlin, but rather an intriguing, deconstructed plat du jour from molecular cuisine. His autotheoretical articulation of ‘thin attachments’ offers a queer rendering of his positionality as ethnographer, foregrounding elements of affect. To round out the collection, the chapter by Daniela Salvucci brings us full circle in our discussion, coming back to Elsie Masson—a fine, aged cheese to close the savoury portion of our meal. Salvucci draws our attention to Elsie Masson as a writer and quasi-ethnographer in her own right, opening up a number of questions about her writerly collaboration with her renowned husband, putative founder of the ethnographic canon. Finally, the Afterword by Marilyn Strathern could not be anything if not a dessert, followed by a shot of an Italian herbal digestivo drink to wash down the whole meal. At this point, we can only wish you, dear reader, ‘Buon appetito/Guten Appetit’, and an enjoyable experience of reading. Hopefully, you will find elements of stimulation to nourish your own ethnographic writing.

Notes 1. Frank Heidemann was among the colleagues who read and commented an earlier draft of this essay, along with Alessandra Gribaldo, Chandana Mathur and Barbara Sorgoni. We thank them for their insightful remarks and suggestions for improvement‚ and any remaining flaws are our own. We would also like to acknowledge Francesca Bettocchi and Maria Lord for translations and linguistic consulting. 2. It is interesting to note that Applegarth’s meticulous study fell on remarkably deaf ears within the world of anthropology itself, where not one review of the volume appeared in a major anthropological journal. 3. Among the most active online spaces, see the HauTalk and AnthroSoWhite Twitter hashtags: https://twitter.com/hashtag/anthrosowhite?src=has htag_click and https://twitter.com/hashtag/hautalk?f=live. Other online

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5.

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contributions to the discussion, only to name a few, are from the Society for Cultural Anthropology website: https://culanth.org/fieldsights/series/ from-reciprocity-to-relationality-anthropological-possibilities; Zoe Todd’s piece in the Anthro{dendum} blog: https://anthrodendum.org/2018/ 06/15/the-decolonial-turn-2-0-the-reckoning/; and this from AllegraLab: https://allegralaboratory.net/shocked-not-surprised-hautalk/ Since 2017, the Cite Black Women movement has drawn attention to the question of citational practices: https://www.citeblackwomencollective.org/. The Anthro{dendum} blog (formerly Savage Minds) is one such space: https://anthrodendum.org/. See also Otherwise Magazine: https://www. otherwisemag.com/magazine. As for conventional print, Anthropology and Humanism publishes poetry and fiction by anthropologists. We should keep in mind that Mead was a pre-internet writer: while it is beyond of the scope of this essay, we think it would be worth asking what stylistic changes and modifications in content have been brought about by the transition from handwriting and typing to the PC and internet. Considering the effects of the conditions behind ethnographic writing, we may ask what writing is all about in late capitalism (Brenneis 2016; Hannerz 2016), and in what ways this has impacted the flow of narratives. In the light of these newer writing environments, one might also ask if this ‘middle stage of scholarly production’ (Ghodsee 2018, 417) has undergone a fundamental transformation (see Wulff 2016). The American Anthropological Association report and recommendations are available on the Association website: https://www.americananthro. org/AdvanceYourCareer/Content.aspx?ItemNumber=1667&navItemNu mber=582 [last accessed 14.12.2020]. While life histories and life stories have mostly been associated with women, we should recall how Vincent Crapanzano’s Tuhami (Crapanzano 1980) constituted a remarkable example of the genre focusing on the life of a Moroccan man. In this regard, both Visweswaran (1997) and Applegarth (2014) invoke women anthropologists who were active in the Victorian era in the U.S., from the 1880s on. Nelson’s autotheory has interesting resonances with autoethnography as anthropologists know it, though we cannot explore this here. Autotheory is best known in connection with her book The Argonauts (2015), leading any anthropologists in the house to wonder if her work was somehow intended as a riff on Malinowski’s book (it was a reference to Barthes).

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Towards an Anthropological Appreciation of Silence as an Ethnographic Key: Homely, Instrumental, Ethical Nigel Rapport

Preamble: The ‘Femininity’ of Silence ‘Life escapes’. This was how Virginia Woolf (1938: 148) felt about the literature that was popular in the early twentieth century, literature primarily from male writers: H. G. Wells, John Galsworthy, Arnold Bennett. Is it not the writer’s task, Woolf went on, to convey the experience of human consciousness: ‘this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible’? (1938: 148–9). And yet, filling pages in the way customarily undertaken—plot, character, probability—risked misappropriating such experience: the ‘myriad impressions’ that ‘fall upon the mind’, ‘incessant, shaping themselves into different moments’, ‘however disconnected and incoherent in appearance’ (ibid.). No method and no experiment in genre must be forbidden towards this end, Woolf concluded (1938: 153), only falsity and pretence:

N. Rapport (B) Social Anthropology, University of St. Andrews, Fife, Scotland, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 E. Tauber and D. L. Zinn (eds.), Gender and Genre in Ethnographic Writing, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71726-1_3

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there were surely ‘infinite possibilities’ if the writer were to draw on ‘every quality of brain and spirit’. The ‘writer’ that Woolf primarily had in mind here was the novelist, but I have nevertheless been inspired over the years, as an ethnographer, by her invitations. Should it not be the case that the structure, the style, and the content of anthropological writing should reflect alike the ethnographer’s experience of the experience of those individual research subjects with whom fieldwork engages? But I have recently been more daunted. Is this something I have personally ever achieved, or even seriously attempted? Could one achieve it? Virginia Woolf’s sister novelist, Elizabeth Jane Howard (1982), expresses some of these doubts when she considers that to venture explanations of the behaviour of others is necessary to fall back on kinds of invention that reveal more about the writer’s self than another. To write of others is to write fiction; even the description of a lover or close friend deploys ‘public words’ for the making of a ‘public image’, meaning that ‘everything of significance is lost’, everything personal ‘obscured’ (Howard 1976: 259). Woolf’s and Howard’s feminine, indeed feminist, reservations concerning the genre and scriptural conventions of a predominantly masculine literary world lead me to wonder about silence: my own silence as an ethnographer and a writer of anthropological descriptions and analyses, and the silence of my research subjects. What new purchase may I gain on human experience through an appreciation of silence and its writerly use: purchase on the way that the personality and personalism of subjective consciousness threaten to escape words? There is an extensive feminist literature that celebrates silence, indeed, for its potential to subvert and rebut a ‘phallocentrism’ that has traditionally vaunted the speechifying male. Silence offers a measurelessness, an aperture and interval, a meditative and ironizing space, to be reclaimed as more than ‘female’ and ‘domestic’ (Irigaray 1985; Knowles 2015; Godart 2016). More narrowly in this context, might I look to silence as a means more authentically to incorporate human otherness in an anthropological text, however paradoxical this might sound? The irony of having my words replace research subjects’ silence—while insisting that it is silence that remains the focus—will make the fiction of the writing more plain, at least. At best, the ‘secrecy of subjectivity’ (Levinas 1985: 78) that is another human life is brought into sharpest focus, cautioning

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against a merely ‘customary’ writing, as Woolf urged, and challenging experimentation.

Writing Phenomenological Subjectivity A place to begin is provided by the ‘trope theory’ of James Fernandez (1971, 1977) and his consideration of the tension between the ‘tropic’ and the ‘inchoate’. The elemental vectors of human existence, Fernandez suggests, concern how we, as individual beings, project bodily states out into the world beyond us. Tropes of cultural convention—the formulae of words and behaviour by which social life is habitually conducted and exchanged—are deployed by individual members of those cultures and societies as means to attempt to come to terms with their own bodily experience: to know it, and to communicate it in the hope of sharing it. ‘This is what I feel and see; this is who and how I am; this is how I construe the world; and you?’ Here is the motivation for cultural expression and social belonging. Individual experiences of body and mind— psycho-somatic, ‘anchored in our body’ (Fernandez 1977: 478)—ramify out into the world, via cultural symbologies in social milieux. The body, according to Fernandez, is to be appreciated as the site where individual emotions and intellections, and cultural codes and social practices and ecological conditions meet. But this is no steady-state phenomenon. For psycho-somatic experience is in flux, first in reaction to how prior projections of that experience are met by the environing world, and then because ‘This is what I feel and see; this is who and how I am’ are matters of ambiguity. The experience of self lacks precise or constant form: it is inchoate, Fernandez argues: it may concern silence rather than a tropic formalism. In other words, if culture and society are motivated to exist by individuals endeavouring to express their bodily states, then those states are transitory, and those states escape easy comprehension and definition even for the individual themselves. We should not underestimate the ubiquity and significance of what is inchoate in human experience, Fernandez writes, ‘identities are problematic and not precisely defined’ (1982: 544). The main objective of anthropology, Fernandez concludes, is phenomenological subjectivity: trying to get an impression of the particular sensory apparatus, operating from a particular embodied point of view, on which an individual’s conceptions are based. Anthropology is the attempt to register the ‘sensorium [in which] minds are enmeshed’

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(Fernandez 1992: 127, 134). What makes this feasible as social science, according to Fernandez, are precisely the tropes, the cultural forms and social institutions, in which and by which individuals will endeavour to express themselves. Metaphors and metonyms, analogies and narratives, conventional gestures, can properly be understood in their individual usage as kinds of hypothesis brought to bear on the often inchoate subject of personal consciousness such that subjectivity might accede to more concrete treatment by the individuals that inhabit consciousness and those bodily sensoriums. Such tropic usage represents attempts to compose individual experience: to figure out what lives are like (Fernandez 1992: 134–5). Hence, the focus of anthropological analysis may shift from individual experience as such—its fluxional nature, its possibly inchoate character, its intrinsic ambiguity or ‘silence’—to how language in public exchange glosses the phenomenological problematic. But here I depart from Fernandez. There is certainly methodological convenience in shifting the focus of anthropological study from individuals’ phenomenological subjectivity per se to the cultural and social media in which the former seeks expression: a canopy of formulae, rituals and narratives. But while practicable, such methodological strategy also alters the topic of anthropological investigation: a focus on the tropic does not do justice to phenomenological subjectivity—its shifting, possibly inchoate nature—and the silence that may be its enduring state. To focus not on silence as such but its translation into the tropes of sociocultural exchange, its transformation, risks missing silence tout court. And rather than a phenomenological approach one risks a (dismissive) structuralist one: ‘Deep down in the silence of your interiority, [every competence] has first to come from the outside, to be slowly sunk in and deposited into some well-constructed cellar whose doors have then to be carefully sealed’ (Latour 2007: 212). In this essay I would retain a focus on silence as a thing-in-itself, and ponder what might be learnt anthropologically from silence as human experience: silence as a key component of human identity and individual expression; hence key, too, to cultural tradition and social interaction. There may be much in human experience that dwells in silence, both for the individual inhabitant of consciousness and for those social others with whom the individual interacts.

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Explorations of Silence How might such anthropology of silence proceed? I have in the past imagined a definition of social anthropology as the study of the effects that human beings—as individual, energetic things-in-the-world—have upon one another, as their distinct and often incommensurate worldviews and life-projects come into contact via social institutions and cultural forms (Rapport 2003: 75–6). These effects will often be inadvertent and indirect, unintended. In this essay I would extend the effects that individuals are responsible for to include silence: the social effects of the individual who is silent to themselves —unable or unwilling to ‘speak’ of themselves to themselves—and the social effects of the individual who is silent to others — unable or unwilling to engage by way of the conventional tropes of social interaction and cultural exchange. I have also in the past imagined the possibilities of anthropology of individual interiority: incorporating the internal conversation that an individual will maintain with themselves over a conscious lifetime (Rapport 2008a, 2012). I have felt that such a study would have a foundational significance, indeed, for a true appreciation of what ‘crosses the boundaries’ of (private) individual selfhood—and becomes the public forms of society and culture. Only by seeking to know how individuals live with themselves internally—inhabit their consciousness—can anthropology hope to know how individuals intend to live with others: how they come to animate cultural–symbolic forms and social institutions with personal purpose. The present essay would extend the imaginary of individual interiority to include what is experienced in and as silence—and the effects of this latter on others. The essay must be indicative rather than conclusive: an indication of the range of issues that anthropology of silence might anticipate addressing. Silence I shall explore as key to the homeliness of an individual’s being with themselves; also as instrumental in social conformism, in managing the distance between individual separateness and ‘noisy’ interaction; or, equally, as manifesting a significant withdrawing or withholding, a refraining from engaging with self and other; and finally, silence as party to a ‘cosmopolitan politesse’ where the individual is socially recognized and included not as member of a collective category but as themselves alone.

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The Homeliness of Silence There is a suggestive passage in Virginia Woolf’s novel, Orlando (1980: 196), where she supposes that individuals talk aloud only because the different identities of which they are composed—the many discrete selves that they have created for themselves—are conscious of disagreement or misunderstanding among themselves. The public space of tropic exchange is entered so that individuals may better communicate with themselves; when this has been established, they fall silent. To the Lighthouse likewise sees silence playing a significant role. The novel is often described as a roman à clef ; the book’s paterfamilias, Mr Ramsay, stands in for Virginia’s father, the philosopher Leslie Stephen, while the materfamilias, Mrs. Ramsay, is an evocation of Virginia’s mother (who died when Virginia was 13). Virginia herself most nearly resembles the young Cam Ramsay, who wants to be a writer. The setting is a holiday house on the Isle of Skye, modelled closely on the Stephens’ country retreat, Talland House, in St. Ives, which looks out onto a bay and the Godrevy Lighthouse. Virginia made a boat trip to this lighthouse in 1892, as concerns the main action in her novel and its sentimental mainspring. In one scene, Woolf describes Mrs. Ramsay knitting by herself in a room, having tended all day to the needs of her family and houseguests (including ‘Lily’ and ‘Augustus Carmichael’): For now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of—to think; well, not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others. (…) When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless. And to everybody there was always this sense of unlimited resources, she supposed; one after another, she, Lily, Augustus Carmichael, must feel, our apparitions, the things you know us by, are simply childish. Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by. (…) This core of darkness could go anywhere, for no one saw it. They could not stop it, she thought, exulting. There was freedom, there was peace, there was, most welcome of all, a summoning together, a resting on a platform of stability. Not as oneself did one find rest ever, in her experience (she accomplished here something dexterous with her needles) but as a wedge of darkness. Losing personality, one lost the fret, the hurry, the stir; and there rose to her lips always some exclamation of

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triumph over life when things came together in this peace, this rest, this eternity. (Woolf 1955: 95–6)

Later, Woolf revisits Mrs. Ramsay’s silence, but now seen through the eyes of Lily, a younger woman. Lily interprets Mrs. Ramsay’s silence in her own way, but she too recognizes how characteristic it is for Mrs. Ramsay to sit like this, even in company: Mrs. Ramsay sat silent. She was glad, Lily thought, to rest in silence, uncommunicative; to rest in the extreme obscurity of human relationships. Who knows what we are, what we feel? Who knows even at the moment of intimacy, This is knowledge? Aren’t things spoilt then, Mrs Ramsay may have asked (it seemed to have happened so often, this silence by her side) by saying them? Aren’t we more expressive thus? (Woolf 1955: 255–6)

In these extracts, Woolf’s observations concerning Mrs. Ramsay—and the mother she remembered—seem to me ‘ethnographic’ in their authenticity. That is, I can imagine them as keen observations and authentic representations of an individual who actually lived, and hence as human truths. In particular, I can see them as insightful concerning the place of silence in an individual’s life and in relation with others. Mrs. Ramsay’s silence as she sits and knits, experiencing her ‘wedge of darkness’, comprises a kind of homemaking that she establishes for herself: she is comfortable in silence; this is where she knows herself best; this is where she is most at-one with her surroundings. Her silence was habitual, something that Mrs. Ramsay often felt the need for, and where she found freedom and peace and stability: restfulness and the homeliness of truly contemplating and understanding self and world. In her silence Mrs. Ramsay experienced a sense of the unlimited resources that she contained, the personal depths that lay beneath the apparitions of conventional roleplaying that she might publicly adopt. At the same time, in her silence Mrs. Ramsay was her most expressive. Woolf sets up a triangle between herself and her protagonists such that Mrs. Ramsay’s silence becomes the state where she is known to Lily as most characteristically herself. ‘How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake’ (Woolf 1983: 199). The stories that Woolf creates add to an anthropological appreciation of how, universally, in company or alone, individual human beings may occupy a homely silence.

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The Adventure of Silence There is something else that Woolf’s treatment of silence brings to the fore, something also latent in Fernandez and his treatment of the inchoate. This is solitude. For Fernandez, culture and society arise out of an individual drive to move from solitude to social relationality. The individual creates and deploys symbolic tropes so as to have some means possibly to communicate and share original personal experience. The extent to which this is successful, given the uniqueness of individual human embodiment and the intrinsic ambiguity in symbolic forms—what do others intend by words and behaviours socially exchanged?—is moot. For Woolf, what is most characteristic about Mrs Ramsay is her contentment and her need to be alone: when she is silent she is alone enjoying her own unlimited resources of imagination and feeling. In Philip Larkin’s haunting image, supported on the ‘giant palm’ of ‘uncontradicting solitude’, ‘there cautiously / Unfolds, emerges, what I am’ (1988: 56–7). Philosophically, much attention has been given to the solitudinous nature of human existence and the silence with which this might manifest itself. Such philosophical observations also concern our ability to know ourselves: to adopt an ‘ironic’ stance in regard to the consciousness that is our window on the world so as to reflect critically on the worldviews we adopt and the life-projects through which we come to know what is other. And while tropic communication and comparison with others might go some way to overcoming the uncertainties of judging the nature of reality, the conscious self remains an Archimedean point of uncertainty: We cannot tie down or place the organizing centre of experience (…) and make it just another object among the things we apprehend. It is not known as things are known but as a condition of knowing. (Lewis 1973: 35)

We know we have thoughts and feelings, we know what it is like to be ourselves, but we do not know how we know, think and feel this: My distinctness, my being me, is quite unmistakeable to me, there can be nothing of which I am more certain, but it is also unique and ultimate, not unique like a rare vase or painting where we can indicate the properties that make it unique, but unique in a final sense of just being itself. (Lewis 1982: 55)

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It is perhaps to Friedrich Nietzsche (if not Søren Kierkegaard) that we look for the origin of concerted modern philosophical attempts to reflect on individual embodiment as the source of conscious being-in-the-world, and the limits to knowledge and expression that this might inevitably incur. However carefully—conscientiously—we record the facts of our own being as they seem to us, Nietzsche urged (1979), self-analysis cannot remove us from the processes of our own consciousness and our habits of interpretation. We cannot know whether we are truly knowing ourselves—even whether we have a consistent self to know—because it is our self, with its biases and preferences, that is our only instrument of discovery. Our consciousness, Nietzsche concludes, is perhaps better considered as a surface to our being, beneath which lies a morass of emotion, will and spirit, body and desire: ‘impurities’ to reason which nonetheless colour our knowing. At the same time, Nietzsche maintained, from his earliest years, a habit of recording introspective explorations. Also, testing his body and diet to ascertain the conditions of best performance, and recording the results. Thus he would hope to reach more reliable truths about himself by combining ideation and affect with observation. Moreover, if the economy of the mind was ultimately that of the body, then experiments with the latter—in relation to food, sex, music, walking, brainwork, say—could be of great spiritual consequence. It was perhaps the case that through practice and will one could come to know one’s unconscious habits of being, and overcome them. Nietzsche can be said to have developed a passion for exploring the paradoxes, and enquiring of the limits, of an individual’s capacity to know themselves; in his adult philosophy he proposed such introspective exercises as necessary for all those aspiring to truth. Through such engagement, people might know themselves deeply—however contingently—as individuals. Moreover, introspection opened a way not only to self-control, self-overcoming and self-improvement but also to moral improvement: ‘egoism belongs to the essence of a noble soul’ (1978: 185). Nietzsche’s paradoxical attitude towards introspection is explained in terms of the power that he saw the practice giving onto. It may not ever be possible to reason truthfully about the properties of the world—or to uncover a true self—from our place within it. Nevertheless, a habit of close observation and experimentation accustoms the individual to looking at themselves askance and possibly transcending themselves: overcoming what are found to be present aspects of self and aspiring to better.

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Perhaps one’s introspective ventures do not descend into the true depths of being, but introspection enthralls because of its potential for adventurous fullness. Nothing in experience is so fruitful and entire, or as consequential for one’s consequent tropic expression: * I love that introspective business, that interest in oneself. * I have always looked forward to seeing what I could fish out of myself. I am a treasure island seeker and the island is myself. * The most unexpected thing I ever came across was myself. * There is no-one I more love to meet than myself; no one whose society I more covet than my own.

These are not the words of Nietzsche but of Stanley Spencer, the English painter and visionary (cited in Collis 1962: 203). The thought of a whole day with himself filled him with ‘the romance of adventure’, Spencer admitted. He also described the time as a vital ‘arriving at himself’: ‘Oneself is a being which can only fulfil itself by a constant and passionate attention to that fulfilment and never swerving from it’ (cited in Glew 2001: 171). This fulfilment Spencer saw as a creative act. He was pressed by a great urge for self-expression, but before he could paint he had to journey to those regions of mind that he knew perhaps less well and felt less in control of, regions where emotions of like and dislike dwelled. It was here that he found the authority for what and how to paint, as well as the capacity to identify the exact likeness, the true identity, of things. The creative process Spencer described as ‘definition through passion’ (cited in Glew 2001: 176). Spencer recounted the ‘open-mindedness’ and ‘generosity’ with which he sought to approach his own mind. He determined not to concern himself with what was ‘good’, ‘bad’, or inconsistent, but to like all he found in himself. For only when ‘the whole committee of “mes” had been consulted’ (see Glew 2001: 198), and every kind of desire and wish to feel been satisfied, did he know what he wished to say and how he might complete a work of art. Instead he would appreciate the whole since it derived from the same individual source; he would pay passionate attention to himself and exercise an openness to the complexity and fullness of his passions.

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Moreover, Spencer knew the creative act as a social and a moral act. An artist’s life, he felt, was a continual celebration of ‘marriage’ between himself and what he wanted to paint. When he introspected and discovered his own ‘integral harmony’, he was also given to seeing the identity of others; it was when he came to know himself most fully that he opened himself up to the complex appreciation of what his senses revealed of otherness beyond the self. For Spencer, painting was an act of connection, of love even, between true selves. When Stanley Spencer exclaimed, ‘I like my life so much that I would like to cover every empty space on a wall with it’ (cited in Glew 2001: 117), this is not to be taken (merely) as a sign of egotism. For it was through examining his life, taking time to ponder his own identity, that he felt he discovered the world. ‘If you wish to understand others you must intensify your own individualism’ Oscar Wilde counselled (1913: 156), and Spencer took him at his word. Moreover, the key to this was solitude: a silent introspection, a responsible and confident individuality. As soon as one tried to adhere to ready-made standards, rules and codes of conduct, one found oneself ‘cut off from [one’s] essential humanity’ (cited in Glew 2001: 199). What may be learnt from Spencer and from Nietzsche is the ‘adventure’ of silence: the ‘capital’ of its ‘mountaintop plenitude’: ‘silence as wealth exponentially increasing’ (Roth 2000: 44). The individual communing with himself or herself uncovers the source of creativity. One introspects and journeys through one’s body, bringing to mind its habitual needs and preferences, its remembrances, its flights of fancy. This is also a source of anxiety. What can be known definitively? The uncertainty of securing for oneself a stable point of self-reference gives to one’s adventurous solitude a limitlessness that is vertiginous as well as fulfilling. The Pragmatism of Silence Proposing a mapping of what he calls ‘the distribution of discourse’, George Steiner (1978) has argued that human linguistic expression can be seen as divided into two distinct portions: the audible and inaudible; the voiced and unvoiced. ‘Internal speech-acts are as important as external, societal speech-acts, and it is very likely that they represent the denser, statistically more extensive portion of the total distribution of discourse’ (Steiner 1978: 65). Quantitatively, Steiner contends, there is every reason to believe we speak inwardly and to ourselves more than outwardly to

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anyone else: ‘the major portion of all “locutionary motions”, (…) of all intentionalities of verbalization, whether audible or not, is internalized’ (1978: 62); what breaches the surface of the self may be a fragment of an individual’s linguistic production. Qualitatively, the inward and unvoiced may enact primary and essential functions of identity: testing and verifying our ‘being there’, fixing us in time and space, engendering self-knowledge and self-satisfaction. In unvoiced or silent linguistic expression may be lodged the fundamental stream or current or currency of consciousness, whether waking or sleeping, practical or fanciful. At the very least, voiced discourse should be understood in the context of the individual’s continuous and complex unvoiced, internal conversation. Truly to comprehend what a person speaks, to apprehend its significance fully and most truly, it would be necessary to contextualize it by way of everything that remains silent: that that individual is at the same time not saying aloud (Rapport 1993). At the least, the relationship between voiced and unvoiced discourse is a variable one: uncertain, ambiguous. Virginia Woolf also adverted to this in Orlando (1980: 192–3). Even as the biographer of a fictional character, how was one to deal with the complexity, the manifoldness, of the individual subject? Their versions may number in the thousands—may be numberless. Did one know how to chart the relationship between the ‘distribution of discourse’, between the silent and the enunciated, such that what was publicly expressed was authentic? How was Woolf to persuade the reader that her account of Orlando’s utterances—the way that Orlando gave verbal and behavioural form to a phenomenological subjectivity—was a telling one? In short, the relationship between voice and individual identity is always an ambiguous one, complex and partial (Rapport 2008a; Irving 2009). The listener—the novelist, biographer, anthropologist—cannot assume that they know another individual by virtue of what they enunciate. Is what one hears from another a true, entire, open and plain expression? Very likely not. What is held to be dearest and truest and most personal may be what is withheld, what individuals are most loath to give up to public scrutiny; what is dearest and truest and most personal may be the hardest to enunciate in public language. Moreover, the ambiguous relation between what is publicly voiced and what is voiced internally, in silence, is an issue for the speaker as well as the listener. How to enunciate and what to enunciate of private

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consciousness is a problematic ubiquitous to social life. ‘Useless knowledge’ was the ominous phrase chosen by Charlotte Delbo (1995) to treat her internment in Auschwitz-Birkenau as a Communist member of the French Resistance. What use was it to learn as a result of experiences in the Lager that hunger made human eyes sparkle while thirst dulled them; or that at night one hoped for life but come the morning one wished for death; or that when one witnessed the body of one’s murdered mother one was not necessarily brought to tears. This kind of knowledge must be withheld or withdrawn, unrehearsed and unlearned, Delbo concluded, if one wished to go on living: the trauma must be silenced, both internally and externally. Delbo’s insight introduces a range of possible circumstances where it might be impossible or inappropriate to voice what an individual knows and could express, and might otherwise feel a need to express. All manner of situations of politeness and taboo, of mood and temperament, as well as extreme alienation and dehumanization, might militate against the expression of personal knowledge and against engagement. Silence becomes a strategy for the survival of personality (Lothe 2017: 20–21). More mundanely, a functioning social system may be based on certain forms of institutional reticence and ignorance. A complex organization— a hospital, an orchestra, even a family—may function according to certain myopia or blindness regarding the true feelings that one section has for another. For the effectiveness of their role-playing it is appropriate that the medical consultant or orchestral conductor do not hear what the porter or the percussionist truly experiences from their contrary position. More mundanely still, a functioning marriage may be based on ‘kindness and lies’ (that are ‘worth a thousand truths’) (Greene 1974: 58). How appropriate is it to tell a spouse one’s true feelings for one’s in-laws, or that their ageing diminishes their attractiveness in one’s eyes? In George Eliot’s poetic image, were we to exercise ‘a keen vision and feeling’ to all aspects of ordinary life, ‘we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence’ (1994: 185). There is, in short, a politics to silence, and a personal temper. Meaning and identity are not truly expressed because of shyness, laziness, kindness and psychological health, because of mannerliness and convention, because of political expediency, because of social functionality. Even should an individual give public voice, a release from ambiguity is not vouchsafed. If the original context of an individual’s expression is their personal worldviews—the selves and landscapes in which they construe

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themselves consciously to be living and acting—then their public voicings, their ‘externalizations’, always risk mistranslation when interpreted by others (Rapport 1993, 2008a). The Privilege of Silence There is a culture and a sociality to silence. Its connotations can be negative: * Nigel’s a deep one! You need “Twenty Questions” to get anything out of him! * Nigel is quiet and hard to know. * Why are you so quiet, Nigel? Is it money? * I think Nigel needs more appreciation from us. I don’t know about his secretive ways, and silences… He can’t be a real Welshman! * I said you were deep, Nigel, when Sid asked me; and that you said nowt unless you were asked.

These are all assessments by Doris, a farm-wife, of me, her new farm labourer. The occasion is my first fieldwork as an anthropologist, in Wanet, a rural valley in the north of England (Rapport 1993, 1994). Doris is in her mid-thirties and I am ten years younger. But in terms of my skills and local knowledge I am younger again, more like her teenage children: Doris has come to treat me as another child of the farm, her farm, Cedar High. I am a ‘waif’ and ‘stray’ whom she and her husband Fred, in kindness, have taken in—housing and feeding—and whom they tolerate in exchange for daily labour on the farm. That is, she and Fred are teaching me how to be a tolerable farm labourer: how to muck-out cow shippons, feed the sheep on the high fells, drive a tractor, fence and drystone wall, mix and lay concrete, ‘haytime’, show animals at market, birth, castrate and bury them. Equally importantly, Doris and Fred are teaching me how to be a responsible member of the Harvey family. For now I am ‘Nigel of Cedar High Farm’: I bear the family reputation around Wanet village, in what I do and what I say and my demeanour, since nothing can easily be kept secret and I must be wary when I step beyond the farm

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bounds. In return, Doris and Fred will be discrete about my ignorance and stupidity: as intrinsically useless as ‘a chocolate fireguard’; as out of place as ‘tits on a bull’. My status as farm labourer had nevertheless been hard-won. It had taken months and come to feel like a triumph, a sinecure, establishing myself as a legitimate local actor. Wanet is a beauty spot as well as a farming valley, and home to a sizeable community of secondhome owners, retirees, commuters and tourists. These ‘offcomers’ of ‘off-comed-uns’ were generally disparaged by Wanet locals who felt hardpressed to maintain what was felt to be a way of life that was hard but rewarding, and theirs alone—in the face of aliens with money but no sense, and no right to be there. Offcomers were an alien breed. They acted differently and they used words differently: glib talkers who were willing to argue that ‘black was white, and yellow no colour at all’. By rights, offcomers should return to the cities of grime, crime, morbidity and miscegenation that was their natural (squalid) habitat. I had worked hard to extricate myself from the classificatory company of these incomers and to insinuate myself into local exchange. I had served as a waiter in a locally run restaurant, been a pub regular for evenings of darts and dominoes, attended local whist drives and church services. I saw the error of my erstwhile urban ways: being a farmer, belonging to Wanet, was the best life. Being accepted as Doris and Fred’s farm labourer—from a weekend trial to a full-time irregular ‘appointment’, housed in a singleseater caravan bought for the purpose—was my reward. I was fit, I was keen and I was biddable. I was also, however, child-like in my ignorance of farm life and my naivety in local ways—indeed, the ways of the world. And Doris knew her duties in regard to children, whether her own or strays she had, out of kindness, taken under her wing. The world was a cold, hard place, Doris found. People could be dwarfed by its size and its threats, natural and manmade. The best chance of survival (and happiness) came from hard work and careful attention to one’s own affairs, one’s own business. Ideally, a human community like Wanet village amounted to a set of cooperating businesses: dairy farming, beef farming, sheep farming; pubs and shops; guesthouses, perhaps camping and caravan sites. Each accounted for the survival of an individual or a family. Sadly, however, Doris found that people did not behave realistically. Some were diligent, but others were lazy, incompetent, unable to accrue a skill or keep a business afloat. Some minded their own business, but others wanted

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something for nothing, or were envious of those who improved themselves and wished them ill. Moreover, the flood of strangers into Wanet had only exacerbated bad behaviour, threatening local life and tradition. The offcomers thought you could live differently, but they were wrong: to survive in Wanet you needed a different kind of intelligence from theirs, one that was bred into you. What Wanet people knew was second nature to them, most of it not coming from school-learning but from stamina and common sense. It is increasingly the case, nevertheless, that Doris finds she and Fred cannot trust their Wanet neighbours. Nosey, deceitful, gossiping, rumourmongering, insulting, hypocritical, duplicitous, thieving, trespassing: you could hold something against every one of them, all in Wanet being ‘black souls’ in some respect. Little wonder that Doris feels aggrieved. Here she is, born in Wanet, bred for Wanet, bringing up four children in Wanet, maintaining a farmhouse that has stood since the 1600s, turning Cedar High Farm into a modern, profitable concern, and yet she is surrounded by people—locals as well as offcomers—who would jeopardize her family, her happiness and her business survival. But Doris refuses to be cowed. Wanet is her home and it will remain so: no way of life could be better. She will stay put, she will protect her own and she will improve her lot. She is canny; she has a mature grasp of how the world works, how people truly are, and how the business of life has to be conducted. There is, after all, no escaping the laws of Nature, whether this concerns the breeding of animals or of people. People are what they are bred to be, and many offcomers should not be allowed to breed at all: * It must be clear to everyone, Nigel, that some folks are just six-to-adozen. And then you have to send their kids away to special schools ‘cos they’re deformed and too stupid to go to a normal school. It’s terrible! But what can you expect when their parents are a pair of thickheads?… Why do they let that sort of thing continue, Nigel? Why isn’t something done about it?

One thing that Doris is absolutely determined to do is to keep her own house in order. She and her family and her business will behave as they should, as they must. Of overriding importance is that her children are protected from those that would threaten them, and the immorality the latter convey. Doris arms herself for the supremely important task of properly rearing her children, sons and daughters: recognizing ‘where her

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children are coming from’, and directing their futures as family members and Wanet locals. There must be discipline, obedience, distinguishing right from wrong, while not being so hard that the children rebel or go mad (and end up with no manners and doing nothing right at all). Perhaps the key to good parenting is the knowledge an adult has of a child’s character—knowledge that they themselves do not: what their family history and parentage decrees, what body language reveals, what signs of the Zodiac instruct. The main problem with children, when they are not releasing high spirits, or fighting boredom or throwing temper tantrums and getting hysterical, is their being spiteful: daring you to establish who is in control. And that needs careful attention. Spitefulness and wilfulness need ‘braying’ out of children because only with maturity is there self-awareness and self-understanding. At least she and Fred are good parents, Doris is assured. They understand what kind of creatures children are: how they develop and what they need, and how ‘from little things big things grow’. Moreover, instilling right and wrong into her children to some extent makes up for the mess in which she finds the world beyond Cedar High Farm. The farm is a kind of heaven where a traditional, natural, way of life can be respected. However rude, nosey and interfering people off the farm might be—as if she and Fred did not know the natural laws of survival and what was for the best on their own ‘shit-heap’—they will maintain family standards: polite children, careful to give nothing away, party to the farm’s health and reputation. Which brings Doris to the question of Nigel: a ‘college student’, but also a child (in maturity and temperament) whom she and Fred have kindly taken in for a spell. His family seems mysteriously absent or distant—although a sister came to visit—and, in loco parentis, she and Fred have undertaken to instruct him: how to be on Cedar High Farm and also how to be as a grown-up male in Wanet. But Nigel is moody, it seems: secretive, hard to trust. He has said he was from Wales, but the Welsh are known for their singing, and loquaciousness, so Nigel’s silence only makes the mystery deeper. He must learn to curb these immature and unsociable traits. Some children can suffer from a tendency to be ‘underneath’ when they are growing up, which they can find difficult to overcome. It is also a matter of Nigel’s developing a thicker skin and not taking it too much to heart when she or Fred have to ‘call’ him or curse him to set him right. Reticence is one thing—not saying inappropriate things to farm outsiders—but being silently aloof, non-participatory, is quite another…

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In sum, silence was not something that legitimately pertained to the role of ‘child’ whom Doris would incorporate and instruct. Being silent was a behaviour that in Wanet, as a labourer at Cedar High—as an anthropologist hoping to maintain a hard-won local identity—I felt I dared not practice. And yet, it was a ‘privilege’ to which I aspired, for the liberty it might afford me to remain inscrutable or at least non-committal (Rapport 2017). For how could I be sure of the right thing to say? I could not risk being construed indefinitely as the outsider, the offcomer. But not only was I ignorant of how to engage in the routines of mundane interaction in Wanet—even more on Cedar High Farm and amid Harvey family life— when I did have a response ready it did not seem to accord with what was being normatively expressed around me. I did not agree with how Doris engaged with her children, often, or how Fred treated his animals. I did not agree with their opinions on city life, on urban poverty, on punishment, on immigrants, on Blacks and Jews. But nor did I feel I could seriously engage with their diatribes and disparagement without showing myself up. It was, after all, not an exposure of their world to mine that I was in Wanet to effect, but the opposite: silence, then, was a kind of compromise, a being among them while biting my tongue. There was a big advantage, too, that in my silence I was more able to secure in my memory what I was hearing and seeing and feeling for later retrieval in a private fieldwork diary. But silence was not a normative option in Doris’s moulding of me. If I was to stay around them in Wanet—be taken under her and Fred’s wing, mix freely and frequently with them and their children, be known as of Cedar High Farm—then I had to speak as and when was appropriate. I must learn the proper way to pronounce ‘tup’ (a ram), to learn that ‘gay far!’ was the Wanet phrase not ‘pretty far!’ while ‘Thanks a lot!’ as a sarcastic rejoinder had no place in ‘Wanet talk’ at all. On saying the right thing in the right way Doris was happy to drill me: Doris Nigel Doris

Nigel

: Nigel’s stomach’s touching his backbone, isn’t it Nigel? Your stomach’s touching your backbone! : It’s past it! : No. First you say, ‘My stomach’s touching my backbone’, and then an hour or two later you can say: ‘I’ve past it!’ (She smiles) : I thought it was, ‘My stomach thinks my throat’s been cut’. That’s what Fred said.

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: Yes, that’s another one you can say. Like Tom does too: ‘I’m so hungry, my stomach will be thinking my throat’s been cut!’ The Habitus of Silence

The space afforded to silence was somewhat different among the porters at Constance Hospital in eastern Scotland: the setting of another fieldwork some 20 years later (Rapport 2008b). Part of the British National Health Service, Constance Hospital was a large teaching hospital with a full range of medical expertise. The porters, some 150 men (plus two women), counted as ancillary staff and were not accorded the same status as medics. Indeed, porters found themselves at the base of a hierarchy of hospital skills, in the company of the (female) domestic cleaners. Constance Hospital, nevertheless, was a caring institution, not only in its primary function to manage the wellbeing of the sick but also in that its managers had care for its staff—including the porters—their job satisfaction and security, in a post-industrial area of Scotland where there was a history of unemployment. The porters prided themselves on their knowledge of the large site of Constance Hospital and how best to traverse it. Reminiscent of taxi drivers, they boasted about the best way to transport a patient (or a body or body parts) on a bed or a trolley or a chair from A to B. The doctors and nurses, the managers, laboratory technicians, clerks and even janitors, would be sure to get hopelessly lost, being committed to only one worksite, and the complex organization would surely break down were it not for the mediating knowledge and ferrying work of the porters. Furthermore, the porters assured themselves that it was they who maintained the right attitude towards Constance Hospital. Everyone else seemed to have sold themselves body and soul to the institution—and the hope of inflated salaries. But the porters held back and kept a sense of proportion. This was merely a job; there were other things in life, in particular to being a man. Manly fulfilment came from a range of things: working and earning money, yes, but also spending money on booze and women; also playing football, fucking and fighting. Even in a hospital it was important not to have sickness and weakness rub off, to keep its contagion at bay, and to hold in view what a man’s life was and how it was achieved (Rapport 2010). The porters prided themselves on knowing how to have a good time.

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At the worksite there was also a rhythm to uphold. Portering work comprised on the one hand being assigned particular transporting jobs around the hospital, and on the other waiting for assignments in the porters’ lodge—or (locally) ‘buckie’. The buckie consisted of two small rooms below ground level. An outer room opened onto a corridor while an inner room was entirely enclosed. Here, the porters and their chargehand received the ferrying requests of wards and clinics and operating theatres and laboratories; and here the porters gossiped, ate snacks, read newspapers, joked and laughed—and, if necessary, settled differences among themselves through physical means (and behind closed doors). The buckie was a macho environment: real men proudly displaying and enjoying the masculinity of their bodies: toned when young; ‘battlehardened’ through lives of application if old. Another rhythm to portering life again, one wholly managed among themselves, was a move between engagement and silence. There may have been ‘rules of engagement’ laid down by the hospital concerning how jobs would be phoned through to the porters, and how the portering chargehand on duty would receive these on the telephone, record them in a book and dispatch porters as available. But these rules were ‘finessed’ by the porters: the chargehand evaluating the requests’ importance, the politeness with which they had been framed, how overworked—‘putupon’—the porters as a group had been that day, and also how much particular porters had been ‘messed about’ by management and not shown respect. In other words, there were informal norms whereby the porters decided for themselves the ways and extents to which they would disengage from hospital rules, determining how willingly and how efficiently they would respond to requests that they leave their buckie ‘retreat’ and go on a job. It was part of this informal habitus, too, that the porters maintained a norm whereby an individual might retreat from explicitly engaging with his fellows—the banter and bravado and expressive camaraderie— and commune silently with himself. A sign of this might be an individual shielding himself behind a newspaper, or reading a book, or concentrating on a meal, or even retreating to the porters’ changing room (deeper in the bowels of Constance again). These signals that the individual porter did not wish to engage with his fellows for a while were generally respected— as a sign of membership, of being deemed a fellow porter, an equal. The silent porter was granted the space to retreat into himself in peace. If the buckie was a kind of sanctum that the porters created—a space that was

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theirs amid the institutionalism and hierarchy of the hospital’s complex organization in which they could practice their natural masculine ebullience without pretence or restraint—then being silent by oneself and with oneself was an inner retreat that the porters allowed one of their number when he felt the need. But one had first to belong. This was made very plain to me by Ian Scott, a porter with a big reputation among his fellows for also being a highly skilled semi-professional footballer. Acting as something of a gatekeeper, Ian would make it known to me in my early days of being a porter—moonlighting, for some obscure reason, from my job at the University—that how I spoke and how I was silent, and whether I was permitted to practise either, had to be earned. ‘Ha! Nigel will soon have stripes on his arm’! was how Ian witheringly drew attention to my apparent eagerness to answer the buckie telephone, and in an officioussounding voice—the chargehand being in the toilet and no one else being interested to stop the ringing. And again: ‘Don’t read that, Nigel! The Sun and Daily Record are crap’! was Ian’s ironic gibe on catching me reading the newspapers that the porters bought and then left in the buckie; I was not (yet) ‘one of them’, and surely such newspapers were beneath the contempt of someone middle-class-seeming such as me. Finally, Ian would hold court in the buckie, happily entertaining the porters with his banter, but also making it plain that the repartee—who spoke, who was spoken about and who was spoken to, and who might partake in silence—was for portering insiders only: * Is it snowing outside, Arthur. Or has your hair gone more grey! * Does Jim have a hole in his trousers? Looks that way from here… * Oh! Watch it, everyone! Nigel’s studying us! [I am seated in the outer buckie reading a newspaper, but I lean around the door to espy Ian’s antics in the inner room] Ooo, hoo hoo hoo hoo. [Ian makes chimp noises—as if he and the porters were zoo exhibits. I initially pretend not to hear, and then I smile] There, he goes! Smiling! I told you he was listening. You see the porters’ mentality, Nigel? Isn’t it terrible! [He laughs]

In sum, the space in which to be silent was a kind of respect that the porters gave one another. One had to belong, but if one did there was a kind of informal but normative engagement that enabled a porter to

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be included in the community at Constance and yet, at least episodically, to be silent and by himself. There was a habitus of silence in which one could be a man and also communing with oneself alone.

Envoi: An Ethics of Silence I have urged the possible significance of silence for description and analysis. I have wanted to provide an initial mapping of silence, proposed as a psycho-social terrain: there may be a homeliness to silence, a solitudinousness, a pragmatism, a privilege, a habitualism. There may, indeed, be far more: an enforced silence of imprisonment, ostracism and exile; a meditative silence before action and even before intention. Silence as social strategizing may include how silence masks, censors, intimidates, pressures another into garrulous self-exposure. In her treatise The Way of Love, Luce Irigaray espouses the ethical significance of silence. She suggests an ethos of silence as a way in which anyone, any human being, might be included in social interaction— incorporated as full members in a universal human community— not as categorized or classified persons (gendered, ethnicized, classed and so on) but as themselves. Individuality can perdure in silence, she proposes, needing never to be transmuted into a public persona or role. I would end the essay on the theme of the ethics of silence, the direction, I feel, of Virginia Woolf’s and Elizabeth Jane Howard’s opening, feminist critiques of literary genres as well as Irigaray’s efforts—an idealized version too, arguably, of the habitus practised among their own by the Constance porters. Human history to date has seen us exist as ‘eunuchs of the heart and the flesh’, Irigaray begins (2002: 3), in that we have encountered otherness but not been sufficiently attentive or respectful. Rather than ‘dialoguing in difference’, we have sought to incorporate otherness in culture: one meaning, one comprehensive order. The history of social interaction has actually been a history of human beings moving away from one another, using tropes—conventional practices and tired meanings— that violate and cause a vanishing of Other and Self both. No culture and no language to date has done more than veil the irreducible core of human being in collective forms. Purporting to apprehend and legislating for the world, cultures have sought to overcome nature—through ideas, concepts, words and things—but this negates ‘the initial being of each human’ and relinquishes a hold on singular experience (Irigaray 2002:

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140). Culture ‘remain[s] outside the most intimate and the most nuclear of subjectivity’, Irigaray concludes (2002: 47). The path to the Other that she would promote entails forgetting words and practices previously defined, for these paralyze Being—life, breath and energy—in collective traditions. We need to practice a ‘loving speech’ that does not simply ‘seize’: predetermine, name, reproduce. This may not be an easy project. Indeed, it entails a constant, ongoing work, since loving speech cannot be invented only once. But it is possible. For in our freedom ‘we live before speaking’ (Irigaray 2002: 84–5). We are not prisoners within the horizons of our languages, and we can ‘transgress’ their already learned forms. We may establish a language of exchange that does expressive justice to the encounter with otherness and accedes to real unknown meanings: unveiling the human in itself. Irigaray elaborates. To draw fully on the way in which we live ‘before speaking’ could be to practice a loving speech that develops the ‘negative’ linguistic technique of silence. Loving speech is a silent being-with that avoids reducing the Other linguistically to an object of ego’s own culture. The encounter entails tentative approaches and withdrawals, questionings that do not amount to a designating. Here is a temporality different both from linearity and repetition, and a movement that eschews a need or expectation of representation. One touches the Other, visually and acoustically—maybe even physically—but the ‘silent’ being-with is characterized by an ‘indirection’ that has no (cultural) telos. Loving speech is a dialectical process whose indirect movement— advance and withdrawal—is assured because of the integrity of the individual subjects who thus encounter one another. Neither is master of the movement, and neither expects to overcome their difference and make the Other the same. Nor can either anticipate any external measure that might assess the authenticity of what is co-built at the meeting: the relationship is a work of interior blossoming—silent—and held by no external standard. Loving speech effects a meeting between human beings who remain subjects of their own individual phenomenology. Even being face-to-face with the Other is always ‘a relationship with a Mystery’ (Levinas 1989: 43): a bodily proximity that refuses synthesis. The formulation ‘I love to you’ is probably more respectful than ‘I love you’, Irigaray concludes, more indicative of the silent encounter that negates any reducing of the Other to ego’s object (2002: 60; cf. Rapport 2018, 2019).

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‘Nothing was more intimate than silence’, novelist Graham Greene offered (1985: 101): a means to ‘settle’ as much between human beings as was possible to settle. The ‘humanity’ of silence is what I have wanted to claim here, its universal nature, over and against specific cultural classifications and characterizations. Yet silence remains no simple anthropological object. (Is it not paradoxical to write silence?) I have found it hard, even here, not to gloss ‘silent’, variously, as ‘inchoate’, ‘uncertain’, ‘reticent’, ‘withholding’, ‘withdrawing’, ‘solitudinous’, ‘interior’. But its very difficulty may recall what is being ventured: an account of, and an accounting for, individual human otherness where life does not escape.

References Collis, Maurice. 1962. Stanley Spencer. London: Harvill. Delbo, Charlotte. 1995. Auschwitz and After. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Eliot, George. 1994. Middlemarch. New York, NY: Modern Library. Fernandez, James. 1971. “Persuasions and Performances: Of the Beast in Every Body … and the Metaphors of Everyman.” In Myth, Symbol and Culture, edited by C. Geertz, 39–60. New York, NY: Norton. ———. 1977. “Poetry in Motion: Being Moved by Amusement, by Mockery and by Mortality in the Asturian Countryside.” New Literary History VIII (3): 459–83. ———. 1982. Bwiti. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 1992. “What it is Like to be a Banzie: On Sharing the Experience of an Equatorial Microcosm.” In On Sharing Religious Experience, edited by J. Gort, H. Vroom, R. Fernhout, and A. Wessels, 125–35. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Glew, Adrian. ed. 2001. Stanley Spencer. London: Tate. Godart, Caroline. 2016. “Silence and Sexual Difference: Reading Silence in Luce Irigaray.” DiGeSt 3 (2): 9–22. Greene, Graham. 1974. The Heart of the Matter. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ———. 1985. The Tenth Man. London: Bodley Head. Howard, Elizabeth Jane. 1976. The Beautiful Visit. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ———. 1982. Something in Disguise. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Irigaray, Luce. 1985. Speculum of the Other Woman. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. 2002. The Way of Love. London: Continuum. Irving, Andrew. 2009. “The Color of Pain.” Public Culture 21 (2): 293–19. Knowles, Adam. 2015. “The Gender of Silence: Irigaray on the Measureless Measure.” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 29 (30): 302–13.

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Larkin, Philip. 1988. “Best Society.” In Collected Poems. London: Faber. Latour, Bruno. 2007. Reassembling the Social. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1985. Ethics and Infinity. Translated by R. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ———. 1989. The Levinas Reader. Edited by S. Hand. Oxford: Blackwell. Lewis, Hywel David. 1973. The Self and Immortality. London: MacMillan. ———. 1982. The Elusive Self . London: MacMillan. Lothe, Jakob. 2017. “Introduction.” In Time’s Witnesses, edited by J. Lothe, 1–23. Edinburgh: Fledgling. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1978. Beyond Good and Evil. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ———. 1979. Twilight of the Idols. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Rapport, Nigel. 1993. Diverse World-Views in an English Village. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ———. 1994. The Prose and the Passion: Anthropology, Literature and the Writing of E. M. Forster. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ———. 2003. I am Dynamite: An Alternative Anthropology of Power. London: Routledge. ———. 2008a. “Gratuitousness: Notes towards an Anthropology of Interiority.” The Australian Journal of Anthropology 19 (3): 331–49. ———. 2008b. Of Orderlies and Men: Hospital Porters Achieving Wellness at Work. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press. ———. 2010. “At Home at Work in the Hospital: How the Porter Distances Himself from the Contagion of the Patient.” In Reveries of Home: Nostalgia, Authenticity and the Performance of Place, edited by S. Williksen and N. Rapport, 209–30. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. ———. 2012. “Shy and Ticklish Truths as Species of Scientific and Artistic Perception.” The Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology 12 (July): 1–9. ———. 2017. “The Inscrutability of Freedom and the Liberty of a Life-Project: The Case of Stanley Spencer.” In Freedom in Practice: Governance, Autonomy and Liberty in the Everyday, edited by M. Silva and H. Wardle, 34–54. London: Routledge. ———. 2018. “Loving Recognition: A Proposal for the Practical Efficacy of Love as a Public Virtue.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 24 (1): 126–44. ———. 2019. Cosmopolitan Love and Individuality: Ethical Engagement Beyond Culture. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Roth, Philip. 2000. The Human Stain. New York, NY: Random House. Steiner, George. 1978. On Difficulty and Other Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wilde, Oscar. 1913. Intentions. London: Methuen. Woolf, Virginia. 1938. The Common Reader. Penguin, Harmondsworth. ———. 1955. To the Lighthouse. New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace & World. ———. 1980. Orlando. London: Granada. ———. 1983. The Waves. London: Granada.

Feminist Ethnography in a Women’s Shelter: Self-Reflexivity, Participation and Activism in Ethnographic Writing Marina Della Rocca

Introduction Feminist qualitative research favours reflexivity and participation as a means of promoting a non-hierarchical approach to research in order to ensure a balance between the power of the researcher and that of the research participants. Feminist research necessarily has a public-focused approach because of its commitment to subverting the patriarchal social order within the scientific disciplines, as well as with respect to the objects of the research. Critical reflections on modern anthropology originated within the feminist perspective and its postmodern and postcolonial approaches that emerged mostly during the 1980s. These reflections involved methods, perspectives and writing styles that paid attention to gender relations and perspectives, the relationship of the ethnographers with their interlocutors, and the anthropologists’ positioning and its influence on research outcomes and texts. As an anthropologist who focuses on violence against women, I recognize that the relationship between

M. Della Rocca (B) Independent Scholar and Activist, Bolzano, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 E. Tauber and D. L. Zinn (eds.), Gender and Genre in Ethnographic Writing, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71726-1_4

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ethnographic research and the feminist perspective is highly productive. My experience as an operator in an Italian women’s shelter confirmed this assumption. The critical contribution of the ethnographic method enables my feminist approach to overcome the risks of homogenous and ethnocentric gazes on women’s perspectives and their forms of agency. This article focuses on specific aspects concerning the writing style of my Ph.D. thesis, which analysed the practices carried out by the antiviolence operators of the women’s shelter where I worked. The research focused specifically on the experiences of migrant-origin women and on the reproduction of structural violence in the advocacy practices that involved them. During the process of research, I decided to develop a specific methodology that reflected both the research field and the aim of the research. Here, I will discuss the process of an ethnographic writing that mirrored the feminist-engaged approach of my investigation. In particular, I will describe the public-oriented, self-reflexive and participatory stances of the research, and how these influenced the structure of the final ethnographic text. This analysis highlights the challenges that I faced as a feminist researcher, including the choice to engage in writing an ethnographic text that aspired to cross the borders of academy and that would make its political goals more effective within the institutional and professional spaces that deal with gender-based violence and migration.

Background My interest in this research started in 2010 when the Association DoRi1 of Bolzano offered me a social worker role in the women’s shelter, where I am still involved as a political activist. I worked in the shelter until 2014 when I then decided to propose a Ph.D. project at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano. During my four-year work experience in DoRi, I supported 152 women, 62 of whom were migrants. DoRi was founded in 1999 by a group of women whose aim was to win a tender issued by the Social Services of the Municipality of Bolzano,2 the main town of South Tyrol. Ten years earlier, in 1989, and following the hard work and activism of local feminists, the Autonomous Province of Bolzano3 enacted a specific law concerning the function and principles guiding the establishment of local shelters for battered women. Following the enactment of this law, five women’s shelters were then established in the province. Local administrative institutions have always played an

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important role in the development of the South Tyrolean women’s shelters. The shelters are financially dependent on the local administration and are professionally accountable to it. Two of the shelters are run directly by the public social services, another by a women’s Catholic association, and the other two by women’s associations that are explicitly feminist and are members of the Italian network of women’s shelters. One of these is DoRi, which for twenty years has been providing an anti-violence centre managed by specialized operators, a safe house and an emergency phone line that is available 24/7. The shelter’s practices are guided by the following Italian feminist principles (De Cicco 2003): • relationships among women that focus on gender solidarity, ‘in which one woman gives her trust or entrusts herself symbolically to another woman, who thus becomes her guide, mentor or point of reference’ (Plesset 2006, 100); • taking the woman’s side, which implies supporting women oppressed by the patriarchal social order, and advocating for women to enable them to exert their own rights. This requires working only with women, not with men, in order to ensure a place of safety reserved for women, and for their specific experiences; • developing autonomy, that is, working in ways that foster the development of each woman’s abilities and her economic and emotional autonomy; • anonymity, which requires respecting the privacy of each supported woman (and where the woman is not forced to say her name); and • streamlined procedures, which ensure an immediate response to each support request and/or emergency (De Cicco 2003). DoRi’s extensive expertise in providing resources for women experiencing violence represents a great resource for the local administration, and is frequently referred to by the Provincial administration when addressing South Tyrolian policies concerning the phenomenon of gender-based violence, specifically in the domestic sphere. While the local administration does not control the work of DoRi, DoRi’s activities must adhere to the requirements of the tender. The anti-violence operators must work in close collaboration with the local social services, particularly when a woman with children comes into the safe house. The aim is to allocate a social worker who must ensure the care and the protection

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of the woman’s children, or of the woman herself as a mother who experiences her own social vulnerability. The women’s shelter also informs the courts when a woman with children enters the safe house. This aims to prevent the woman’s partner from pressing charges against the woman for a supposed abduction of the children. This procedure represents a legal safeguarding, but implies that the women are also required to report their experience of violence to the police, who contact them a few days after they enter the safe house, in order to evaluate the women’s status and those of their children. Agreements such as these aim to guarantee institutional protection, however they also expose the organizational cultures and policy logic of local institutions and the impacts these have on the supportive work of the women’s shelters and on the lives of the abused women themselves. In my research, I decided to explore how these dynamics affect migrant women in ways specifically related to their migration backgrounds and experiences. Many studies reveal the specific vulnerability of migrant women suffering domestic violence. Most of them are referring to the theory of intersectionality as outlined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, an important figure in critical race theory. She underlines that male violence against women implies the need to consider ‘how the experiences of women of colour are frequently the product of intersecting patterns of racism and sexism, and how these experiences tend not to be represented within the discourses of either feminism or antiracism’ (Crenshaw 1991, 1244). In 2011, a group of female European researchers, Ravi Thiara, Stephanie Condon and Monika Schröttle, edited a text collection focused on the specific vulnerability of migrant women entitled: ‘Violence against Women and Ethnicity: Commonalities and Differences across Europe’. This book includes a number of contributions by European scholars and professionals who adopted the intersectional perspective in analysing the multiple system of oppression and marginalization connected with migration, and proceeded to unveil the structural and interpersonal dynamics that migrant abused women have to deal with in order to escape violence (Thiara et al. 2011). Many other scholars underlined the multi-layered systems of power that affect migrant-origin women who experience gender-based violence (Raj and Silverman 2002; Menjivar and Salcido 2002; Welchmann and Hossain 2005; Gangoli and Chantler Gangoli et al. 2011; Gill and Anitha 2011; Bimbi and Basaglia 2013). Some of them are anthropologists who questioned issues related to specific forms of violence (Volpp 2000; Akpinar

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2003), the relationship of violence against women and racism (RibeiroCorossacz 2013; Davis 2014) and the oppression of institutional violence against migrant women (Gribaldo 2014; Speed 2014, 2016). My own experience working in DoRi highlighted some important aspects related to this issue. Firstly, how migration laws concerning residence permits often force migrant women back to their violent partners because these women risk deportation if they seek a legal separation. Secondly, the lack of institutional and service resources to respond adequately to migrant women’s needs, and the intricate legal matters related to migration.4 Further, frequent misunderstandings about the strategies employed by migrant women to escape violence (structural and interpersonal5 ), or the women’s inability to respond according to service expectations, subjects them to judgements made by social service and institutional operators who tend to scrutinize their decisions and behaviours. This work experience made it clear to me that there are different dimensions to be considered when attempting to understand a woman’s vulnerability to domestic violence: the legal, economic and social status of the abused woman influences the woman’s abilities and opportunities to liberate herself from situations of violence. With these issues in mind, I decided to critically investigate the reproduction of structural violence (Farmer 2003) in the practices of DoRi’s operators towards the migrant women who turned to them for assistance. In my analysis, I considered the influence of the political and social context in which the women’s shelter is embedded, and the institutional system of power that involves both the anti-violence operators and the women who turn to them. The aim of the research was to identify possible practical ways to overcome the structural violence that affects migrant-origin women and to foster a transformative process that would necessarily involve the South Tyrolean social services and institutional practitioners. The research developed within three specific ways. In the first phase, I analysed documentation describing the work of the women’s shelter, which detailed the experiences of ten migrant women who had sought assistance. At the same time, I re-entered the safe house as a night-service operator and undertook participant observation. In the second phase of the research, I involved some anti-violence operators and members of the DoRi association in a shared reflection and analysis of their own practices, and then involved eight migrant women who lived in the safe house by interviewing them twice about the support that they had received. The ethnographic

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analysis of my research was based on the triangulation of three different perspectives: the ethnographic outcomes generated by my analysis of the ten cases and by my participant observation; the operators’ reflections on their advocacy practices; and the perspective of the interviewed women on the support that they received from DoRi and from local social services and institutions.

An Engaged Feminist Perspective and Its Lexicon During my time working in the women’s shelter, I witnessed the emotional distress of the women, and I shared with my former colleagues the frustrations generated by our difficulties in responding to situations experienced by migrant women. In trying to find solutions, my ex-colleagues and I were consistently confronted with an institutional vacuum. This vacuum highlighted the contradictions of the local welfare system, which on the one hand portrays itself as able to support every single abused woman but on the other does not extend this support equally to all the women who need it. This awareness represented de facto the starting point of my research. I witnessed the injustice of the migrant women’s condition, and I must ask myself whether and to what extent our practices reproduces the women’s vulnerability, even though in a more subtle and humanitarian way. I feel angry toward the structural violence that affects them and toward the extent of its dynamics, its origins and its consequences, [….], which appears to me impossible to solve (From my fieldnotes ).

The experience described by these words was at the same time professional and emotional, and shaped the research’s goal and methodology, which aimed to transform inequalities. I decided to apply a perspective that would aim to overcome a (supposedly) neutral and detached observation, and to embrace an explicit committed and ‘oppositional point of view’ (Lyon-Callo 2008, 156). This led me to an engaged ethnography that focused on problematizing the taken for granted of consolidated practices, and on rethinking these by transforming the ethnographic outcomes in ethnographic action (Schensul and LeCompte 2016). The public orientation of my ethnography was explicitly feminist, given its focus on violence against women and on promoting the empowerment of migrant women who are trying to escape from violence. This required

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me to understand the migrant women’s vulnerability through an intersectional perspective, one that inherently considers the women’s encounters with many forms of racist and classist discrimination. The intersection between these different but interconnected axes of oppression (Farmer 2003) determines the women’s social vulnerability to different forms of violence, institutional and interpersonal, and within both their context of origin and their host country. The feminist stance of my research adheres to the principles that guide DoRi’s work, to which I constantly refer in my analysis. This stance lent a specific lexicon to the written text of my Ph.D. thesis, which reflects the women’s shelter work and policy, and makes the text not only accessible to anthropologists and academics, but more importantly to the operators of women’s shelters and other services and institutions at local and national levels that undertake daily work on gender-based violence. Examples of this lexicon follow here. The first is ‘Donne in situazione di violenza’, which literally means ‘women who find themselves in a situation of violence’. Anti-violence operators use this expression instead of the word victim, which confers a passive role to the woman and denies her agency. By using the expression donne in situazione di violenza, the anti-violence operators stress the structural dimension of gender-based violence. Moreover, by using this specific expression, I did not merely reproduce the operators’ emic lexicon, but promoted it politically. In the same way, I adopted another expression, that is, relazione di accoglienza, which is difficult to translate from the Italian. It does not refer to a mere ‘reception/support relationship’, which represents its literal translation, but to a way of advocating for the women and in ways that imply warmth, welcoming, listening, trusting, equality, empathy and valorization. The use of this lexicon enabled DoRi’s operators to be aware of the need to redefine these concepts through an intersectional perspective that would better reflect the migrant women’s experiences and refer to the structural barriers that affect them specifically. I applied the same perspective to another concept, empowerment. The Italian women’s shelters operators use another word for defining women’s empowerment, autodeterminazione (self-determination), which has its origins in the Italian feminist movement. However, I decided to use the word empowerment because of its wider comprehension by other agents, such as social services, institutions and governmental and non-governmental organizations. At the same time, and by analysing this

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concept through the critical lenses of both anthropology and intersectionality, its use forces the text’s readers to reinterpret the concept of empowerment by distancing it from its mainstream understanding, that is, a Western-neoliberal perspective (Cornwall and Anyidoho 2010), and by integrating new elements that refer to migration processes and related forms of marginalization. The processes of empowerment should take into account the structural barriers (legal, economic, institutional and linguistic)6 that affect migrant-origin women in Italy, and specifically in South Tyrol. The use of a specific lexicon also included those formed within anthropological disciplines. By applying concepts that emanate from within anthropological analysis, I aimed at promoting among the anti-violence operators alternative verbalizations of the specific experiences that concern domestic violence. An example of this was the use of the word agency for describing a possible attitude of the women in response to psychological abuse. Domestic violence entails a psychological control by the abuser, who tends to manipulate the woman in order to reinforce his power over her. This implies that the perpetrator often uses a form of brainwashing as a means to control a woman, making her feel guilty, useless and worthless. In order to survive, many women respond to this behaviour by adapting themselves to the expectations of their abuser. They hope that this will prevent them from experiencing violence, notwithstanding the fact that nothing works effectively against violence because it is mostly unpredictable. The abuser understands that this is the precise means to keep the woman in check. Women are profoundly affected by this behaviour. Sometimes they end up internalizing this ‘manipulative’ attitude and reproducing it in all their formal and informal relationships, including their relationships with anti-violence operators. For example, they accommodate their behaviours and opinions according to those of their interlocutors, or they lie if they fear being blamed for something. Sometimes the women even reproduce the abuser’s manipulation. All these represent the women’s survival strategies in the face of the psychological violence from which they suffered. The women’s shelters operators are obviously aware of these dynamics, and they do not judge the women for their behaviour. However, they often use the same word, manipolazione (manipulation), to refer to this, although in Italian women’s shelters the word describes the psychological brainwashing used against the woman by the abuser. Their aim is of course to underline the relationship of these attitudes with the abuser’s acts. However, to talk about

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‘women’s manipulation’ risks blaming the women themselves. I therefore proposed to use the word agency instead of manipulation, because it focuses on the women’s strategies to survive the abuse, and because it lends a more positive, effective and empowering definition of those strategies. In the same way, the use of the Bourdieusian concept of habitus (Bourdieu 1977) to describe the professional patterns behind the practices of anti-violence operators, makes clear to them their embodiment, as professionals, of the institutional and cultural frameworks in which they work. This highlighted their limits in acting against these, but also the political role of their own agency in affecting the status quo towards greater social justice for migrant-origin women.

The Self-Reflexive Approach My multi-positioning in this research project, that is as a feminist, former operator and researcher, influenced the research process and the related written analysis. By re-entering the women’s shelter as an anthropologist, I necessarily had to redefine my role in the shelter. My first question was to ask myself how to undertake a critical investigation of the operators’ practices and avoid making them feel judged. As a former operator, I could understand how challenging my presence would be for them, given they would be exposed to a critical investigation undertaken by a former colleague. Being aware of the operators’ vulnerability, I decided that a good response to this challenge would be to apply a research method that made myself vulnerable to their critical analysis before commencing my own analysis of their work. I undertook an analysis of my previous work at the shelter, aiming to generate a critical investigation of my own work practices. This involved an autoethnographic analysis of the documentation that I had produced during my work at the shelter, and which referred to my work with ten migrant women. In making myself vulnerable, ‘a different set of problems and predicaments arise which would never surface in response to [a] more detached […] [approach]’ (Behar 1996, 29). In The Vulnerable Observer. Anthropology that Breaks your Heart, Ruth Behar underlines what it implies for an anthropologist to be vulnerable to ethnographic analysis and writing, and for the ethnographers themselves. She mostly refers to self-revelation in the anthropological writing, which is not what I did in my research. However, Behar points out specific aspects of the ethnographer’s vulnerability, which precisely describes my work:

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That doesn’t require a full-length autobiography, but it does require a keen understanding of what aspects of the self are the most important filters through which one perceives the world and, more particularly, the topic being studied. […] Vulnerability doesn’t mean that anything personal goes. The exposure of the self who is also a spectator has to take us somewhere we couldn’t otherwise get to. It has to be essential to the argument, not a decorative flourish, not exposure for its own sake. (Behar 1996, 26).

By engaging myself in this process, my experience as an anti-violence operator became the ‘epistemological and ontological nexus of the research process’ (Peterson 2015, 228). This methodology clarified that my research had nothing to do with judging the operators’ practices, but underlined instead how these are interrelated with the social and institutional context in which they (we) work. Hence, I identified how I had reproduced myself within the axes of structural violence affecting migrantorigin women, and this analysis enabled a shared reflection. The process involved a group of three operators, and two members of the DoRi association, which I named GRD, that is, Gruppo Ricerca DoRi (DoRi’s Research Group). We formed this group precisely for the purposes of the research, and we met six times for periods of two to three hours. This self-reflexive analysis of my work promoted a new openness with the operators, leading them to reflect critically on their own practices and then to the deconstruction of their own system of meanings. A further step in the research process was to undertake participant observation within the safe house. At that time, it would have been inappropriate for me to re-enter the house as either an anti-violence operator or as a researcher. In view of this, I asked my former colleagues if it was possible for me to re-enter the safe house as a night-service operator, which implies fewer days of work per month and a much lower level of tasks and responsibilities. Given that I had worked as a shelter operator before commencing my research, I took it for granted that the anti-violence operators would agree to my returning as a night worker. However, my assumption was wrong. In my field diary I noted my frustration when the operators told me that my request would be evaluated according to DoRi’s formal procedures, that is, after discussing my request with the professional team and considering whether my engagement in the night-service was appropriate or not. I was extremely disappointed and felt insecure and disoriented. I felt that I was no longer part of their professional environment and that I was now an outsider, to

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be treated like anyone else making the same request. I experienced a sense of displacement, what Mascarenhas-Keyes defines as a ‘schizophrenia between the “native self” and the “professional self”’ (Mascarenhas-Keyes 1987, 180) that is, between my previous identity as a DoRi operator and my new identity as anthropologist. Although I am researching at home and not in an-other space, in another country, I feel that my immersion in the field became invasive. I am elsewhere at my home, experiencing the tension between being inside and outside together. But, being at home, this elsewhere doesn’t allow me to define its boundaries, and requires time and energy from my daily life, making me feel in a condition of apnoea, which challenges me personally, the ways I perceive myself and in my everyday life. (From my fieldnotes )

I then realized that the operators were justified in their need to consider some relevant concerns related to their work. They are responsible for the privacy of the women who they support, and for the trusting relationship that they build with them. My request made explicit the operators’ ethical commitment to the women, as well as their commitment to the local institutions that require them to respect specific bureaucratic procedures concerning the privacy and safety of the women and their children who are hosted in the safe house. I took for granted my own ethical commitment to the women, which reflects my internalization of the specific role of an anti-violence operator, a role I had previously held. By changing my role, I had to negotiate my new tasks within the research field and all of us (the operators and I) had to engage in building a new trusting relationship between each other, and ‘to deal with the difficult task of rendering unfamiliar what in our former professional relationship had been familiar’ (Della Rocca 2019, 52). Starting from this assumption, I decided to better clarify my ethical commitment as an anthropologist towards my interlocutors, and I explained each step of the research, its motivation, its possible effects on the interlocutors and on me, and how I would manage all of these factors (Della Rocca 2019). When I did finally commence my work in the night-service, I felt somewhat confused, but recognized that it was necessary for me to perceive the safe house in a different light: Today, it is the first time I re-enter the safe house as night-operator after six months since I worked in the antiviolence centre, and I am very happy to do it. I feel this place as part mine. I am confident in it, I

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move consciously, because I have the “power” to act that way, due to my professional know-how, that, however, I must re-define as a night-service operator. Because this role implies another degree of authority, toward this space, the women, my ex colleagues and the other night-operators. And, at the same time, I am here as a researcher, a role that helps this re-definition but that implies distancing myself in order to reflect critically on my acts.

I systematically observed my attempts to internalize a different way to stay in the house that implied not intervening in the women’s situations. I reflected on my internalized ways to define the women’s stories, placing the stories in categories that for me were spontaneous and reflected the work of the shelter. In particular, I became aware of my habit of focusing on specific aspects of the women’s stories that are clearly related to their encounters with domestic violence, and how I frame these within the professional categories that enable anti-violence operators to build supportive practices. However, and unavoidably, this means that other dimensions of the women’s lives are left out, including those that would lend a more holistic understanding of their existences, and consequently a better comprehension of the women’s perspective on how violence affects them and ways to build their own empowerment.7 I realized that I had to deliberately deconstruct my professional expertise as an anti-violence operator. I gave constant attention to this matter throughout the entire research project.

The Participatory Stance of the Research After analysing each of the ten cases, I shared with some operators and members of the DoRi the contents of an article I had intended to submit to an academic journal. In the article, I had reported the outcomes of the initial phase of the research, where I had undertaken my first analysis of the reproduction of structural violence in DoRi’s practices. The operators expressed their fears about its publication, claiming that I had not adequately reported the complexity of their work, and that this would likely lead to a misinterpretation of their practices. They felt scared and exposed, and we then discussed and deliberated on these apprehensions for many hours. Finally, and in order to consolidate my trust relationship with them, I decided not to submit the paper. Some of the operators were actually surprised by this decision, and expressed the fear that this could damage my role as a researcher. This then led us to reflect on the

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power of our own positioning—mine as the researcher who owns the data, and theirs as operators who had the power to either grant or deny access to DoRi’s data. We all became aware of the need for constant dialogue, a dialogue that should consider not only our new and old professional relationships, but also our friendships. Anthropologist Stella MascarenhasKeyes underlines that conflict situations within the field can be successfully integrated into the research’s methodology (Mascarenhas-Keyes 1987, 189). However, in the case of a ‘native’ ethnographer, the relationship with the interlocutors represents a formidable challenge because it usually begins before the research and then continues after it. In these cases, the interlocutors’ feedback becomes much more relevant for the researcher because it directly affects her personal sphere. Taking into account this challenging positioning, I proposed that the operators engage with me in a collaborative process. I proposed that I would discuss with them the contents of my Ph.D. thesis, and would include their points of view in the final written text. This was agreed to and my final text reflected not only my own analysis of the shelter’s practices, but also the voices of the DoRi’s operators concerning their own practices, as well as their own agency towards the local institutions. I shared with them each chapter of my thesis, which was then discussed systematically in six further meetings. The operators’ points of view were progressively integrated within the text. I also paid great attention to the perspective of the interviewed women: after the two first interviews, I met each woman a third time, reading them the extracts of the previous interviews, which I had reported in the text, and describing to them the outcomes of the research. Some women added new elements that I inserted in the final version of the text. This process attempted to reflect the women’s shelter’s ‘internal polyphony’ (Sorgoni 2011, 27), which involved the operators, the women who turn to them, and the context in which their relationships take place. An example of this is found in the discussion about the case of Zoe, a highly traumatized woman whom I supported, and who lived with her daughters in the safe house for two months. During this time, she manifested several difficulties in taking care of her children, who all presented persistent health problems. For this reason, the operator’s team, in agreement with the social services, decided to organize Zoe’s accommodation in a shelter house for single mothers. In the text, I describe Zoe’s disagreement with the decision to relocate, a move that would have distanced her from the social network that she had built in the previous two months. She finally accepted the relocation, but only because she

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felt she had no other choice. I stressed that this contradicted DoRi’s principles, and I highlighted the power that the operators exerted over the woman. In the text, I also reported the operators’ opinions on this case. One of them in particular underlined how this decision aimed at ensuring the well-being of Zoe’s daughters, who were seriously affected by their precarious health situations. At the same time, she emphasized, it represented Zoe’s opportunity to reinforce her role as a mother. In response to this claim, I reported the words of an interviewed woman who sometimes felt overwhelmed by the pressure exerted over her by the operators. She explained that the latter disagreed with her accommodating way to respond to the behaviour of her former husband, which the operators evaluated as too risky for her and her children. The woman claimed that she could understand the operators’ requirement to protect her and her children, however she perceived this pressure as an obligation, which for the women who experienced violence, she said, represents a reproduction of the abuser’s violence. Finally, I reported the opinions of two other DoRi members, who underlined that it is often implicit in advocacy work that power can be perceived as being ‘over’ the women in order to ensure their long-term empowerment, even when the women may not have agreed initially, but, the operators claimed, the women often later agree that it was required at the time. The women stressed, however, that sometimes the actions by operators are often contrary to the feminist theoretical principles that are supposed to guide the work of the shelter. The collaborative stance of the project implied further engagement of the anti-violence operators in the process of the research. I suggested that they write a specific chapter in the thesis and other paragraphs that would describe the shelter’s policies, guidelines and the nature of its work. This specific way of collaboration was designed to ensure a balance in the power relationship between the operators and me by allowing them to represent their own work and to use the lexicon that they use for describing this work. As Lassiter suggested in 2005: [….]collaborative reading and editing (especially that which pushes toward co-interpretation) is what ultimately makes an ethnography collaborative. When taken seriously and applied systematically rather than bureaucratically, any one or a combination of these strategies leads us from the mere representation of dialogue to its actual engagement, from one-dimensional to multidimensional collaboration, and from a clichéd collaborative ethnography to a more deliberate and explicit collaborative

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ethnography that more immediately engages the publics with which we work. (Lassiter 2005, 96)

Notwithstanding our co-writing effort, and based on two reasons, we decided not to engage in the co-writing of each chapter of the Ph.D. thesis. Firstly, this would have required a significant investment of time by the operators, and the risk that they would be unable to give full commitment to their daily work. Secondly, we decided to use the thesis chapters, which I was progressively writing, as the basis for our collective reflection on the different perspectives that emerged from the ethnographic analysis reported in the text. Although I held more authority than the DoRi’s members concerning the final content of text—apparently contradicting the feminist approach that aims to overcome any form of hierarchical power—we (the DoRi’s members and I) were conscious of the different roles that we played within the research process. This had been one of the most relevant topics of the discussions that we had held before starting our suite of meetings, where we had asked ourselves who would have authority about what. If there were issues related to anonymity and the exposure of the women’s shelter services, they would be subject to the approval of DoRi’s members, and the contents concerning the ethnographic analysis would be controlled by me but subject to discussion with the research partners (the DoRis’ members and the women whom I interviewed8 ). This effort consolidated our shared contribution to the research. The members of the GRD (DoRi’s Research Group) did not become ethnographers themselves, notwithstanding the fact that the collaborative process was based on our common experience (theirs and mine) as operators and as activists of DoRi. The condition for sharing was both the goal of the research and its feminist stance. At the same time, they did become authors of the text, but only in regards to the description of the operators’ work at the women’s shelter, and in the definition of the feminist principles that guide the DoRi’s political activities. Furthermore, they participated in the drafting of the entire text by sharing reflections on each of its chapters. This built a rich interaction among the GRD’s members, who responded according to their own experiences and positionings, many of which were diverse. This interaction set a new way of reflecting on specific issues, including, although indirectly, the perspectives of a number of the migrant-origin women they supported. Since the goal of the research had been to identify new practices in supporting migrant-origin women, the GRD’s members committed themselves to

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building a common point of view that then proceeded to inform the construction of a set of concrete work proposals. In fact, the Ph.D. thesis concludes by suggesting specific practices that aim to improve DoRi’s support practices, as well as those of other Italian women’s shelters. During the collaborative process, they did not act as anthropologists but instead as anti-violence operators and activists who used the anthropological analysis and methodology, which I had offered them during the collaborative process, to integrate new perspectives into their own work and political struggles.

Towards Further Engagement My previous professional experience in DoRi had required me to reflect on my former habitus (Bourdieu 1977) as an anti-violence operator, so I undertook a deconstruction of this role and shared this process with some members of DoRi. It was this process that led the research into a collaborative process, and which made explicit the polyphonic dimensions of the women’s shelter that involved the anti-violence operators, the women who turn to them, the local services and institutions, and the analysis which highlighted the power relationships inherent in the fieldwork. As a former operator, ethnographer and an activist, my own positioning in the field was highly relevant for my Ph.D. research, and forced me to put into question its influence on the ethnographic analysis and on its representation. In order to respond to this, I attempted to make explicit the voice of each participant (the DoRi’s Research Group, the interviewed women and me). With this objective in mind, I attempted to represent in the text my constant dialogue with my interlocutors. By undertaking this process, I also considered the limits of my cultural proximity within the field. First, I reflected on the possible risk of overlooking some critical aspects concerning the operators’ practices, given that I would have previously internalized these practices during my fouryear work experience in DoRi. In fact, and although I had attempted to deconstruct my identity as an anti-violence operator, I was constantly confronted with the taken for granted of my former professional habitus. An example was my reaction to the difficulties that continued to confront many of the women. Although I avoided intervening in certain cases, I had to deal with my habit of advocating on their behalf in response to their problems. At the same time, some of the interviewed women

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asked me for help concerning specific issues related to their psychological, social or legal empowerment. Another limit was the potential reluctance of the interviewed women in criticizing operators, who de facto were my ex-colleagues. One of them, in fact, claimed that some women would never report criticisms concerning the anti-violence operators, due precisely to my personal ties with them. Nevertheless, my specific expertise as a former DoRi operator conferred me with specific knowledge that would otherwise have required a long-term observation, as well as an in-depth study of the feminist perspective on gender-based violence and the principles underpinning the women’s shelters advocacy work. This know-how was particularly significant for my ability to manage the emotional distress connected to the experiences of domestic violence, and it allowed me to face the narratives of the women while avoiding the risk of their re-traumatization. One of them in particular underlined how easy it was to talk with me about issues that other social operators could not understand, many of which have been used to judge women, especially immigrant women. This specific expertise also gave me access to the emic perspective of the operators, and to their lexicon, thereby ensuring my ability to develop a profound understanding of the field and to use concepts that made my ethnographic text an effective instrument for the anti-violence operators to apply. In saying this, I refer not only to the operators of DoRi, but also to operators of other Italian women’s shelters. This was in fact an explicit wish of DoRi’s members when they realized that the representation of their experiences potentially echoed the experiences of many other Italian anti-violence operators. Our discussions around the use of a pseudonym specifically highlighted this aspect. In fact, being known as a former operator of DoRi, the real identity of the women’s shelter could be easily disclosed. Thus, the use of a pseudonym did not respond to the need for anonymity, but reflected instead the usefulness of representing experiences that the operators could potentially share with other Italian anti-violence operators. The use of DoRi’s real name would have focused attention on the specific situation of DoRI, whereas members preferred to emphasize the commonality experiences shared by other anti-violence operators. Aiming to give voice to the migrant-origin women, I engaged myself in a consideration of their specific vulnerability to violence. This mirrored the critical feminist approach of many academic disciplines and of feminist ethnography itself, which have played an important role in feminist research to date. One of the most controversial concerns has been the

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tension between the universalistic interpretation of women’s oppression and the risk of cultural relativism. The anthropologist’s effort to highlight the emic interpretation and conceptualization of the phenomenon aims at overcoming its own ethnocentric understandings. This approach directly contributed to the construction of a cultural relativism that sometimes prevented anthropologists from recognizing injustice, suffering and discrimination against women (Wies and Haldane 2011; Plesset 2006). Towards the end of the 1960s and into the 1970s, the second wave of feminism empowered many ethnographers, mostly women, to unveil the patriarchal norms inherent in anthropological patterns of investigation. This led anthropologists to acknowledge that gender inequalities were embedded within many contexts under investigation, as well as within the anthropological discipline itself, and paved the way to represent the gendered domains within the field (Visweswaran 1994, 19). In their edited book, Women, Culture, and Society (1974), Rosaldo and Lamphere recognized that oppression of women was a global issue, whereas the contributions edited by Reiter in the text Toward an Anthropology of Women (1975) paid more attention to cultural, social and class differences. Both texts underlined the patriarchal prejudice that made men the privileged interlocutors of ethnographic investigations, rendering women mostly invisible or the bearers of specific ‘particularities’ subjected to the dominant male perspective (Busoni 2000, 113–19). In 2001, the Handbook of Ethnography edited by Atkinson et al., included the contribution of Beverly Skeggs, who described the historical development of feminist ethnography during the 1980s and the 1990s. Skeggs underlined how the social experience of being a woman represented the starting point of feminist research (Skeggs 2001, 432–33). This perspective mirrors in fact the principles of second wave feminism, which fought to subvert the patriarchal domination of women’s bodies, sexuality and identity, a subversion that must be necessarily done by women. Such an approach aims at re-defining women’s subjectivity within the different social domains. However, many scholars and activists criticized feminist analysis for being merely based on gender belonging, thereby obscuring other forms of oppression. This statement put under question mainstream feminists for considering only the perspective of Western, white and bourgeois women, and for marginalizing the experiences of black, migrant or indigenous women. Within the anthropological critique, Lila Abu-Lughod claimed that discrimination against black women or migrant women in Western countries is not only sexist but also racist and classist (Abu-Lughod 2005).

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She claimed that even feminist anthropologists tend to reproduce the structural inequalities embedded within the Western-centred perspective. It becomes clear in the ways they represent non-Western women, whose experiences are often essentialized. To avoid the risk of reification, AbuLughod suggests undertaking an ‘ethnography of the particular’, which, ‘by focusing closely on particular individuals and their changing relationships, […], subvert the most problematic connotations of culture: homogeneity, coherence, and timelessness’ (Abu-Lughod 2005, 476). As a feminist researcher who has embraced the ethnographic critical and postcolonial perspective on gender, and on feminism itself, I problematized the complexity of my positioning within the research. This requires referencing to the “halfie” position treated by Lila Abu-Lughod herself in her text “Writing against Culture” (2005): “The problem with studying one’s own society is alleged to be the problem of gaining enough distance, […] [given] for halfies, the Other is in certain ways the self” (Abu-Lughod 2005, 468). Due to my proximity to the DoRi anti-violence operators, the problem of distancing them—in order to deconstruct my taken for granted—was the problem of distancing myself from part of my identity by othering it, that is by othering the experiences of an anti-violence operator as I had been a few months earlier. At the same time, my research concerned the experiences of migrantorigin women, who, as migrants, represent the emblem of the Others who live within the contexts of the Western anthropologists themselves. In addition, as women migrants, they are often otherized by Western feminists, that is, they are subjected to a process of culturalization as explained above. The multiple structures of power, which mark my positioning, thus become explicit. This required me to engage in an in-depth analysis of this positioning within the specific net of the relations in which I was entangled: an effort that anthropologists—independently of their being outsiders or insiders—must undertake as subjects who move ‘within a larger political-historical complex’ (Abu-Lughod 2005, 468). With this objective in mind, I explicitly underlined the political goal of my research and the challenges related to me as a feminist anthropologist. By focusing part of my analysis on my figure as ethnographer, I stressed the role played by this in influencing the public-focused, reflexive and participatory stances of my ethnography. The written production aimed at reflecting these stances, rendering the text a concrete tool for a critical auto-reflection by the women’s shelters operators and for the potential

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application of this on their concrete work. This effort led to translating the outcomes of the ethnographic analysis into concrete actions that are capable of transforming the advocacy practices towards migrantorigin women. In the final phase of my Ph.D. project, the GRD (DoRi’s Research Group) and I outlined a set of measures that concerned specific practical tools for the advocacy work and for policies which should be integrated into the activities of the DoRi’s Association. Although these actions refer to the specific South Tyrolean context, the research participants and I were aware of their potential application in many other social and institutional spaces. This was enabled through the adoption of a specific lexicon that reflected those of the Italian women’s shelters, a lexicon that also echoed the reciprocal contamination between my anthropological perspective and those of the anti-violence operators. This process allowed the deconstruction of the taken for granted of the subjects who were involved. Consequently, it enabled recognition of the discrepancies among the different perspectives at stake, opening alternative understandings within their own paradigms. I took this engagement a step further in a subsequent research project, again based in South Tyrol, which aimed at an intercultural understanding of violence against women and women’s empowerment.9 It has produced a text that outlines specific suggestions concerning advocacy work with abused women who belong to the so-called first and second generation of migrants in South Tyrol. The target was again the operators of women’s shelters, the social services and the institutions that deal with gender-based violence. By interviewing migrant-origin women about key concepts concerning gender issues, violence against women and women’s empowerment, the aim of the research was to report the voices of women of different belongings and generations in order to deconstruct stereotypes and also to identify alternative perspectives. This project required considerable effort, including the review of an extensive ethnographic corpus of data in some fundamental concepts, finding out effective ways to interpret the migrant-origin experiences of domestic violence and then promoting prevention without homogenizing the women’s points of view. The text demands constant negotiation between the anthropological imperative of a thick description of the phenomenon and the perspective of social operators who need practical tools and a specific lexicon. My former experience in intervening in the women’s process of empowerment, and my understanding of DoRi’s experiences as a women’s shelter and its political struggles as a feminist association, was

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extremely useful when attempting to achieve a balance between these different, and sometimes opposing stances. The text reports the women’s point of view, stressing the fundamental commonalities among them while at the same time providing specific ways for them to interpret their experiences. The document also highlights the risks of feminist ethnocentrism by reporting some discrepancies between the perspective of the women’s shelters and the migrant-origin women’s points of view, including the women’s perspectives themselves, in order to unveil their subjectivity and demonstrate why divergent views are relevant if their attempts to support them are to be effective. A further example of this effort is my current participation on an institutional ‘working table’ convened by the executives of the Autonomous Province of Bolzano that focuses on supporting female asylum seekers who have experienced gender-based violence. One of the goals of the working table is the production of an online document that will be available to operators of South Tyrolean social services and will contain specific definitions of different forms of gender-based violence. In attempting to describe so-called honour-based violence, I started asking myself how to define it in a way that could overcome its common understanding, which tends to be subjected to a process of culturalization.10 At the same time, the definition of honour-based violence must be accessible to operators who are not anthropologists, and who generally recognize this form of violence within the frame of international agencies that are mainly focused on the human rights perspective.11 Researchers who deal with this specific form of violence face the same difficulties in defining so-called honourbased violence without obscuring their specific dynamics, and at the same time overcoming any risk of stigmatization (Mojab 2004; Sen 2005; Cavenaghi 2013). This still represents a very important debate, and is one which feminist anthropologists should pursue by representing the particular declination of the different forms of gender-based violence within different social, economic and institutional contexts and pursuing, at the same time, the exposure of the multilayered dimensions of power and the need to go beyond the borders of current academic thinking. This will require anthropologists to reconsider and renegotiate their writing styles and lexicons. This, from my point of view, does not imply mortifying the complexity of the phenomenon under study, but instead implies the need to create networks and tools that allow public-focused ethnographies to better pursue their public-oriented objectives.

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Notes 1. DoRi is a pseudonym of the association that was chosen by their members and is an acronym of Donne-Rifugio (Women-Refuge). 2. The Social Services of the Municipality of Bolzano, as well as those of South Tyrol at all, contracts various services to NGOs through a public competition. The anti-violence centre of Bolzano is one of these organizations. Since its inception, DoRi has had to participate in a tender every five to six years. 3. Bolzano is the main town and the administrative centre of South Tyrol, which in the second half of the twentieth century achieved a specific autonomy from the Italian Government regarding a set of administrative issues. 4. In 2013, the Italian Internal Ministry enacted a security decree that provides a humanitarian residence permit for undocumented women who press charges for domestic violence. This decree is commonly known as 18-bis Article. This law simplifies some cases, but does little to address the vulnerability of undocumented migrant women. In fact, it does not fulfil the requirements of the Istanbul Convention (Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence). This convention recommends guaranteeing the migrant women’s access to a residence permit, which makes them legally independent from their abusers. The 2018 immigration-security decree, which was proposed by the Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, worsened the rights of migrant-origin women by abolishing precisely the permit for humanitarian reasons that the women receive according to the 18-bis article. This permit has been converted in a residence permit for so-called ‘special cases’, which addresses different forms of specific vulnerabilities without ensuring the migrant-women access to a long-term empowerment process. 5. The structural violence to which I refer implies legal, linguistic, economic and institutional barriers that intersect the dynamics of interpersonal violence exerted by the husband or a member (mostly male) of the family of origin. The analysis of this intersection required a specific theoretical frame. The model of the mosaic of violence by anthropologist Shannon Speed offered an useful tool to unveil the mutually constitution of the axes of oppression and violence that affect migrant, black or indigenous women within a political order, which is at the same time patriarchal, neocolonial and neoliberal (Speed 2014, 2016). 6. The legal barriers concern the women’s difficulties in obtaining an autonomous residence permit, because many of them hold a residence permit for family reasons, which is connected directly to the permit of their husbands. By depending legally on him, many women are prevented

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from seeking support in case of violence, because they fear deportation. The economic barriers mostly refers to the women’s obstacles in accessing the labour market. Racism, linguistic difficulties and the isolation generated by domestic violence often hinder entering the job market relegating many migrant-origin women to informal and precarious work. For women who migrated following their violent husbands, to learn the local South Tyrolean languages becomes a great challenge, because they are particularly isolated and traumatized. These language barriers prevent the women from seeking institutional support, from building informal social networks and from finding a job that makes them economically independent. In addition, South Tyrol has three official languages: Italian, German and Ladin. Although the latter is less important for seeking a job or building meaningful relationships with locals, the knowledge of the other two languages, Italian and German, is often required for getting a stable job. Finally, institutional barriers mostly refers to the South Tyrolean bureaucratic system, which hinders access to a set of welfare benefits for all those who are not South Tyroleans or do not permanently live in South Tyrol from minimum two or five years (depending on the benefit). Institutional barriers also concern the dismissive behaviours of institutional operators (police officers, social workers and court ‘staff’), who often behave in paternalistic or even racist forms towards migrant people who live in South Tyrol. Besides, many of them still respond to domestic violence according to a set of stereotypes. This attitude make the institutions far from being a safe place for migrant-origin women who escape violence. 7. In my Ph.D. thesis, I precisely underlined the relevance of experiencing, as anthropologist, a greater access to other aspects of the women’s lives, which were mostly precluded to me before, when I worked as antiviolence operator. In fact, the trusting relationship that I was required to build with my interlocutors as a researcher implies meeting the women at their homes and talking about daily issues that concerned my life and theirs. This entails building informal encounters, which are mostly excluded from the professional relationship that the same women interwove with me before at the women’s shelter. 8. I met with the eight migrant-origin women whom I interviewed four times. I met the women the first time when I explained them the whole process of the research and its objectives. The second and the third times, I interviewed them. Finally, I met with all of them a fourth time during the last phase of the research. In this meeting, I explain them the research’s outcomes and compared one more time the perspective that emerged from the ethnographic analysis with those of the women

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who I interviewed. My attempt was to verify with the eight migrantorigin women themselves to what extent they felt their experiences were adequately represented in the ethnographic text. 9. Under Dorothy Zinn’s supervision, I worked on this study from March 2018 to June 2020. The project was funded by a grant from the Central Research Commission at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano. 10. This reflection concerns the use and the conceptualization of the word honour, which tends to reduce the so-called honour-based violence to a cultural issue, failing to explain it as the expression of a patriarchal social order. 11. Recently, Dorothy Zinn and I published an article that reports anthropologists’ critical analysis of the use of a specific lexicon by some international declarations against women’s discrimination and gender-based violence. These declarations focus on a human rights perspective, but reveal the remnants of a colonial interpretations of specific practices and behaviours of non-Western people (Della Rocca and Zinn 2019).

References Abu-Lughod, Lila. 2005. “Writing against Culture.” In Anthropology in Theory, edited by H.L. Moore and T. Sanders, 466–479. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Akpinar, Aylin. 2003. “The Honour/Shame Complex Revisited: Violence against Women in the Migration Context.” Women’s Studies International Forum 26 (5): 425–42. Anitha, Sundari, and Aisha K. Gill. 2011. “ Reconceptualising Consent and Coercion Within an Intersectional Understanding of Forced Marriage.” In Forced Marriage: Introducing a Social Justice and Human Rights Perspective, edited by A.K. Gill and S. Anitha, 46–66. London: Zed Books. Behar, Ruth. 1996. The Vulnerable Observer. Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart. Boston: Bacon Press. Bimbi, Franca, and Alberta Basaglia, eds. 2003. Speak Out! Migranti e Mentor di Comunità contro la violenza di genere. Padova: CLEUP. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Edited and translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. First published 1972. Busoni, M. (2000). Genere, sesso, cultura. Uno sguardo antropologico. Roma: Carocci. Cavenaghi, Piera. L’onore delle donne. Un’analisi etnografica tra i migranti pakistani e indiani nel bresciano. Ph.D. diss. Università degli Studi di Udine, 2013. Cornwall, Andrea, and Nana A. Anyidoho. 2010. “Introduction: Women’s Empowerment: Contentions and Contestations.” Development 53 (2): 144– 49.

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Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1991. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43 (6): 1241–99. Davis, Dána-Ain. (2014). What is a feminist activist ethnographer to do? American Anthropologist, 116(2), 413–415. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman. 12112. De Cicco, Stefania. 2003. La casa delle donne: esperienze a confronto tra Bolzano e Düsseldorf . Master diss. Università degli Studi di Verona. Della Rocca, Marina. 2019. “Emotional Vulnerability and Ethnographic Understanding: A Collaborative Research Project in a Women’s Shelter.” In Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography, edited by T. Stodulka, S. Dinkelaker, and F. Thajib, 49–62. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland AG. Della Rocca, Marina, and Dorothy L. Zinn. 2019. “Othering Honor-Based Violence: The Perspective of Antiviolence Operators in Northern Italy.” Human Organization 78 (4): 325–334. Farmer, Paul. 2003. Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gangoli, Geetanjali, Khatidja Chantler, Marianne Hester, and Ann Singleton 2011. “Understanding Forced Marriage: Definitions and Realities.” In Forced Marriage: Introducing a Social Justice and Human Rights Perspective, edited by A.K. Gill and S. Anitha, 25–44. London: Zed Books. Gribaldo, Alessandra. 2014. “The Paradoxical Victim: Intimate Violence Narratives on Trial in Italy.” American Ethnologist 41 (4): 743–756. Lassiter, Luke E. 2005. “Collaborative Ethnography and Public Anthropology.” Current Anthropology 46 (1): 83–106. Lyon-Callo, Vincent, and UTP Higher Education Staff Contribution. 2008. Inequality, Poverty, and Neoliberal Governance: Activist Ethnography in the Homeless Sheltering Industry. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Mascarenhas-Keyes, Stella. 1987. “The Native Anthropologist: Constraints and Strategies in Research.” In Anthropology at Home, edited by Anthony Jackson, 180–94. London: Tavistock Publication. Menjivar, Cecilia, and Olivia Salcido. 2002. “Immigrant Women and Domestic Violence: Common Experiences in Different Countries.” Gender & Society 16 (6): 898–920. Mojab, Shahrzad. 2004. “The Particularity of ‘Honour’ and the Universality of ‘Killing’: From Early Warning Signs to Feminist Pedagogy.” In Violence in the Name of Honour: Theoretical and Political Challenges, edited by S. Mojab and N. Abdo, 15–37. Istanbul: Bilgi University Press. Peterson, Ashley L. 2015. “A Case for the Use of Autoethnography in Nursing Research.” Journal of Advanced Nursing 71 (1): 226–33. Plesset, Sonia. 2006. Sheltering Women: Negotiating Gender and Violence in Northern Italy. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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Raj, Anitha, and Jay G. Silverman. 2002. “Violence against Immigrant Women. The Role of Culture, Context and Legal Immigrant Status on Intimate Partner Violence.” Violence Against Women 8 (3): 367–98. Reiter, Rayna R. 1975. Toward an Anthropology of Women. New York, London: Monthly Review Press. Ribeiro Corossacz, Valeria. 2013. “L’intersezione di razzismo e sessismo. Strumenti teorici per un’analisi della violenza maschile contro le donne nel discorso pubblico sulle migrazioni.” Antropologia 15: 109–129. Rosaldo, Michelle Z., and Louise Lamphere, eds. 1974. Woman, Culture and Society. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Schensul, Jean J., and Margaret D. LeCompte, 2016. Ethnography in Action: A Mixed Methods Approach (Ethnographer’s Toolkit 7). Lanham: AltaMira Press. Sen, Purna. 2005. “‘Crimes of Honour’, Value and Meaning.” In ‘Honour’: Crimes, Paradigms, and Violence Against Women, edited by L. Welchman and S. Hossain, 42–63. London: Zed Books. Skeggs, Beverley. 2001. “Feminist Ethnography.” In Handbook of Ethnography, edited by C. Atkinson, A. Coffey, S. Delamont, J. Lofland, and L. Lofland, 426–442. London: Sage. Sorgoni, Barbara. (2011). Per un’etnografia dell’accoglienza. In Etnografia dell’accoglienza. Rifugiati e richiedenti asilo a Ravenna edited by B. Sorgoni, 17–34. Roma: CISU. Speed, Shannon. 2014. “A Dreadful Mosaic: Rethinking Gender Violence Through the Lives of Indigenous Women Migrants.” Anthropological Approaches to Gender-Based Violence and Human Rights, Working paper #304, 78–94. Accessed [December 20, 2015]. http://gencen.isp.msu.edu/ documents/Working_Papers/WP304.pdf. Speed, Shannon. 2016. “State of Violence: Indigenous Women Migrants in the Era of Neoliberal Multicriminalism.” Critique of Anthropology 36 (3): 280– 301. Thiara, Ravi K., Stephanie Condon, and Monika Schröttle. 2011. “Introduction.” In Violence against Women and Ethnicity: Commonalities and Differences Across Europe, edited by R.K. Thiara, S. Condon, and M. Schröttle, 17–31. Opladen: Barbara Budrich Publishers. Visweswaran, K. (1994). Fictions of feminist ethnography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Accessed [June 26, 2017]. http://ebookcentral.proquest. com. Volpp, Leti. 2000. “Blaming Culture for Bad Behaviour.” Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities 12 (1): 89–116. Accessed [December 19, 2016]. http:// digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yjlh/vol12/iss1/3. Welchman, Lynn, and Sara Hossain. eds. 2005. ‘Honour’: Crimes, Paradigms, and Violence Against Women. London: Zed Books Ltd.

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Wies, Jennifer. R., and Hillary Haldane. 2011. “Ethnographic Notes from the Front Lines of Gender-Based Violence.” In Anthropology at the Front Lines of Gender-Based Violence, edited by J.R. Wies, and H.J. Haldane, 1–17. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. Accessed [April 5, 2017].

Can There Be Feminist Anthropology in Turkey?: Histories, Continuities, and (Dis)Connections of Gender and Genre Hande Birkalan-Gedik

Introduction ‘Can there be feminist ethnography in Turkey?’ In this paper, I take my readers to a terra incognita—to unmapped geography of feminist ethnography in Turkey. This question has a firm relevance at a time when feminist ethnographers have already discussed several aspects of feminist ethnographic praxis and the role of gender and genre in the field and writing. I will begin to first argue that, in fact, there has been feminist ethnography in Turkey, which found resistance in anthropology and developed chiefly in sociology, communication, and media studies, as these disciplines increasingly rely on ethnographic methods, which were once thought to have been the signature domain of anthropology. Second, I pose that in this constellation, most of the emergent feminist ethnographies avow their methodologies as feminist but do not comply with their claims fully. Other cases only allude to the general literature

H. Birkalan-Gedik (B) Institut für Kulturanthropologie und Europäische Ethnologie, Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität, Frankfurt am Main, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 E. Tauber and D. L. Zinn (eds.), Gender and Genre in Ethnographic Writing, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71726-1_5

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on feminist ethnography, falling short of contextualising generic issues at large, vis à vis, in their own work. In the end, feminist ethnographies both within and outside anthropology bypass an occasion to set themselves with a dialogue on textual, genre-related issues to feminist ethnographic examples. Here, I am framing my viewpoints particularly in the context of Anglo-American social and cultural anthropology traditions—as I received my training in the US alongside folklore studies. I will therefore be speaking from the Anglo-American school of anthropology as an important location, one that has guided me through my understanding of feminist ethnography. Third, I will demonstrate that feminist ethnography in Turkey can be located at the creative tension between ‘strong feminist activism’, an impetus that came from women’s movements, and ‘weak feminist textuality’, a textual feature that ethnographies seem to suffer in their writing. Certainly, there is a conundrum as to why, despite strong feminist activism, anthropology in Turkey bypassed producing fully feminist ethnographies, and other disciplines partly achieved this task. I will examine this issue when I discuss the emergence of anthropology in Turkey and its relation to state formation and nationalism, whereby I will consider how far feminist thought and action impacted ethnographic studies in the country. As I present critical accounts of both anthropology and feminist ethnography, I explore reasons for the lack of ethnographic feminist writing and propose strategies on how to overcome this ineptitude. At the outset, I take feminist ethnography to encompass three interrelated planes: First, I am interested in the relation of feminist ethnography to feminist epistemology, which concerns feminist ways of knowing and expressing this knowledge both in the field and in the text. Here, I find ‘experience’-based knowledge, as opposed to that of an assumedly ‘objective’ one, to guide my ethnographic understanding. Second, I observe that anthropology in Turkey, for the most part, refrained from exploring socio-cultural, ethnic, and gender-based differences or structural inequalities in the country (Birkalan-Gedik 2005). It insisted on an assumed ‘sameness’ in the name of so-called national culture, thus failing to extend an analysis through which differences were disclosed in ethnographic texts. By no means do I suggest that ‘otherness’ is reconcilable, yet my anthropological vision has been framed by awareness for distinction, whereby I remain attuned to such differences as they reveal themselves in everyday life situations and fieldwork. I strive to reflect on them in my text in a critical manner. Third, I search for feminist textuality, which

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would interpret the lives and experiences of women and men through a lens of feminist analysis. I try to combine these elements sensibly to speak to my vision of feminist ethnography (Birkalan-Gedik 2009). I begin by presenting my own journey of feminist ethnography, hoping to reveal my positionality on fieldwork and in writing. After examining the development of anthropology in Turkey, which emerged as a nationalist, masculinist, and positivist science, I discuss the emergence of feminist ethnographic voices since the 1980s and point out certain work exemplary of feminist fieldwork methodologies. The precursory feminists conducted noteworthy ethnographic examples; however, their writings do not reveal any kind of feminist textual features, thus falling short of offering examples of feminist ethnography. Having said that, I should underline that I do not possess a ready formula for feminist textuality, although I believe self-reflexive writing to be the essential base of feminist writing, whereby ethnographic experience and epistemology can be made more transparent. Furthermore, it can be achieved in various ways. I personally try to achieve it, among others, through deploying diverse writing strategies. For example, I let the words of my informants speak on their own. I present their words often in an intersubjective dialogue with my own and with greater theoretical viewpoints to create a polyphonic text. Certainly, I do not suggest that the narrative with my informants eliminates the problem of textual authority or solves the problem of voice. But it offers alternative authorship. My aim is not to simplify these issues, but to complicate them, as my keen sensitivity to explore novel possibilities forms a great part of my feminist ethnographic endeavour. The remaining portion of the paper will discuss the tensions between feminism and anthropology around the presupposition that, especially since the 1980s, feminists in Turkey operated on diversity, despite differences among women, while anthropology insisted on sameness—on an assumed socio-cultural homogeneity of the groups it studied. As a result, these two different fields took two different roads with parting aims, never merging. I will then ask, is it because of these divergent trajectories of feminism and anthropology that the Turkish example presents another ‘awkward’ relation, to borrow the term from Marilyn Strathern (1987)? Or can we take feminist ethnography in Turkey as a diverse manifestation of feminist ethnography in the US or in the UK?

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A Brief Segue: My Story as a Feminist Ethnographer My journey with feminist ethnography began when I was a graduate student at Indiana University getting ready to go into the field. My fieldwork took place between 1996 and 1999, in intervals, resulting in a submission of my manuscript to the Graduate School in 1999 as my dissertation, where I focused on village migrants’ experiences of homemaking and storytelling in a gecekondu 1 neighbourhood in Istanbul. In my work, I aimed to show the agency of the village migrants in their storytelling and homemaking activities in a great metropolis. I penned my text at a time when the writing culture debate was still fresh (Clifford and Marcus 1986), and to which feminist anthropologists strongly reacted. Some of the feminist anthropologists underlined the valuable textual contributions of women anthropologists in the 1950s, or even those in the 1920s, or of anthropologist’s wives (Abu-Lughod 1986, 1993; Behar and Gordon 1995). Influenced by the feminist receptions of and their contributions to ethnographic writing, I declared my writing feminist. Lila Abu-Lughod’s conceptualisation of feminist ethnography impacted me immensely, as I became keenly attuned to the ethnographic enterprise and textual innovation (Birkalan 1999, 15). In particular, her Writing Women’s Worlds (1993) and Veiled Sentiments (1986), in which she tackled issues of gender and genre, deepened my understanding of feminist ethnography, as I saw how it can be practiced. Abu-Lughod identified a feminist ethnographer as: a woman fieldworker who does not deny that she is a woman and is attentive to gender in her own treatment, in her own actions, and in the interactions of people in the community she is writing about. In coming to understand their situation, she is also coming to understand her own through a process of specifying the similarities and the differences. (Abu-Lughod 1990, 25–26)

Bothered by the white, elitist, and condescending male representations that prevailed in the discourses on gecekondu, I was writing against these representations of village migrants which treated them as ‘weak’ subjects—not as active agents who constantly negotiated their being in the gecekondus. My informants welcomed me to their worlds and their words guided me as my primary sources in my text. I wanted to develop

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an appropriate style with my field experience, exploring the possibilities of feminist textuality, which I framed as non-distanced, intersubjective, sincere, and emotional for representing the lives of women, children, and men alike. Ruth Behar’s ethnographic style also influenced my practice of feminist writing. I was painstakingly thinking about deeper textual sensibilities: on the one hand, about my audiences and the translatability of my field experience to words, and on the other, about how to succeed in my role as a transmitter and translator of my informants’ words, which rightfully demanded an audience. Furthermore, my quandaries about crafting an ethnographic text as a non-native speaker of English multiplied, when I worked on my own translatability. In my writing I wanted: […] to bring to life the meaning of my role as a woman in the field, how I explored the issues of home, placemaking, storytelling, ceremonies, marriage, kinship, migration, death and illness, and what these things mean to me and to other women. I hoped that my work will offer another way of presenting a feminist ethnography. (Birkalan 1999, 16)

Back then, as a female doctoral candidate and as a budding feminist ethnographer, I became attuned to the current anthropological debates about writing culture, feminist positionality, and self-reflexivity in the field and in text. These perspectives enabled me to critically reflect upon an important lag in the Turkish ethnographies on gecekondus. More than most, I engaged myself with ‘differences’ as they related to the multiplicity of women’s experiences. I worked with women in the gecekondu, who came from different ethnoreligious backgrounds such as Kurdish, Azeri, and Turkish as well as Alevi and Sunni. These differences revealed the varieties in the community on the one hand, and on the other, some of these terms also marked the unspoken differences between the ‘Self’ and the ‘Other’, between the researcher and her informants.2 Intellectual exchanges on these matters with my seniors—I should particularly mention Michael Jackson here—on intersubjectivity and the value of experience in anthropology enlightened my vision of ethnography and offered renewed perspectives for my research and writing. The issues I dealt with were intricate and personal, which my friends in the field openly shared with me, especially when I returned to the field after my father’s death. While still needing to be in the field, this experience made me realise that my own emotional involvement impacted getting into the

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emotional lives of the people with whom I study. I crafted a text that dealt with not only how my informants thought about the world, but also how they felt the world around them as well. Besides, I witnessed how death—so painful that it is—can be a connective ground to talk about emotions—both of mine and of my informants, as the theme triggered narratives of migration, departure, and farewell. I aimed to frame my experience next to the theoretical insights provided, again, by anthropologists who declared themselves feminists: Lila Abu-Lughod (1986, 1993), Ruth Behar (1996), and Catherine Lutz (Lutz and Abu-Lughod 1990). A self-reflexive stance took priority in my own feminist claims, as I aimed to show how I strived to cross borders with my informants and reflected on them both in the field and in my writing. I became a participant and an observer on different occasions, tailoring my positionality as insider and outsider and as a ‘halfie’—a sister, a daughter, and yabancı, the outsider, or foreigner, as Tamam, my main informant put it (Birkalan 2000). The word yabancı described my ‘otherness’ and thus ‘differences’ with respect to the group with whom I was studying. I reflected many times on ‘my’ culture versus ‘your’ culture. Among other things, I came from an urban, middle-class background with a university degree. Most of my informants, on the other hand, originated from the village and semi-literate but were extremely talented in telling stories. Listening to their birth-control or child-rearing methods, what to cook for supper, or discussing with them which detergent brand cleans well, stood out as exceptional moments of both similarities and differences as women. I was realising my ethnographic endeavours with the hope to speak from and contribute to gendered textuality with distinctness and charm (Birkalan 2001). At one level, I declared to write in an experiential mood, where I desired to dwell on the field issues in a self-reflexive manner. On the other, I refrained from objectifying or homogenising discourses I found in Turkish examples on the gecekondu, and I used field experience as a guiding principle. Notwithstanding, I presented conversational dialogues with my informants to balance out the problem of textual authority, honouring their experiences and feelings. Last but not least, I laboured to weave a more poetic text, as opposed to an academic, male-canonised one which posed as scientific and insisted on certain principles, for example, that women-centred analysis is too personal, emotional, or biased. I searched to find my way in my gendered textuality, though a dissertation may not be the best place to experiment. I sensed that writing became an eminent challenge for me, as I debated several formal issues

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with my dissertation committee. Nonetheless, I wanted to vividly convey the agency in the gecekondu in Esat Pa¸sa through the richness of individual experiences that I witnessed and myself encountered. I maintained a keen interest in creating such a text that would mirror my experience, which I partially fulfilled. My dissertation, unfortunately, did not become a book, which I always regretted. In the end, I designed experimental texts and published them in Turkish, as a firm believer in giving back our end products to the communities we work with (Birkalan 2000a, b, 2001). Landing my first job in Istanbul, I happily started working as a founding member of the M.A. and Ph.D. Programme in an Anthropology Department at a private university. I tried implementing courses on feminist ethnography among the handful of courses I taught every semester. I achieved this only in part, because the department chair concluded that there were courses that were more important. Nonetheless, she conceded that I could teach feminist ethnography ‘as a subsection’ in my methodology course. Finally, in 2004, I was able to realise my dream of teaching about feminist ethnography for anthropology graduates and undergraduates, as I searched for opportunities to continue research. I navigated through my will and the necessities of academia, mostly because the university I worked with never granted research leaves or funding. In the attempt to negotiate time for ethnographic research and writing, I have been to a variety of places: through several stays between 2000 and 2002, primarily in intervals, I did ethnographic research mostly with the elderly inhabitants of the island of Imbros (Gökçeada) in the Aegean. A large number of the Imbrians left the island in the 1960s and have settled in Greece, Europe, America, and Australia. My fieldwork also had a part in Athens, when I visited the Imbrian Association and had interviews with its members. I carefully listened to the heart-breaking stories of my informants on departure, migration, and nostalgia. In the hot and dry summers, Imbrians, old and young, grouped themselves on the island and danced in festivity. But winters became cold and tricky. Once I got stuck on the island for days. Boats could not dock passengers to and from the mainland because of a heavy thunderstorm. In these days, I witnessed the grievance of the elderly community more closely, who remained only a handful in their homeland. For most of them, our ‘Otherness’ revealed itself around ‘Turkish’ versus ‘Imbrian’— terms they used covertly to point to the political unrest since the 1960s, when Imbrians started to migrate from the island. Although I did not

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express my identity as particularly ‘Turkish’, I remember in the first year, one of my informants told me that she thought I was a spy, ‘because their migration from the island did not interest any Turks’. I responded telling her that the local authorities also said something like that to me because of the same reason: ‘no interest in the Imbrians from the Turkish side. Why are you interested?’. Both assumptions stood in stark contrast and were far from reality. The reality for me was that throughout time I saw my elderly informants passing away, the ones who shared their stories over Turkish coffee—μšτ ρ´ιo, coffee with medium sugar. As much as I wanted to publish my research as a full book, I could not get to it. My research ended up in a few conference papers (Birkalan 2002, 2003), academic presentations, and articles where I dealt with several intersubjective stories of the field and people focusing on the idea of ‘otherness’ (Birkalan-Gedik 2013a, 2010). I have been, and still am, entertaining the idea of writing an ethnographic novel (Jackson 1986), where I would draw from memory, poetry, fiction (precisely, that of Ruth Behar 2001), and, of course, from my ethnographic experience. Through my work on Alevi women minstrels, I personally witnessed the feminist strategies of the female artists in highly male-dominated contexts. Interestingly, these strategies represented but one model for feminist writing and performance (Birkalan-Gedik 2008, 2013b) due to their innovative techniques, for example, subverting their way to minstrelsy, which is known to be a male domain of artistic practice; or, again, subverting the poetic language of the poems, whereby female minstrels navigated through male-centred epistemic worlds. I continued to employ intersectional feminist methodologies to understand KurdishAlevi women’s everyday lives and their experiences within their religioustransnational communities in eastern Anatolia, Istanbul, and Germany (Gedik et al. 2020; Gedik and Birkalan-Gedik 2016; Birkalan-Gedik 2013b). The power that women interlaced in their loss and suffering, which became a Leitmotif in their narratives, struck me more than anything else. In another instance of fieldwork, themes of loss and sorrow connected me to Sevguli in a Kurdish-Alevi village in Varto, in eastern Anatolia, which is both the hometown and the ethnographic site of my husband. I accompanied my husband Erdo˘gan, who is a sociologist, during his fieldwork in 2005. Our visit to Varto coincided at a time soon after our loss of our Lorin, our first daughter, who so sadly and so unexpectedly died during my pregnancy, just three days shy of my giving birth to her.

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Sevguli knew my husband since his childhood. Erdo˘gan had introduced me to Sevguli before. Now, we met again shortly after losing our first daughter and she witnessed our sad story and deep sorrow. So she paid us a condolence visit at the house of my husband’s sister, which became our warp and woof during my husband’s fieldwork. Sevguli discerned my role more than an accompanying wife, as I previously recorded life stories of village women. I could not yet get to hers. When she visited us, she said that she noticed my silence and pensiveness. No doubt, she tried to console me, as she said that she wanted to chat with me cenî bi cenî, ‘woman to woman’. She told her story in Zazaki, a Kurdish dialect, and in Turkish. But because she was far better versed in Zazaki than Turkish, my husband became a facilitator for our communication, helping me and navigating his different roles and positions in his own fieldwork. I had been contemplating my deliverance to sorrow for so long and talking might have done me well. At that time, she said that she was ‘around her 70s’, and like many women of her generation in the region, she did not know her exact age. She has given birth four times, to four living children who were taken away from her one by one. When she turned twelve, her father forced her to marry a man, who was more than forty years old, for one cow that the groom gave in lieu of her bride price. It became the ticket for Sevguli’s family to rid themselves of misery and poverty. When she turned thirteen, she lost her husband. Sevguli, a girl child, was first made into a bride, and then, into a widow. She went back to living with her family, who was far from being affluent. Again, her father forced her to marry another man. Sevguli became a kuma, the second wife, of a much older husband whose wife could not bear any children. Sevguli, unsure of her age, was very sure about the loss and agony that sprung out of her motherhood. She became the biological mother of four children who were, literally, ripped from her breast after she fed them. ‘What a fate’, I had thought at that time. But, was it really fate? I listened to Sevguli’s story of lost motherhood which she told gently and patiently, underlining in each episode that she was made to be deprived of living her motherhood socially and emotionally. After years spent grappling with how to write about it, we finally analysed this truly fascinating but equally painful story at length and discussed it in the framework of fieldwork contexts, narrativity, and feminist epistemology (Gedik and Birkalan-Gedik 2014).

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Yes, once there was motherhood, and once there was not… This time, experiencing ‘lost motherhood’ connected me to Sevguli as a ground to talk about our experience as one woman to another, despite our ethnic, cultural, and social differences. But also, this experience became a great challenge for me, so I reflected on it in the best possible way in my text that would ethnographically make sense for our readers. Both Erdo˘gan and I thought of the text we co-(l)laborated and co-authored as a productive and fulfilling feminist practice. For now, I conclude my narrative on select instances of practising both feminist ethnography and writing. In particular, I should underline that I began experimenting with ideas to develop new writing styles—alternatives to academic writing, for instance, writing in a more personalised way and trying out the possibility of a more poetic autoethnography, one that clearly goes beyond ‘self-reflexivity’. I should also underline that my position in discussing, problematising, and evaluating the state of feminist ethnography in Turkey also has been through several versions (Birkalan-Gedik 2009; Birkalan 1999, 2000a, b). I wanted to put my own experience vis-à-vis the ways in which anthropologists and feminists in Turkey perceive ‘feminist ethnography’. When I wrote on feminism and anthropology in Turkey in 2009—possibly the first piece on the topic, I realised that only a handful of anthropologists in Turkey, if that, were interested in mapping the terrain across these fields. Certainly, since then, the number of practitioners of feminist ethnography in Turkey has increased as the definitions, discourses, and practices of feminist ethnography have changed, and feminism in Turkey has crystallised in various unique ways. The Development of Anthropology in Turkey In my introduction, I argued that feminist ethnography in Turkey found resistance in anthropology, and perhaps because of this resistance, it developed with a strong ‘accent’ on feminist activism. The discord between feminism and anthropology in the Turkish context likens to what Marilyn Strathern has written more than thirty years ago, underlining that anthropology resisted feminism, and therefore feminist anthropology remained as a sub-discipline within anthropology rather than being able to create a paradigm shift (Strathern 1987). The Turkish case presents another awkward situation that should be inspected, about how anthropology

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in Turkey appeared historically, but also about how anthropology and feminism handled the idea of ‘differences’. Today social and cultural anthropology in Turkey is the ‘smallest of the small disciplines’ in social sciences and has a rich history that both illuminates and complicates the division between ‘imperial’ and ‘national’ traditions. The emergence of anthropology in Turkey dates to the 1850s. This period coincides with the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of the Turkish Republic, when several anthropological concepts and theories from Europe—such as social Darwinism, evolutionism, and materialism—were skillfully adapted to the Turkish case. The idea of ‘race’ aligned with a plural, cosmopolitan understanding, meaning the biodiversity of different peoples, which meant nations, ethnic groups, and tribes (Birkalan-Gedik 2019). Anthropology took a radical turn from a multicultural, cosmopolitan vision to a local, national turn at the turn of the twentieth century. With the Young Turk Revolution in 1908, discourses on nationalism affected later developments in the new nation-state and anthropology (Birkalan-Gedik 2019). Physical anthropology was professionalised in 1925 at Istanbul University under the Faculty of Medicine as Türkiye Antropoloji Tetkikat Merkezi (Centre of Anthropological Research of Turkey) upon the order of the founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. This type of commissioning and institutionalising of anthropology functioned as a flagship of Turkish nation-building; anthropologists at the time actively contributed to this through the Turkish History Thesis, positing that the Alpine race came from Central Asian and Anatolian populations. Likewise, the Sun-Language Theory argued that world languages stemmed from a ‘proto-Turkish’, and it promoted Turkish ethnonationalism (Birkalan-Gedik 2018, 58; Kieser 2006, 110). Later named as the Türk Antropoloji Enstitüsü (Turkish Anthropological Institute), where the cultural branch has emerged, anthropology became utilised more than a pure disciplinary endeavour (Birkalan 2018, 41). By the end of the 1940s, however, the racial paradigm started its demise in anthropology (Aydın 2000; Birkalan-Gedik 2018, 2019). The nationalist twist in anthropology continued and positioned the ‘Turkish’ nation as a superior ‘unity’ to other ethnic groups in the country, whose cultural differences were erased. Keeping its nationalistic focus, the emergent cultural anthropology, then named as Etnoloji, combined the evolutionist, nationalist, and modernist paradigms and created a complex

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and dynamic non-Western anthropological tradition. Within this tradition, it promoted discourses of ‘sameness’ and ‘unity’ of the new-born nation-state in its disciplinary constellations. The ‘Other’ of Turkish ethnographies indicated villagers, as opposed to so-called exotic culture in faraway places as seen in colonial anthropologies (Birkalan-Gedik 2005, 74). Especially in the 1940s and 1950s, using research perspectives from British-structuralism, anthropology’s choice of a native ‘Other’ suited the aims of the newly founded Republic of Turkey: it orchestrated societal and cultural change through Kemalist reforms and assumed the peoples, groups, and locales of anthropology in Turkey to be homogeneous. This perspective also shaped anthropology’s ‘objects’ in various distinct ways: homogenising ethnoreligious groups and secularising, modernising, and westernising a Muslim society. The above-mentioned discourses partly refer to the ways in which I use the term ‘difference’. However, when I use the term ‘differences’—of race, class, or sexual orientation—I do not mean them as mere contexts, but the very data to shape our field experiences and textual representations. They can surface in several aspects of ethnographic fieldwork and refer to a whole range of diverse or distinctive issues between the researcher and her informants. But differences can also exist among the people—in the cultures we study. To be more specific for the Turkish context: I am thinking about various possible representations of gender, class, and ethnicity, which remained uncritical and underexplored in the ‘national’ ethnographies in Turkey roughly until the end of the 1980s. These differences fluctuated in the tension between ‘truth’ and ‘taboo’. The official state discourse shaped what kind of ethnographies could be conducted. Ethnic differences were minimised: after all, there were no Kurds in the country, there were ‘mountain Turks’. Furthermore, certain ethnographies presented the Turkish village in such a way that their representation of a ‘culture’ became either homogenous, neat, or unified at best. At worst, their representations fell into the trap of ‘othering’ making differences based on ethnicity and gender invisible or non-existent. Specifically, they situated representations of women through certain images attributed to or imposed on them (Arat 2000). The effects of a bloody military coup on 12 September 1980 left immeasurable traumas on individuals in Turkey. The putschist generals killed many thinkers, activists—mostly people from the Kurdish and Turkish Left—or put them in jail after systematic torture. The coup also became an effective leverage to suppress academic freedom. As a result,

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the ethnographic topics that were ‘allowed to be studied’ within the state’s official ideology were minimised, as the state tightened its claims on the ‘truth’ and ‘taboo’. Now, keeping the political transformations in the 1980s in mind, let us go back to the issue of women: the emergence of the women’s movement in Turkey that started around the same time that Western ideas made their way into the Ottoman Empire. Sirin ¸ Tekeli underlines that women activists had achieved their fundamental rights, such as the abolition of polygamy and repudiation in the Ottoman Empire (Tekeli 1986, 180). This idea stood in stark contrast with the commonly held view that women in Turkey gained their freedom thanks to Atatürk. It referred to a common but inaccurate assumption, which feminists challenged in the 1980s, arguing that it was a result of the result of more than fifty years of activism by Ottoman women (for instance in English, see Çakır 1994; ˙ Durakba¸sa and Ilyaso˘ glu 2001). Along these lines, certain scholars identify the women’s movement in the 1980s as a ‘new women’s movement’ (Tekeli 2010) as it took a radically activist turn, developed critically, and overtly promoted a feminist agenda in the public sphere. The relationship of feminism and feminist ethnography to activism has been discussed widely among scholars in the North American school (Devault 1999; Naples 2003). For the Turkish case, the development of feminism and activism in the 1980s can be seen as a great impetus that led to the establishment of women’s studies at the Turkish universities. Furthermore, feminism in this period embraced differences among women, as it contributed to the so-called democratisation in the 1980s after the military coup (Arat 1994). In this era, terms such as Islamic feminism made their way to the feminist literature, but Kurdish women again remained unrepresented, as they were considered at the limits of Turkish feminism. In short, feminists wrote about ‘differences’, but as women, but ‘writing differently as a woman’ did not take place. Until the 1980s, anthropologists followed the ideological conventions set by the Turkish state and eliminated ethnic and gendered differences for a long time in fieldwork (Birkalan-Gedik 2005a, b). Only by the 1990s, the ethnographic gaze gravitated towards the nuanced gendered individuals and was able to include—to a limited degree—women coming from different ethnic backgrounds as well. In light of this quick survey, I would argue that feminism resisted against the official discourse to which ethnographic studies obeyed. I will elaborate on feminist involvement in ethnography in the following

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section more in detail. For now, let me say this: while feminism’s activist component enabled a more relatively flexible attitude towards studying differences among women, anthropology in Turkey insisted on ‘sameness’ and turned to study the groups, themes, and themes which seem either to be less permissible or likely to be funded (Özmen 2000; BirkalanGedik 2005b). Ethnographies, emerging as early as the 1940s and often written in the form of monographs, reveal the ideological framework of the Turkish state. The nationalistic enterprise of anthropology also meant a patriarchal view on the Turkish society, a lens which determined the approaches taken towards ‘Turkish’ women (as opposed to women in Turkey). More importantly, this perspective created a discourse on ‘the Turkish woman’ which is rooted in the patriarchal and masculinist vision of the Turkish state. Within the social and cultural branches of anthropology, a ‘woman’ component was added to the ethnographic studies, but it was envisioned within the discourses of Turco-centrism, nationalism, militarism, and modernism (Birkalan-Gedik 2005b). Anthropology helped reinforce images of women under Kemalism, the founding principles of the Turkish Republic. As Jenny White observes, the roles made available to women under Kemalist nationalism were either the modern, virtuous asexual woman who was a product of education; mothers of martyrs; or the entirely Westernised woman who was immoral and loose (White 2013, 156). And anthropology served the state to provide ‘ethnographic evidence’ on Turkish women, although the images of Turkish women have also centred around conflicting stereotypes (Arat 2000). With an important disciplinary lag, anthropologists in Turkey only in the past few decades have begun to criticise methodological issues and delve into the postmodernist criticisms of traditional ethnography. The ‘writing culture’ debate, which reached an apogee in the 1990s, arrived almost twenty years later in Turkey and was not adequately discussed. Only at the beginning of the 2000s, did anthropologists in Turkey present essays on the history of anthropology focusing critically on its nationalistic, masculinist, and objectivist character, the contemporary practices of ethnography (Aydın 2000; Özmen 2000; Atay 2000), discussing forms and contexts of writing (Gedik and Birkalan-Gedik 2016; Birkalan 2000a, b, 2001), and experimenting with different ways of ethnography and writing (Atay 1996). In the past decade or so, readers of anthropological oeuvres encountered reflexive ethnographies of the new generation of sociologists and

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media and communication studies scholars. Using ethnographic methods, they started to openly articulate feminist ethnography, yet kept a typical focus on fieldwork experiences and practices more than writing strategies. They focused on different components of fieldwork and self-reflexivity (Zırh 2017; Harman¸sah and Nahya 2016); while some gravitated towards feminist methodology, they ended up reporting on articles in English (Pala, n.d; Ünlü 2019; Tuncer 2015). A recent collection (Bartu and Özbay 2018), has a lengthy section on feminist ethnography (Bora 2018), which is very reminiscent of my article (Birkalan-Gedik 2009), but without a single mention of it. These texts contribute to the discussions on ethnographic writing, mostly because of their reflective character in fieldwork, but clearly, not all reflexive texts are feminist. Now, in terms of feminist writing, which could create another type of ‘difference’, we need to revisit the contexts of anthropological practice in Turkey. Besides anthropology being a nationalistic discipline, I can offer another reason for resistance to feminist textuality in social sciences in general and in anthropology in Turkey in particular, which might derive from the perception of anthropology as being positivistic, scientific, and objective. These features permeated the earlier ethnographies and formed mainstream anthropology with strict borders both on ethnographic methodology and textuality, which fashioned itself for the most part after British structural-functionalism. Besides, male anthropologists in Turkey coming from the older generation found the discussions on anthropology and literature to be intellectually unproductive. At best, they considered them as a distraction from their ‘scientific’ work and excluded those who thought, taught, and wrote otherwise. At the second National Congress of Anthropology in Turkey in 2004, a well-known male anthropologist called my approach, which I identified feminist, as unscientific, underlining that ‘there is one method, and that is the scientific method’. I do not tell this anecdote in passing, but to underline that these scholars taught anthropology at universities and communicated a ‘scientific’ notion of anthropology to their students. I interpreted this as a part of his insistence on ‘truth’, a fundamental distinguishing factor between fiction and creative writing, but also between experience and reality. Anthropological writing in Turkey, therefore, is seen as scientific penning with strict rules. A presupposed ‘masculine imagination’ determines the formats of theses and dissertations as well as academic articles and books, which hinders feminist anthropologists from finding a voice

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of their own. The ‘masculine imagination’ argues that writing other than that which follows academic norms evokes the idea of ‘fiction’ as invented truth, while anthropology should present accounts of ‘real’ people, places, and events. Anthropology and writing in North American settings prove that this binary opposition is eroding, but many anthropologists in Turkey still consider other forms of writing as a creative act that belongs to literature, not to ethnography. For example, unlike literature, textual experimentations such as using allegory, parody, or metaphors are resisted as much as a self-reflective, experimental, collaborative methodology is seen to be detrimental to the scientific quality of the discipline. Possible experimentations, such as textual subversions of gender—for example writing from a ‘she-centred’ perspective—are either not welcomed or considered as improper or non-academic. The Turkish language does not have gender but gender subversions are well-known, for example, in the Ottoman court literature, particularly in the case of the 17th century court-poet Nedim (Silay 1994). However, many think that anthropology should not be mistaken for poetry or a novel, where the author can experiment. Anthropologists have not yet thoroughly criticised the androcentric bias and male canonising in academia and academic writing, and they have not yet exhausted the relationship between text, textuality, and other generic differences in writing as feminists (such as subversion of cultural and linguistic codes). It seems that uncovering the silent, hidden, partial feminist writing in anthropology is like looking for a needle in a haystack, going through several texts and trying to make sense of them from a feminist perspective. I find this situation a bit curious. On the other hand, feminists at the literature and history departments previously discussed feminist writing both at length and in detail in various examples from British, American, and Turkish literary oeuvres. Turkish, English, and American literature scholars produced a growing amount of literature on écriture féminine (Çakır 2006) and traced women’s literary sensibilities that emerged in the late-Ottoman Empire. Feminist historians have already tackled the issue of ‘writing as a woman’ (Berktay 1991). They diagnosed that historiographic writing in Turkey ˙ was male-oriented, which muted women (Durakba¸sa and Ilyaso˘ glu 2001; Çakır 1994), looking for times and places in history that women’s presence mattered (Yaraman 2003). I do not mean to suggest that the developments in oral history and literature did not affect anthropology at all, but the feminist impact from outside anthropology remained minimal and only influenced the small number of women anthropologists who had

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contacts with feminist historians and sociologists publishing in Turkish and translating original works into Turkish. But I would argue that their criticisms were understood within the limits of tolerating ‘difference’. Although anthropological studies on Kurdish women are now ‘permitted’, they are expected to remain within the contours of official ideology. Feminist Activism and Feminist Encounters with Ethnography in Turkey: 1980s–2000s I have underlined that feminist ethnography found resistance in anthropology in Turkey but developed with a strong ‘accent’ on feminist activism, taking the role of an interdisciplinary facilitator and creating partially feminist texts. My usage of the term ‘accent’, first, emphasises feminism’s counterpart, activism, which became the core feature of feminist ethnography in Turkey, just as it also played a central role in feminist social sciences in the North American settings (Lamphere 2016; Craven and Davis 2013). The activist spirit motivated feminists in Turkey, influencing both the topics and the theories they chose to study. They also took more critical positions and underlined three urgent issues: women’s agency, women’s power, and women’s bodies. Moreover, among other things, they addressed social inequalities, domestic violence, women’s uprootedness, and de-territorialisation, and they carried these issues to academic discussions. The notion of an accent implies a second, metaphorical sense, as I refer to doing feminist ethnographic work with ‘difference’. In that case, I mean ‘accent’ in the sense that one might speak a language with an accent. Therefore, feminist ethnography in Turkey presents itself with a Turkish accent, which is both a distinction and a challenge for the future of feminist ethnography in Turkey. Feminism in Turkey developed far more critically than anthropology after the 1980s (Birkalan-Gedik 2009). Feminist social scientists—among these, anthropologists—conceptualised and practised feminist possibilities in ethnographic fieldwork. They underlined the lack of representative studies on women and aimed at providing a ‘woman’s perspective’ in their research. For example, Türk Toplumunda Kadın (Women in Turkish Society) (Abadan-Unat et al. 1979), a pioneering interdisciplinary collection, spoke to such interests and concerns with women’s roles and identities in politics, society, and culture. As a precursory text that examined women’s issues, it stood in stark contrast with the malestream

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ethnographies in Turkey, which mainly consulted male informants and turned to women when males were absent, arguing that they were representing the ‘culture’. The book was published in German in 1985 under the Die Frau in der türkischen Gesellschaft (Women in Turkish Society) and had another edition in 1993. In 1990, almost a decade later, 1980 ler Türkiye’sinde Kadın Bakı¸s Açısından Kadınlar (Women in Turkey in the 1980s from Women’s Perspective) (Tekeli 1990a) appeared; it was a seminal feminist foray, published in different editions (1990, 1993, 1995, 2015). The collection aimed to challenge the androcentric field research in social sciences and women’s representation in history, presenting the work of twenty women anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, literary critics, and historians. They concentrated on women’s history, women’s labour, women’s ways of resistance in public and private spheres. I take this book as a feminist manifesto in social research as the contributing authors became influential figures in women and gender studies in the years to follow or continued to work on gender ethnographically in their own disciplinary settings. Some of them veered towards teaching new generations of graduate and undergraduate students, as feminist thought in Turkey started to be diversified and institutionalised through study programmes at the universities in the 1990s. Celebrating a thirty-year history today, they continue researching women and producing policy and knowledge on women (Sancar 2008). Subsequently, the book appeared with the title Women in Turkish Society, a title that does not do justice to what the authors intended to achieve in Turkish (Tekeli 1990b); and in German as Aufstand im Haus der Frauen: Frauenforschung aus der Türkei (1991) was prepared by Ayla Neusel, Sirin ¸ Tekeli, and Meral Akkent. This title refers to an uprising in the houses of women and simultaneously signals women’s reaction to everyday life that relates to both the private and the public. Furthermore, scholars who have been working in feminist qualitative sociology have defined and problematised feminist research, analysis, and epistemology (Y. Ecevit 2010; M. Ecevit 2010), but have not yet discussed feminist textuality. Their work has successfully made its way into the mainstream textbooks on sociology and has been widely received at numerous feminist conferences. For example, one of my feminist heroines, Yıldız Ecevit complained that (2010, 49) the knowledge about women in social sciences was produced by way of ‘adding and stirring’ women into mainstream research. She meant that the research was done

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in the classical malestream framework but ‘touched upon’ women when they thought it was necessary or when they could find male informants. Moreover, she also underlined that while certain studies placed women in their focus, they were not necessarily feminist. Here she differentiated works which she identified as ‘sociology on women’ and ‘feminist sociology’, and considered the work on women truly feminist when researchers openly claim a women’s perspective. Yıldız Ecevit taught many years at the Middle East Technical University, a founding member of the Gender and Women’s Studies Department. She once painted me a picture of academic and activist feminism with a metaphor of ‘bridge’. The Turkish term for a bridge is köprü, and this is how Ecevit envisioned the role of gender studies—setting up bridges with real-life concerns for women: [...] the valuable feminist knowledge and experience that activist women gained through feminist politics are not sufficiently reflected in academic women’s studies. In order to eliminate this disconnection, it is vital to strengthen the relationship between feminist information producers (theory/concept) and feminist policymakers (action-activism). (Y. Ecevit 2010, 50, my translation)

This need for a köprü may explain why there is ‘strong’ activism in feminism, partly coming from outside the academia. Years-long engagement in feminist activism indeed paved the way to the establishment of women and gender studies and degree programmes in Turkey, which took institutional forms in the 1990s. And since then, their scholars have led important activities: for example, enabling translations and publications of original articles that have dealt with feminist theory and ethnographic feminisms. This period also witnessed translated articles about feminist ethnography and praxis, women’s history writing, and brief moments of questioning unequal power relations in the field (Çakır and Akgökçe 2001). In my view, the development of gender studies in Turkey can provide more resources and opportunities for feminist ethnography in the field and text. If one considers the development of feminist anthropology in the US, which emerged when no gender studies departments and programmes were in the making (Behar 1990, ix–xii), the Turkish case of feminist ethnography presents a beneficial circumstance. Under an institutional roof, feminist research has provided social science scholars with

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a chance to reflect upon and criticise mainstream research and writing strategies. I take women and gender studies departments as important centres to radiate discussions on feminist ethnography, whereby feminist ethnographic writing can be examined. Yet one cannot find courses on the topic in these constellations.3 Scholars who write in academia do not question the academic norms of writing, whereby institutionalisation can be simultaneously an advantage and disadvantage. Seminars meetings, conferences, and even feminist writing residencies—possibly with literary scholars—and considering collaborative publications, can provide a prolific ground where women with similar feminist interests can come together and learn from each other. Feminist ethnographers can bring new genres to ethnographies or strengthen their voices of women anthropologists as writers. But they can also work in a collaborative, dialogic manner with their informants and reflect that collaboration in their texts. The multi-textual and multivocal texts, for instance, can include ‘biographical, historical, and literary essays, fiction, autobiography, theatre, poetry, life stories, travelogues, social criticism, fieldwork accounts, and blended texts of various kinds’, as Ruth Behar exhorted in her introduction (1995, 7), more than 25 years ago. Post-2000s: Feminist Activism, Feminist Publishing, and Feminist Ethnography Feminist activism in Turkey, especially as it developed since the 1980s, has played a crucial role in social sciences, as feminists have unfailingly dealt with real-world concerns and carried them to their academic work. More importantly, in the past decade or so, feminist activism has become more visible in the public eye, as feminist reactions to the AKP (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi/Justice and Development Party) government’s political oppression in Turkey accelerated.4 Feminist activists have resisted the government’s policies on gender. Among others, they were keen to criticise the pronatal policies of the AKP government: in particular, they criticised Turkish President Erdo˘gan’s encouragement for women to have at least three children in 2008 and his claims that abortion is equivalent to killing in 2011. As feminists sharply criticised policies and discourses and identified them as ‘anti-feminist’, they became a target of the government’s witch-hunting. Today, many feminist activists are no longer able

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to live and work in the country because of the recent threats to freedom of speech. Feminist activism in Turkey in the 2000s substantiated itself through feminist networking and feminist publishing, which were already in place since the 1990s. Activist women organised themselves around ‘action platforms’, initiatives which worked, for example, towards ameliorating the legislation in Turkey by demanding the change of Civil Code (2001), Penal Code (2004), and Constitution (2017). Women’s cooperatives became both compatible formats and sites of feminist activism since the 2000s, as they signify the essential pillars of feminist struggle.5 Feminists led several campaigns in the 2000s, such as the twentieth anniversary of Solidarity for Against Domestic Violence in Turkey (2007) as a nationwide campaign (Özkan-Kerestecio˘glu 2016). Feminists supported the candidacy of a woman who was a sex-worker in the national elections (Sosyal Feminist Kolektif 2007). By the 2000s, both academic and activist feminists criticised and challenged the official, mythical discourse on women (particularly on motherhood) and effectively mapped out areas in which women have power. Domestic work has been one of the most important agenda items, followed by women’s participation and their representation in politics. Furthermore, feminists demanded equal treatment of women’s position in the family with more life-work balance. Ethnic feminist demands, especially those of the Kurdish feminists, became more visible in public. Kurdish women, despite the extreme state oppression on them, persevered to remain in everyday life and politics. The Gezi Protests of 2013 marked a decisive turn in the history of feminism and feminist activism in Turkey, whereby several women come out and protested abortion bans implemented by the Turkish state. One more time, women were in the streets, parks, and were ‘everywhere’. Finally, the presence of feminist reactions can be also evidenced in the feminist petition, that is nearing 1.000.000 signatures, protesting the withdrawal of Turkey from the Istanbul Convention in early 2021. From the above assessment I suppose that the downplaying of feminist ethnography has been due to the fact that feminists had to prioritise gender issues—the ‘field’ had personal and political importance to create change. While feminists have raised their voices in the streets, they are yet to write their words in the texts. Feminist publishing became more visible, as Güldünya and Ayizi Publishing houses printed books on and

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by women, although these books did not necessarily strive for a feminist writing style.6 Some print journals, such as Amargi Feminist Teori ve Politika (Amargi Feminist Theory and Politics); Feminist Politika (Feminist Politics), and Kültür ve Siyasette Feminist Yakla¸sımlar (Feminist Approaches in Culture and Politics), brought together opinion pieces and essays on feminist ethnography. They also translated articles that were originally written in English, to Turkish on ethnographic issues feminist deemed urgent. Furthermore, some respected open-access social science journals, keen on peer-review, as a form of collaborative writing presented their readers with feminist consciousness and a feminist mission. The Fe Dergi (Feminist Ele¸stiri/Feminist Criticism), published by Ankara University KASAUM-Kadın Sorunları Ara¸stırma ve Uygulama Merkezi (Women’s Studies Centre) and Moment Dergi (Hacettepe University Cultural Studies Journal), published by the Department of Communication at Hacettepe University, disseminated young scholars’ ethnographic reflections digitally, thus impacting scholarly exchange. Although these journals publish articles that treat gender and fieldwork critically, they do not dwell on issues of ethnographic writing. By the 2010s, several online feminist publications and feminist internet sites with differentiating viewpoints appeared. The 5 Harfliler/5 Lettered (2012)7 and Reçel Blog /Blog Marmalade (2014) presented different issues on women employing distinctive, feminist textualities and offered alternatives for a feminist language and feminist writing strategies. The translations of feminist texts from Western languages into Turkish had a critical turn since the 1980s, whereby oeuvres indispensable for a feminist library became available in Turkish. These texts expanded to include examples of feminist research methods in the 1990s. For instance, Farklı Feminizmler Açısıdan Kadın Ara¸stırmalarında Yöntem (Method in Women’s Studies from Different Feminist Perspectives, 1995), framed its aim and scope in a twofold—to offer significant articles on methodological and theoretical discussions on women’s social research and to present their materials that are informed by such perspectives in Turkey. The editors and contributors of the volume came from oral history, anthropology, and literature who wanted to provide their research experience-based discussions on feminist methodologies. Articles in translation included pieces from sociology, history, literature, Middle Eastern Studies, and Black and Third World Feminism. The Turkish examples, for instance, considered feminist oral history in a case study that dealt with

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feminist research. Another one presented a discussion on women anthropologists doing fieldwork with women, but again, there was no mention of feminist ethnographic writing. Besides translations, ‘reports’ on feminist ethnographic praxis have contributed to the growing corpus of feminist ethnography, which has grown precipitously in the last decades. From time to time, the content of these publications comes closer to translations, where an author summarises original articles but seldomly dwells on her position, and therefore is not able to move beyond the ‘she said’ kind of reporting. While these reporting articles may contribute to a wider feminist literature, I am critical of this reporting form, because they neglect to present what is going on among scholars in Turkey. The fact that they turn their faces to other feminist tales, to the histories of other feminists, gives the impression that the authors are contributing to a discussion on feminist ethnography and feminist writing but repeating some information which was produced in the context of ‘other’ anthropologies and not duly connecting them to the Turkish case. Some recent ethnographic examples claim to be feminist but cannot ˙ ˙ further illustrate their claims. In Imkansız Medeniyet TOKI/Akta¸ s 8 Mahallesi Örne˘ginde Feminist Bir Etnografi, Burcu Hatibo˘glu-Eren focuses on the everyday experiences of lower-income women at the outskirts of the Turkish capital in the face of the Turkish government’s urban transformation (2017). Hatibo˘glu-Eren initially wrote this text for her doctoral degree in social work. It was based on her ethnographic fieldwork in Akta¸s, a pseudonym she used for the neighbourhood in Ankara. Although she claims her work as ‘feminist ethnography’ and identifies her positionality as a ‘feminist ethnographer’ and refers to Dorothy Smith once (2006), she does so only very briefly and it is difficult to find traces in the text to support her claims (Hatibo˘glu-Eren 2017, 15–17). On the other hand, a few exciting textual features deserve a further, in-depth illustration. First, the author presents stories on the feelings, ideas, and thoughts of women on how urban transformation affected their lives, arguably by offering the words of her informants. However, there are many instances in which her voice of assertions drowns out the words of her informants. I take these cases to illustrate the researcher’s position on textual hierarchies. Where should a feminist ethnographer position herself in the text?

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I have been concerned with this question in my work as well. I had to give many thoughts as to how to present the words of my informants in the text. As I primarily overcome ‘textual authority’ in my writing, I presented the words and worlds of my informants as they are, set in a dialogue rather than placing them in my text hierarchically. I wonder if we can find another way to talk about voice differently without undermining the agency of the people with whom we study. Can we offer another alternative textual positioning when we present the unheard voices simply speak for themselves, instead of us, ethnographers speaking for the potentially vulnerable groups? Hatibo˘glu-Eren experiments with other aspects of her ethnographic narrative and she writes her ethnography in an informal manner, which strikes us as a textual novelty. Customarily, academics in Turkey write in ‘factitively’, which allows the often male author to speak with an endowed authority. Therefore, presenting her ethnographic narrative in present continuous as opposed to factitive challenges the male canonised academic writing, as she brings a more colloquial, everyday usage for the language. Yet, even this novelty cannot justify considering her to be fully feminist, as she misses self-reflexivity, a foundational base for feminist textuality, as I mentioned above. Çi˘gdem Yasemin Ünlü, who completed her degree in communication studies with her work with tailors in Bursa, discusses feminist methodology about her field experiences, claiming herself as a ‘feminist’ (Ünlü 2019). She investigates women’s experiences in a tailor shop, as an example of a semi-public sphere, in Bursa, the fourth largest city in Turkey. Her ethnographic text has various references to methodological issues both within anthropology and feminist research which stand out. I find her writing to be self-reflexive about field methodologies; however, she does not look for something unique in terms of her writing genre. Recently, several authors have published highly engaging books on challenging topics, dealing with disturbing themes that were not examined by anthropologists. A journalist, Sibel Hürta¸s (2014) gives a firsthand account of women who were put in jail because they killed their husbands. She describes the experiences of these women with one word: ‘silence’. They were silent when they had to endure their suffering, which came to their husband exercising domestic violence on them, or who sexually abused them or their children. The author vividly describes women’s experiences, based on their own words, which got under my

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skin when I read them. Very moving and challenging descriptions visualise the very idea of the ‘straw that broke the camel’s back’. The women’s reactions describe how they could not take it anymore, as they radically reacted to a seemingly ‘normalised’ action. The women themselves ended their suffering, their years-long endurance to various forms of violence and abuse by killing their husbands. Hürta¸s does something courageous in her writing by letting the women speak through their own words. Taking the role of an interlocutor, she illuminates the cultural background of embeddedness of private issues such as patriarchy, masculinity, and violence.

Conclusion Today, feminist ethnography in Turkey has a strong foothold in feminist politics but suffers from weak feminist textuality. The strength comes from feminist activism, which emerged as early as the 1980s, maintained connections with the feminist academia in the 1990s. In the 2000s, feminists engaged themselves with social and political issues and presented their unique ways of feminist organising and criticism. Anthropology, on the other hand, resisted the impetus of feminism as a part of its insistence on ‘sameness’ (reading it as national unity and purity)—furthering its historical baggage in ethnographies, which influenced weak ethnographic textuality. Malestream research in Turkey argued that feminist scholarship does not present the so-called ‘proper’ or ‘scientific’ knowledge, as it is too ‘political or subjective’; and eventually began to discourage ‘novelistic’ writing. For a long time, claims to ‘objectivity’ have been the greatest yardsticks to measure anthropology as a science. As a result, anthropology—which developed ideologically, within the official state discourse in Turkey, excluded feminist studies, and called them ‘unscientific’ or ‘unnecessary’. Today, examples of feminist ethnography go beyond anthropology, as ethnography became a shared methodology for other disciplines—sociology, communication, and media studies, and yielded feminist ethnographic examples. However, these examples still suffer from feminist writing strategies at large. Thus, this partial engagement with feminist ethnography both as a method and as text became a challenging issue. Conversely, and perhaps to the dismay of the readers, while feminist

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conviction is in place, feminist ethnography in Turkey did not tackle feminist ethnographic writing, whereby producing weak feminist textuality. Shall we take this weak textuality as a drawback, perhaps as a missing component, or an unconventional, yet downplayed feature of feminist ethnography? Shall we take this as camouflage, because ‘strong activist’ and ‘weak feminist textual’ ethnographies can be interpreted as strategies to remain ‘alive’ within academia? In the light of the intellectually rich and fascinating history both of feminism and anthropology in Turkey, how can we envision a future of feminist ethnographic writing? I look at feminism as a transdisciplinary endeavour to transform anthropology. Feminist theory, method, and writing can offer fresh perspectives, for example, as they question the inherent but taken for granted power relations in a society. They can extend the analysis to a wide range of groups, with more democratically informed perspectives on gendered individuals and ethnic groups (Birkalan-Gedik 2009, 291). While I believe that feminist research can offer a vast territory to anthropology, we need to think about how feminist researchers can facilitate encounters between feminism, ethnography, and anthropology and how they challenge the borders of these related fields. The young generation of ethnographers in Turkey, coming from various disciplines, are already producing critical perspectives on feminist texts and tackling issues such as self-reflexivity and self-positioning within the larger contours of ethnographic methods. I believe that this methodological scrutiny should also be reflected in the text so that the weak feminist textuality can be remedied. When methodological and textual concerns are put in a dialogue, one can see a bright future for feminist textual experimentation in the Turkish case. As much there is a lot to learn and reflect on from AngloAmerican cases; similarly, the rich history of feminism and anthropology in Turkey is an abundant source of feminist ethnography and it can offer useful insights for other anthropological traditions which underline the importance of women in the field and the text.

Notes 1. The term gecekondu means ‘built overnight’ and refers to houses which village migrants built since the 1950s, on the outskirts of the big cities in Turkey. For a long time, the definition of a gecekondu evoked the quality of the homes that the fresh migrants made and mostly emphasised the cheap material and the illegality of the homes more than how migrants pass the

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time in their actual everyday life. In literature, one can also find references on gecekondus that would remind of favellas of Brazil, bidonvilles of Africa, or slums of Northern America, however, compositions and structures of the gecekondus have changed dramatically throughout time, proving to be hopeful and vibrant forms of human habitation, not some forms of temporary living arrangement in decline. I should note the following books which influenced my approach: Gendered Fields: Women, Men, and Ethnography (1993, edited by Diane Bell, Pat Caplan, and Wazir Jahan Karim). Now a classic, Women in the Field: Anthropological Experiences (1970, edited by Peggy Golde), and Arab Women in the Field: Studying Your Own Society (Soraya Altorki and Camillia Fawzi El-Solh, eds.) spoke deeply to my interests in fieldwork and writing. To my best knowledge, my course on feminist anthropology/ethnography in 2002–2003 at the Yeditepe University Anthropology Department was the first attempt to offer a course on the topic. Unfortunately, I was unable to open the course because it could not reach the minimum number of students. But luckily, the following year, I implemented the first course on feminist ethnography and taught it at the undergraduate and graduate level at a Turkish university until 2013. Here I am referring in particular to the Gezi Protests that started on 28 May 2013. Looking back, I can see that Gezi was only the beginning of the protests against the state’s mishandling and oppression of various groups. At Gezi, several feminists, LGBT and eco-activists came together. Women’s cooperatives are creative and effective ways of feminist organising, developing since the 2000s, which also relied on the work of feminist scholars. The Amargi Kadın Kooperatifi/Amargi Woman’s Cooperative is the first one, established in 2001. Successively, Filmmor Kadın Kooperatifi/Filmmor Woman’s Cooperative in 2003, Sosyalist Feminist Kolektif/ Socialist Feminist Collective in 2008; Kadın Cinayetlerine ˙ Isyandayız/We are Protesting Femicides in 2009. Opened in 2010, the Ayizi Publishing, was closed in 2019. Güldünya publishing takes its name from a young woman who became a victim of an honour-crime by her family. The Turkish word for woman is kadın, which is comprised of five letters. 5 Harfliler/5 Lettered hints ‘woman’ in Turkish creatively. The very long title of the Ph.D. thesis, without a reference to feminist ethnography, roughly translates the title of the book, except that the thesis does not display the term ‘feminist ethnography’.

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Uncertainty, Failure and Reciprocal Ethnography Paloma Gay y Blasco

Ethnographic writing is always collaborative: it is rooted in knowledgemaking relations in the field and also conversations in the academy. Yet the ethnographic genre is also deeply individualistic, its aesthetics, politics and generic conventions working together to enshrine the ethnographer’s persona as insightful interpreter of an alien world, guide into hidden terrains and weaver of theoretical filigree. Think Malinowski, at once shaman and scientist. And as academics jostling for advancement within a highly competitive field, we build our careers on the distinctiveness of our individual contributions. This emphasis on the ethnographer’s genius does more than mask the role of field interlocutors as co-producers of anthropological knowledge: it prevents us from probing the nature, extent and limits of their contribution. It also directs our sight towards the finished product—the assertive, well-rounded analysis—and away from the necessary uncertainties and ambiguities. Fuelled by institutional processes of review and critique,

P. Gay y Blasco (B) Department of Social Anthropology, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Scotland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 E. Tauber and D. L. Zinn (eds.), Gender and Genre in Ethnographic Writing, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71726-1_6

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the stress on the theoretical contribution of the individual ethnographer makes hesitations and failures invisible, and so limits our capacity to know our task fully. My aim here is to push in the opposite direction, away from these twin silences. I want to reflect on the entanglements that accompany the inherently collaborative process of making knowledge through ethnography. And I want to examine some of the ambiguities, uncertainties and failures that unavoidably shape these collaborations and their results. Lastly, I want to throw light on the institutional frameworks that enable but also constrain our task. I do it by reflecting on the radical experiment that I carried out with my friend Liria Hernández, on the ten-year process of trying, and in many ways failing, to write together a reciprocal life story. This is a book where Liria and myself—former informant and anthropologist—describe and analyse each other and each other’s worlds (Gay y Blasco and Hernández 2020). Liria and I met in 1992, when we were both 23 and I lived in her home during my fieldwork in a state-built ghetto in Madrid where 400 Gitano (Spanish Romani) families had recently been resettled. Liria had grown up in a very deprived area of Madrid, had left school without finishing her primary education, and had married an older relative aged sixteen. When we met, she had two children and worked selling textiles in open-air markets. I was a Paya (non-Gitana) student from a middle-class family, and I was half-way through my doctoral studies at the University of Cambridge in the UK. In our book we look back on our intertwined lives: each of us writes about herself and the other, about our pasts and presents, and about the Gitano and Payo people who surround us, including our two families. We take as our departure point Liria’s elopement from her community in 2009 and my decision to support her then and over the coming years against the wishes of her relatives. They were my friends and long-term informants and repeatedly asked me to help them bring her back. Our book had a peculiar genesis. When Liria eloped, I tried to find ways to help her economically. As a just-literate Gitana woman who had lived her whole life within the embrace of her community, who had always earned a living precariously amongst other Gitanos, she had no way to earn money and scant capacity to survive in the city. My head of department allowed me to use part of my yearly research budget to pay Liria to write down her life story even though I was not working on Gitano issues at the time and did not intend to do anything with what she wrote. Yet

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once Liria started writing she would not stop. On a large school notebook, in capitals with very idiosyncratic spelling, she poured out her pain, her grief for the children she had left behind, her love for her new partner and her hopes for a new life. The strength and honesty of her work moved me deeply, and I proposed that we do a book about it together. I imagined this as a straightforward anthropological life story, one where I would analyse Liria’s life and worldview, treating her writing and her verbal accounts as data. But Liria was a writer and a storyteller, and I happened to be a key character in her tale. Encouraged by my colleague Nigel Rapport and by my students, we decided to try to write reciprocally, each describing herself, the other and the very diverse people who surround us. We had no model to follow and it was often very difficult to know which path to take. I had never read a book like the one we decided to try to write: one where control was fully shared by two authors with such different experiences of anthropology, where the anthropologist’s life was opened up to the scrutiny of the former informant, and where the lives of a Gitana and a Paya were examined together. It took us a long time to work out how to write, together and individually, and how to bring our two voices together. I was frequently certain that we were going to fail. Writing Friendship is in some ways ‘about gender’ in the sense that it explores our lives as two Spanish women from radically contrasting backgrounds, both born in Madrid in 1969. The book takes as its starting point Liria’s elopement, so it is about sexual transgression and its punishment amongst Gitanos in Madrid. It is also about my role in her escape and how, as a friend and an anthropologist, I tried to find my moral compass when confronted with a gendered morality that demanded that Liria be harshly castigated. Trying to tease how we came to make our choices, Liria and I look back also on our very different childhoods and on the decades of our friendship, the years when we changed from young to middle-aged women, when she was a Gitana wife and mother and I a Paya scholar within British academia. From the start, a key purpose of our book was to make visible Liria’s voice, to place it in equal dialogue with mine and to do this by working together, sharing the planning, interviewing, writing up and editing. For many years she had been my informant and her views and interpretations had influenced my own. We now wanted to challenge the still-entrenched notion that anthropological knowledge is the result of the flair and insight of the individual ethnographer. Specifically, I wanted to

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test what would happen to ethnography as a genre, and to anthropology as a way of knowing and representing the world, if the contribution of informants was problematised and foregrounded. I was interested in the adjustments to the ethnographic genre that anthropologists may have to make in order to incorporate informants and non-professional collaborators into the textual conversations of academic anthropology. Was this possible at all? What complications would ensue? I wanted to extend the general preoccupations of collaborative anthropology—openness, accessibility, egalitarian working practices1 —in the specific direction of reciprocal ethnographic writing.2 In the process of writing our book we had to devise our own genre. Our reciprocal aims meant that the standard ethnographic format, and the standard life story format, did not work. The end result did not fit into any model, within or outside anthropology. It was an awkward patchwork of dialogues, interviews, reminiscences, personal reflections and letters. In some ways the manuscript read like a memoir, a personal account of the past as seen from the present, but it was also very much a depiction of a world, an attempt at deciphering the interplay between our individual circumstances and the broader social and cultural flows that run through them. Often our complicity came strongly to the foreground in what we wrote and how we wrote it, but at other times it was the clashes and negotiations that seemed most urgent. Throughout, we asked what anthropology is and can be for each of us, and we also reflected directly on the limits of our experiment, the many ways we did not manage to deliver what we set out to do. Throughout the time it took us to write our book, its legitimacy as an anthropological project was questioned by many around us. Colleagues, publishers, line managers and seminar audiences doubted whether this book was anthropological, ethnographic, scholarly. At the very end of the process, long after a contract was signed with Palgrave, the academic nature of the manuscript was questioned by the anonymous reviewer who was asked to provide or refuse final approval. Like others before her, the reviewer was troubled by the fact that we did not use references or quotations and did not discuss theoretical debates to which Liria could not have unmediated access. This was a result of our decision to write as accessible to her as possible: Liria left school aged 11 and, although she can read and write, does so laboriously. She lacks the very extensive training necessary to decipher anthropological texts.

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The reviewer argued that, by not discussing how our book related to earlier academic works, I had chosen to place the burden of contextualising our text on our readers, disregarding the scholarly community within which I exist and presenting myself as writing in isolation. Instead, I should have entered into an explicit dialogue with earlier authors. Crucially, the reviewer stated that our deliberate lack of direct engagement with other scholarly texts effectively meant that our book, whilst a good memoir, should not be read or evaluated as a scholarly text. The points that the reviewer made are intriguing and important, and attempting to address them made me understand my own task and its complexities better. Yet they also made me ask myself, why should the boundaries of academic writing need to be policed, and in this particular way?3 Answers to this question will embody understandings about what kind of task anthropology is and should be, about the relationship between local and anthropological forms of knowledge, and about who is and is not an anthropologist. These answers can be powerful in their practical effects. They have the potential to enable or disable particular forms of inscription and dissemination, to include or exclude different interlocutors and to strengthen or weaken the walls around our knowledge and scholarly debates (cf. Rios and Sands 2000, 27; Abu-Lughod 2006; Tsao 2011). Crucially, this question is far from new. It has a history, a genealogy, roots. It has been asked repeatedly since the nineteenth century, and of many different individuals and groups. I am particularly interested in the fact that it has been asked of a highly diverse cluster of women who wrote what were perceived to be womanly texts and did so from within the periphery of scholarship.4 Positioned very differently within academic and wider social hierarchies, these women collaborated in various ways with anthropologists who were working to establish their own individual voices and careers, to carve their own places within the panorama of anthropology and to build the discipline as a theoretically driven form of scholarly knowledge (cf. Lamphere 2004; Gambrell 1997; Behar 1993). Some of these were ethnic minority women who came to anthropology from strongly marginalised communities, much like Liria.5 Others were white and well off socially and economically, but they remained defined by their ties to these scholars as assistants and wives.6 Obvious names will come to mind: Ella Cara Deloria, Jovita González and Zora Neale Hurston, but also Edith Turner, Marion Benedict, Marianne Alverson and even Elsie Clewes Parsons. And there must be others who are less

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well known because the anthropologists they assisted or collaborated with never reached the notoriety of Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict or Victor Turner. The reciprocal anthropology that Liria and I attempted echoes aspects of the highly heterogeneous body of work that these women produced: some of them worked collaboratively or wrote polyphonic texts; most constructed their own genres; others moved well beyond reflexivity to open themselves to the scrutiny of their subjects. As Cotera explains of Deloria, Hurston and González, they ‘elaborated new ways of knowing and of telling at the interstices of politics, cultural production and disciplinary knowledge’ (Cotera 2010, 231). Their lives and their work— ‘(t)oo literary to be considered authoritative ethnographic texts and too wedded to ethnographic realism to conform to the aesthetic norms of literary modernism’ (Cotera 2010, 16)—embodied contradictions which throw light, not just on our own collaboration, but on anthropology and ethnography more broadly.7 There are obvious similarities between Liria’s precarious and complex position as author and the positions of some of these women, and our relationship too mirrors the relationships they had with their patrons, employers and husbands. But their work speaks to me also for other reasons. These women grappled with uncertainty, failure and ambiguity in their attempts to write anthropology, as well as with the instability and unreliability of their knowledge, as we did when attempting to turn our dialogue into an egalitarian yet scholarly text. Steeped in the anthropological desire to access and communicate the other’s point of view, their work also ‘called into question the possibility of rendering that other perspective in any singular, monolithic way’ (Gambrell 1997, 10), even to render it at all—once again an awareness that our writing shares with theirs. They looked for ways to deal anthropologically with their existential engagements, with the deep drives and conflicts that moulded their lives, and their attempts, like our own, were often fraught and problematic.8 It is with these concerns in mind that they looked on anthropology, and it is through these concerns that they reflect the discipline back to itself. So I could examine the question of what makes a text scholarly in order to trace some of the processes of exclusion and inclusion that have shaped the history of our discipline, as biographers and analysts of these women’s work have done. Instead, I want to look to my experience of writing with Liria in the light of their work to ask the questions I would have liked to reviewer to ask: What does a reciprocal experiment like ours reveal

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about anthropology? What tensions, capabilities and constraints become visible when we attempt reciprocal work and take it as far as it will go, and when we fail at it? What does reciprocal work show us about our discipline that our habitual ways of working, and their attached systems of value, more readily hide? And by our discipline I mean both the global, unequal, hierarchical institution and its products, our texts. Note that my aim is not to construct a contrived homogeneity between the lives and work of these women and our own, but rather to deploy some of their writing to bring into sharper focus the distinctive character of our own project and of its contexts.9

Uncertainty The work that Liria and I did together revolved around our friendship and our dialogue. We wrote not just collaboratively, like others had done before us,10 but pushing reciprocity as far as we could. We looked at each other, defined each other and so we also received back images and stories about ourselves that we didn’t always understand, agree with or like. As we started to try to find explanations for the events and the world around us, our dialogue began to deliver not just two but often multiple interpretations, contrasting, complementing, often conflicting. Liria and I sometimes disagreed with each other but we were also often uncertain ourselves, and this uncertainty was nourished by the process of deep personal introspection that reciprocal writing demanded. It was as if we had become longsighted: the more intensely we peered at events and at the people around us, the more we brought them up close, the more their blurriness was magnified. This instability was deeply disquieting for me and I did not welcome it. Partly this was a result of my habitual expectations because in previous projects I had always tried to create cohesive, convincing arguments, believing that this is what makes good anthropology. The conventions of scholarly writing demand that we fix our insights: even if the knowledge we have of events and people is partial and evanescent, even if these qualities are the very subject of our study, our analysis still has to appear firm, persuasive, coherent. The reciprocal aims of my work with Liria complicated this solidification process and so I felt that I was not getting it right.

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On a personal level, some of the events we were trying to interpret were inherently opaque and painful—for example, Liria’s precipitous decision to elope, leaving her young children on the spur of the moment, and my childhood abuse by a trusted family friend. These events are central to who we are and their destabilisation unsettled both of us deeply, not just as anthropologists but as human beings. I also became increasingly aware that the story we wanted to tell would bother intensely many of the people we were talking about—Liria’s family, my own. For many years I had written about Gitanos with little regard about what they might think. I did not address them but other anthropologists. Now I started to question the right that Liria and I had to write a text that might be seen, by some at least, to demonise her community. I knew that ours was just one version of what had happened and doubted whether this version deserved telling over any other. The fact that we were recounting our stories to each other in order to write them down, to publish them in an academic context, demanded a coherence that was impossible to deliver. It seemed to me that claiming authority, assuming the agency to know and represent, would have to betray or ignore this deeply felt experience of groundlessness. And I had no idea how to turn this instability into an anthropological argument. I was reminded of the work of one of my Ph.D. students, Daniela Castellanos (2015). Talking about envy in the village of Aguabuena in the Colombian Andes, she describes anxious villagers spying each other through slits in the walls of their adobe houses, seeing only fragments of the world, each limited to what can be ascertained from a particular punto, a spot in space and in the social fabric, each unable to grasp a fuller picture and to dominate their environment. Attempting to understand what to do with this experience, it was difficult to find guidance within my discipline. Anthropologists do study uncertainty as a key aspect of the experience of their subjects; there is even talk of ‘the anthropology of uncertainty’ (Samimian-Darash and Rabinow 2015, 2). And I found useful work on uncertainty as condition central to the encounter with the other (Jackson 2012, 2017). But it was much harder to find uncertainty that was allowed to remain, that did not work as an obstacle to be overcome on the path to authority—unresolved uncertainty as condition of human existence and therefore as anthropological method.11 Most often uncertainty appears in ethnographic writing as part of our subjects’ experiences, not our own. Anthropologists do pose puzzles and conundrums for their readers but, as in a TV whodunnit, they

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do their damn best to solve them, heroes of their own intellectual adventure. This textual strategy is central to ethnography and is essential to the conjuring of authority and the creation of singular authorial persona (Gay y Blasco and Wardle 2020). My experience with Liria made me realise how readily, in previous work, I had brushed ambiguity aside as I built arguments that fitted as well as I could make them the stylistic requirements of journals and reviewers. I wondered what steps we have to take, what contortions of the mind and the soul we have to undergo, to reach these places of certainty from which we scholars purport to speak to each other. I compared the rough, circular, meandering drafts that Liria and I were generating to the polished monographs that I admired, and felt that I had to find an argument, resolve the contradictions, move forward, and so move myself forward too, stop feeling so anxious about it, so worried and conflicted, get a grip, get a handle on our book and myself, make a contribution. Marion Benedict describes experiencing a similar confrontation with uncertainty when gathering information for her husband Burton in the Seychelles in the 1970s: the facts that she was collecting ‘tended to slide away’ as she realised informants lied (Benedict and Benedict 1982, 3). And she too contributed to this unreliability. ‘Upon what grounds did I decide what was true and what false? Sheerly on intuition… Yet it was on this illogical basis that I believed, remembered and recorded some things in my notebook, and disbelieved, forgot, and did not record other things. The process of fictionalizing had begun’ (1982, 4). Unable to ascertain truth, she jumps in at the deep end: fiction becomes her particular path towards arriving at the ‘felt life’ that objectivity could not deliver (1982, 6). Then her subjective, invented-but-true account is published alongside the supposedly objective, scholarly one of her husband´s, bringing the unstable character of both into sharp focus. For Ella Deloria on the other hand, uncertainty was generated not by a lack but by a surplus of knowledge, the result of her complex position as a Lakota collaborating with white anthropologists in the early decades of the twentieth century. Deloria wrote to Ruth Benedict, ‘I simply cannot write it as a real investigator, hitting the high spots and drawing conclusions. There is too much I know… I tell one thing – and fearing it will be misunderstood, I tell something else on the other side, and so it goes’ (Deloria in Gambrell 1997, 130). Gambrell finds parallels between the dilemmas that Deloria and Zora Neale Hurston faced in this regard. Both authors implicitly questioned ‘the unexamined presumption

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of mastery that informed so many ethnographic studies from the same period’ (Gambrell 1997, 130).12 In my work with Liria, I gradually moved from struggling to construct unequivocal interpretations to trying to convey the impossibility of finding a solid ground. I went every Thursday to my local Zen group and heard people talk about the need to accept uncertainty as essential to life. Very gradually, revealing the ways Liria and I talked past each other and failed to grasp the significance of people and events became central to my writing method. Now our disagreements and our ignorance, which had felt so intractable to start with, started to appear more fertile. It would be easy to pretend that I found comfort in this strategy, that all was well. It was not. The shift was fruitful in that it gave me a structure and a frame within which to place the opacity of our discussions—I could continue working every day at my desk—but writing still felt deeply disquieting. This ongoing discomfort was revealing: I learnt how counterintuitive it is for me to ‘write provisionally’ Cohen (1992, 347)13 —indeed to accept that I know and live provisionally—and how I resist the precariousness of my interpretations in bodily ways. Working with Liria I became intimate with this precariousness and began to envision making space for it in my anthropology. Today, I believe that the opacity that I tried to grapple with when writing with Liria is useful. Reciprocal work like the one we attempted forces anthropologists to confront the partiality and precariousness of our own perspectives in ways that ordinary anthropological work does not. It reminds anthropologists of something that we know well about our discipline: its grounding in evanescent subjectivity. And here I am encouraged by Nigel Rapport’s statement that, any words we use about human life—whether as livers of a life or observers—are markers of hope rather than claims to certitude. They more display our ignorance, perhaps, than our knowledge. They more register our uncertainty and our anxiety than our confidence—or should be deemed to. They mark our life-journeys, the words we put to frequent use being a kind of horizon, speaking to the issues we are currently having to deal with and hoping to get beyond. (2015, 190)

Uncertainty itself is one of these words. Nigel asks, ‘What is a satisfactory (provisional) conceptualization?’ (ibid.). My answer would be, one that makes its provisional nature visible.

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Certainty Whilst I was so preoccupied with uncertainty and so worried about the imminent failure of our book, Liria’s concerns were very different. Our inability to pin down events, interpretations and responsibilities took second place to a much more pressing necessity: to convey to readers her overwhelming certainty that God oversaw and guided all—our two lives and our project. For Liria the final purpose of our book was to make the goodness of God visible and so the possibility that we might fail never grabbed her. To ensure that our readers would come closer to God, Liria wanted a chapter dedicated to explaining in detail his benevolent role in our lives. I was unsettled by this prospect: what would our audience say— my colleagues, my students, other anthropologists—if we used our book to preach to them? At times this disjuncture between our orientations felt like an intractable problem. In fact it is nothing special: all anthropologists and informants face similar situations. The question is what to do about them, how to deal with them methodologically. Anthropologists most often take the approach endorsed by the reviewer of our manuscript in her comments. They address each other and treat their informants’ perspectives as data. They sidestep the necessity, demanded by our reciprocal approach, to allow informants to choose the terms on which to speak to anthropological audiences.14 This necessity is present, albeit implicitly, in the work of some of the women who I mentioned above, and they dealt with it in diverse ways. The ‘much-observed absence of interpretation and analysis in Hurston’s ethnographies’, for example, has been read as a result of her decision to ‘let her subjects speak for themselves’ (Jacobs 1997, 336). For Edith Turner it was a matter of engaging the spiritual, those dimensions of experience that seemed to overlap with those of her informants and that she also tried to grasp through analysis.15 Maybe closer to our own strategy are Elsie Clewes Parsons’s essays on Pueblo mothers (1991), published in Man between 1915 and 1924, the years when Malinowski was doing fieldwork and writing Argonauts. Whilst he was honing his persona as scientific authority, interpreter of Trobriand life for the Western world, Parsons was developing a polyphonic method where the knowledge of her interlocutors stood on a par with her own.16 Instead of exemplary informants and an all-knowing ethnographer, we find named locals and an anthropologist finding her feet, sometimes with surety but often with

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hesitation. And, rather than one seamless narrative of discovery and analysis, Parsons gives us an assortment of voices around a theme, of which hers is one, a precarious one at that. There is a degree of mutuality here but also what Tsing (2005, 246) went on to call ‘friction’.17 As to Liria and me, from one perspective our two orientations (Evangelism and anthropology) purported to encompass or absorb the other. As a Christian, Liria looked on our anthropological venture as a manifestation of God’s will. As an anthropologist, I looked at Liria’s Evangelism as one set of beliefs amongst so many, another element of her life to be questioned and interpreted. Yet Liria saw no contradiction between these different standpoints, and she saw herself as a feminist,18 an Evangelical, an anthropologist, a friend and an informant. She conceptualised anthropology as a moral enterprise, one that can deliver better relations between human beings, as demonstrated by our friendship’s capacity to, as she says, ‘break down boundaries’. She was very keen that our book would be accessible to women who had experienced ostracism from their communities just like she had, and she believed that God’s purpose was that our book would help them in their plight. I would like our book to be understood not only by anthropologists, but also other people who don’t have that quality of understanding that way of writing. I am very interested in the support and the opinion of anthropologists, but I would like them to grasp why I also want other people to read our book, in particular women who have gone through situations similar to mine, who have seen themselves cornered, not knowing what to do, because nobody held out a hand to them. I hope that reading this will give them hope, and it will help them face up to their circumstances, because no matter how difficult it seems, or even if they come from families with very harsh customs, it is always possible to fight to achieve a future. If we write our book only with anthropological words, other people who have gone through situations like mine will not be able to understand it. Even though we know that in principle this book is for anthropologists and students, we also want regular people like me to be able to understand it. (Gay y Blasco and Hernández 2020, 19)

Liria’s anthropology is unfettered by what may be considered correct, acceptable or analytically sophisticated by the discipline. This anthropology is grounded in her own life experiences, her common sense and her resilient positive personality. Take her response to the same reviewer, who argued also that we had neglected to explore the inequalities between

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us. In our book Liria interviews me about my childhood abuse and speaks very frankly about her sorrow at my experience. The reviewer had found the fact that Liria interviewed me, and that we compared our two lives, very worrying. They argued that our approach took the reciprocal method far too far and, crucially, that it downplayed the very real power differentials between the two of us so that our suffering and experiences were presented as equal. This, the reviewer stated, was simply false. My appalled, automatic response was to comb our book, looking for places where the hierarchies and power differentials between Liria and myself could be made even clearer, and to ask Liria to do the same. Unlike me, Liria refused to take the comments of the reviewer at face value. When I tried to push her to write additional paragraphs about these inequalities, she wrote about how she had supported me whilst I was doing fieldwork—opening her house to me, guiding me, feeding me—and how I helped her many years later when she eloped from her family. Paloma as much as me, we won’t stop talking about so many things that we have in common, and it is true that they exist. But we cannot leave aside other areas of our lives where inequalities stalked us. In some occasions, like at the start, when we started to get to know each other, I found it strange that although she was twenty-three years old and was becoming independent from her wealthy family through her fieldwork project, she nonetheless depended on a Gitano family to be able to achieve it. The thing is that, no matter how much money her family or Paloma might have, at that time it wasn’t much help to them. And this precisely has been the first sign that made me believe that this was God’s plan acting in her life and in mine. So of course we have been in unequal conditions. But this never broke the bonds that also united us. What I am trying to explain may seem confusing but in reality to start with Paloma needed me and I opened to her my life and my heart, but later on she would return it to me with the greatest gratitude. And this is what has made us different from others: no matter how high up each one might be, depending on the occasion, we knew how to hold each other’s hands without looking anywhere else, without caring about the alien gaze of those who surrounded us.19

Liria stressed our shifting reliance on each other at different times in our lives. She refused to see inequality as unidirectional, monolithic or static, and placed more emphasis on the God-directed ability to provide

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emotional support than on economic or social capital. Her faith in our love for each other surprised, moved and at times embarrassed me—it seemed so out of place in a monograph—and I tried and failed to get her to tone down some of her more enthusiastic statements. I worried that she was downplaying the impact of our inequalities out of a desire to sustain our friendship and wondered whether she was being fully honest. At the same time, I was also reminded of my obligation to take her stance seriously precisely in order to confront the power differentials of which the reviewer had spoken. Whilst the reviewer and I were concerned with revealing the hierarchies and inequalities that separated us, Liria wanted to emphasise the humanity we share with each other and with the people around us, a humanity grounded in the inevitability of suffering and the desire to reach for a good life. Talking about the Madrid friends whose lives we examined together—middle- and working-class Payos, Gitanos, Latin-Americans and North-Africans—she says: Their stories were not very different deep down, and each in its own way had its dark and painful side, and this side united us all somehow— Gitanos, Payos, Latin American or immigrants, each one with their customs or ethnicities… When we listen to their stories, we realise that they have suffered many difficulties in their lives. We are not the only ones who have suffered, and I feel sorry for them and I identify with their suffering. In some ways, what they tell is not that different from my own life. Each one of us in their own way, we have all known how to persevere, we have looked for something to hold onto, one thing or another—God, the love of friends, the warmth of the family… We don’t know what the future holds for us, because our situation changes constantly and is always uncertain and outside our control. It’s a constant struggle to overcome. It is an internal struggle against your fears and external against the world. (Gay y Blasco and Hernández 2020, 135)

This shared humanity, Liria argued, is essential also to the reciprocal project and to anthropology: It seems very important to me also to be able to see the life of the anthropologist. If you do not open up to your informant, you cannot truly know your informant. If I tell you all about myself, and I only see you with your armour on, your happy life with a husband, and work, and children,

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your life too will remain silent. There will not be authentic communication because of the fear that anthropologists have to reveal their suffering to their informants and to the world. (Gay y Blasco and Hernández 2020, 157)20

Liria’s humanistic and passionate outlook is far from unique. Cotera talks about the ethnographic novels written by Ella Deloria, Zora Hurston and Jovita González as ‘allegories for a kind of passionate praxis that could not be imagined in the ethnographic milieu in which (they) worked, a praxis centred on intimate encounters across difference in the interest of social transformation’ (Cotera 2010, 231). In their novels and ethnographies, much like in the texts written by Edith Turner,21 Marion Benedict or Marianne Alverson, these authors foregrounded what the discipline had pushed to the edges: they ‘turn(ed) from regimes of description that centre on disconnection, objectivity and distance, and embrace(d) modes of telling founded on connection, subjectivity, and intimacy’ (Cotera 2010, 225). Unaware of the work of these or any other anthropologists, confronting tremendous hardship in her everyday life, Liria accessed her innate awareness of the potential of human connections to initiate positive change, wrote about it eloquently, and willed anthropology to listen. Working with Liria and accompanying her over so many difficult years, I had to open up to a co-author who knew how to speak to academia only from her heart. I began to imagine the vulnerability that Edith Turner described as ‘anthropology of a different kind’22 and to wonder what my own different anthropology might look like. And I had to try to engage this passionate praxis without allowing our work to become simplistic or unidimensional, abandoning my analytical rigour, becoming politically naïve or losing sight of the nuances and concrete effects of our disparities. The task, already formulated by Virginia Domínguez (2000, 368), was to begin to learn ‘how to incorporate and acknowledge love in one’s intellectual life, indeed in one’s writing, and how to incorporate and acknowledge love in one’s politics’.

Failure At the start of my work with Liria, still full of naivety and enthusiasm, I was excited in particular about two dimensions of our project: the fact that I was opening my life to her scrutiny, and our decision to work in an egalitarian manner, sharing the writing, the editing and control over

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the structure and argument of our book. Liria did investigate my life and write about it: in this we did meet our goals. Working in the egalitarian manner we had imagined, directing together with the production of our text, turned out to be a different matter. We faced practical circumstances that we had not envisioned, and these constrained our reciprocal aims. I was paid to work on the book: my job included time for research and I dedicated it to our project. Liria was not, and she had to earn a living. Year after year over a decade, I used up the fund my university gave me to attend conferences or do fieldwork to pay Liria for the time she spent on the book, but we never had enough to enable her to put in nearly the hours that I did. Moreover, aware of her lack of knowledge of written anthropology, she expected me to take the lead when deciding the layout, content and direction of our book, and I confess that this was my impulse too. As a result, during much of the time that we worked together Liria’s primary role was as purveyor of handwritten texts and recordings, and of course as interlocutor in our conversations and mutual interviews. As well as writing my own texts, I was project manager, transcriber, translator, editor and organiser, choosing which of her and my own materials to include and what the overall argumentative thrust of each chapter would be. I constructed Liria’s sections by choosing and editing texts that she had written and weaving them with statements that she had made during our taped conversations. Liria looked over everything I produced, requesting changes to her work and to mine, but throughout most of the book I built the structure and tempo of her sections myself. We did spend some weeks each year writing side by side and it was then that came closest to our ideals: I became a facilitator that provided Liria with information about anthropology and its aesthetics and norms, and we worked together to figure how to tell our story. As Liria grew more at ease with computers, Skype and Whatsapp it became easier to work like this at a distance. This happened particularly in the last year. Until then, we repeatedly drifted back to the division of labour that caused me such unease. From one perspective, we were making the best of our distinct strengths and capabilities, working creatively within the limits of our circumstances. From another, we were retaking the very positions that we had tried to avoid, as scholar and subject, anthropologist and informant. One of the questions here is whether our aims were ever achievable, and what this may say about anthropology, the ethnographic genre23 and

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collaboration. But there is a concomitant issue: the fact that both authorial voices were, in a way, my creation.24 Editing and translating Liria’s work I tried to be as faithful as possible to what I thought were her writing style, verbal pace and mannerisms; to what I believed to be her interests, passions, objectives and ways of being in the world. Yet it did also seem to me that Liria’s voice, as it appears in our book, was my construct, that both she and I were characters in a work of fiction that I was producing.25 This was magnified by the fact that Liria does not speak English so that ultimate responsibility for the published version of our text rested with me. And, although we did not quote other authors, I could see that in my editing, translating and organising of our writings I was still addressing anthropological debates that bypassed Liria. I was consuming our friendship and our stories once again, just as I am doing now, ‘antropófaga’ as much as ‘antropóloga’ as Rappaport (2005, 84) states. The problems that all anthropologists face—how to bridge the distance between life and text—acquired added urgency because of our reciprocal goals. Once again, Liria saw things rather differently, describing me as the tool that God had given her ‘so that with Paloma’s help I would be able to speak up and witness’. She explained, So it was Paloma who God chose. He put her in my path, to be my tool, and He did it so that together we would talk about the oppression that we women suffer and explain that what he wants is that we will not be oppressed but that we should have the same freedom as any man, and that there should be equality for all. Paloma does not believe in God, but He placed her where I would find her. God has used her because she has access to that world of anthropology, and in this way we can do the book together, and other people will see that God is in my life and in hers. Even though she never has managed to understand it, from the beginning He chose her because she can reach many places that are beyond my reach as a Gitana woman. She is like the platform that God has given me so that I can speak to a bigger audience. (Gay y Blasco and Hernández 2020, 146–47)

I was not convinced, and came to think of and experience our work as a failure. And I do not mean failure in a positive way, as an obstacle to be overcome on the way to eventual success. I mean ongoing failure, painful and frightening. I believed that we had failed because Liria could only access or speak to anthropology through my mediation,26 because we struggled to achieve any semblance of coherence or certainty, and because

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our accessible writing was only sometimes recognised as academic yet the story we were telling was too anthropological for a popular audience. I am aware that I brought to our book earlier complexes and fears. But I also believe that what I experienced as failure was the embodied sense of working in a space where meeting so many conflicting expectations was impossible, at the boundaries of scholarship. Failure is how I, with my history, feel the unresolvable contradictions that run through both our project and our discipline. And of course Liria faced her own conflicts: she wanted to witness to God’s action yet be listened to by sceptical anthropologists; she believed that I was her tool but felt that she had to defer to me as expert; and she was excited at working as an anthropologist but frustrated at the opacity of anthropology and of the university systems which excluded her in so many ways. And I read about these other women working at the edges of anthropology and see them caught also in unresolvable tensions—some lived with greater ease, others with more angst and struggle. Gardner, discussing the difficulties that Ella Deloria faced when writing her books, trying and not managing to get them published, explains that ‘however she attempted to organize her ethnological manuscript, it kept escaping the boundaries set by scientific “objectivity.” Hers was a conversational anthropology (which)… disrupted the lineal scientific narrative expected of her’ (Gardner 2009, xi). Enmeshed in the contradictory demands of scholarship and of her position as Lakota ‘insider’, Deloria wrote to Ruth Benedict in 1947: Ruth, it’s just awful!... I made a hundred false starts, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve torn up my Ms and begun again… It is so distressing to find it so hard to do this writing in any detached professional manner! It reads like a chummy book on writing rather than like a study… I try to keep out of it, but I am too much in it, and I know too many angles. (Deloria in Gardner 2009, xvii–xviii)

Deloria suffered greatly. She was haunted by the conflict between her obligations to her relatives and her commitment to academic anthropology, and she agonised also about her lack of theoretical finesse. She attempted to resolve these paradoxes by writing Waterlily (Deloria 1988a), an ethnographic fiction that was only published many years after her death. Yet the novel itself generated its own entanglements for Deloria: the need

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‘to devise an accessible style for an… uniformed audience; her determination to present her people in the best light; and her deference to Benedict, whom she entrusted to pull the manuscript together and then to find a publisher’ (Gardner 2009, xvi). Deloria’s anguish finds echoes in Edith Turner’s writing. Turner describes returning to the UK and eventually starting to write up her African experiences, ‘one hundred single-spaced pages in pencil, on extra-long paper’ (Turner 2005, 84): My “Kajima” piece consisted of just the ‘living moment’ material. Such a style was not used in anthropological writing at the time, so the purpose of writing the piece was for me alone, confirming in me—anchoring firmly in me—the understanding that the living moment is precious. It was my basic understanding that this was the basic stuff of anthropology. I did not mind that there was no audience for my tales. I felt the method was a natural fact. (Turner ibid.)

In spite of the confidence with which she makes this statement, Turner also describes entering into a deep depression fuelled by her sense of alienation from the academic world to which her husband had free access. ‘I myself was a nothing’, she states (Turner 2005, 85; cf Engelke 2002). These women found paths through these entanglements by devising their own genres, cultivating their singular from-within-the-edge voices, meeting only partially the conventions of ethnography and transferring anthropological approaches to other narrative arenas. Turner’s work was recognised and she became a key figure in humanistic anthropology. Deloria wasn’t to nearly the same extent during her lifetime, and she failed to publish much of her work. As for Liria and me, we carried on and stitched our patchwork. My compromise was to make our failure to work in a fully egalitarian manner, and my worries about authorship, voice and control as obvious as I could to our readers. Whilst Liria described her God-given confidence in our book and friendship, I talked about the accommodations we had to make in order to continue working. Each of our voices conveys its own totalising drive but, because they are set together, they are revealed as puntos, locations from which each of us approaches each other and the world (cf. Castellanos 2015).

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So What? Writing about uncertainty, about Liria’s passionate anthropology and about failure, I know that these issues have already been taken apart by many other scholars. Take dialogue: by the 1980s, when some writers were proposing ‘cooperatively evolved’ text as the solution to the ills that faced anthropology (Tyler 1987, 202), praising the benefits of ‘mutual dialogic production’ (Tyler 1986, 126), others were countering that dialogue has so much potential to become complacent, to hide so many inequalities, and that dialogic ethnography in its many forms is inherently hierarchical and colonial (Visweswaran 1994, 80). And take failure. Already almost twenty years ago, Lather argued that the best an ethnographic text can do is become the ‘site of the failures of representation’ and that textual experiments ‘are not so much about solving the crisis of representation as about troubling the very claims to represent’ (Lather 2001, 201). Drawing on Visweswaran (1994) and Haraway (1997), Lather (ibid.) talked about ‘good enough ethnography’ and about anthropology as ‘modest witness’ but went on to acknowledge that this tactic easily reintroduces ‘a sense of mastery through the very defence of risky failures. As methodological stances, reflexive gestures, partial understanding, bewilderment, and getting lost are rhetorical positions that tend to confound refutation, and fragmentation of texts hardly avoids imposing one’s interpretation of a fragmented worldview’ (Lather 2001, 217). These warnings can rightly be applied to my work with Liria and to this article. Remember what I said just above: ‘Each of our voices conveys its own totalising drive but, because they are set together, they are simultaneously revealed as puntos, locations from which each of us approaches each other and the world’. Once again I subsumed Liria’s perspective into my own and my statement encapsulates much of what is problematic about our collaboration. So, in spite of the pull of my training, I have no wish to present my work with Liria as a fix. We don’t move the discipline forward. What we do is precisely what the reviewer disliked: show rather than tell, conveying to the best of our abilities the lumpy texture of our particular anthropological encounter. Together in our book, and on my own here, we try to communicate what it was like, for us, to try to address in practical ways the angst of our discipline over its elitism, its isolation and its hierarchies (Eriksen 2006; Moskowitz 2015). Because Liria and I did take seriously

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the debates about the failure of reflexivity and the limits of collaboration, and we took what seemed to us the next logical step: we attempted to reverse the gaze, opening our friendship and our lives to scrutiny. If nothing else, experiments like ours are good to think with, to criticise and improve upon—this is why they are so necessary. Our compromises and failures make viscerally clear some of the key dilemmas that face anthropology today, in 2020, at a time when openness, accountability, impact, but also metrics of academic value like the British Research Excellence Framework press on anthropologists so strongly. Who do we write for? Why? How are we to think of our interlocutors, our informants? What should their role be in our discipline and our lives? These are questions that, every single day, we already answer through our routine choices, from fieldwork to writing, from reviewing an article to examining a thesis or marking an undergraduate paper. Reciprocal work, failures included, brings these questions to the surface. This is also the reason why I am interested in the projects attempted by these very diverse, assorted women writing from the edges of anthropology. Their experiments and the fates of these experiments too make visible the tensions, hierarchies, expectations and compromises that are in our blood as a discipline. Their many different, positioned, singular, sometimes anguished writings reflect back to anthropology the very processes and systems of value that we take completely for granted—us, who are so good at seeing through, localising and positioning the totalising systems of value of those we study. These women saw through. They urge us to ask ourselves about our choices and our future. I am encouraged to think that, in the balance between theoretical argument and experiential exploration of life and anthropology, these women found their voices within the second. It was in this narrative arena that they confronted their constraints with greatest creativity and that they moved with greatest freedom. These women knew that theoretical insights can propel a text without being its explicit focus and they knew that accessible, unconventional ways of narrating experience may be an effective method of anthropological enquiry, particularly if we want to ‘write faithfully to life, to its ambiguity, uncertainty, and existential risk’ (Pandian and McLean 2017, 5).27 These women’s writings evidence the fact that the anthropological imagination is larger and more powerful than a debate amongst specialists—something that I have learnt working with Liria. Most importantly, the obstacles that many of these women faced finding recognition for

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their work reveal also our power as audiences and not just as writers or researchers.28 These obstacles remind us of the responsibility that we have as readers, teachers, reviewers and evaluators to nurture openness, risk-taking and creativity in our discipline.

Notes 1. See for example Curran (2013), Holmes and Marcus (2008), Lassiter (2001, 2008), Majnep and Bulmer (1977), Rappaport (2005, 2007), Rios and Sands (2000). 2. Lawless (1993) used the term ‘reciprocal ethnography’ to describe the process through which ethnographers incorporate their informants’ critical perspectives into the evolving text. Her own work includes extensive use of this strategy but, unlike in my work with Liria, she as ethnographer remains in control of the text, there is no co-authorship, and her collaborators’ statements and texts are used as data for Lawless to interpret. She describes this kind of reciprocal ethnography as an improvement on postmodern reflexivity because it extends the ‘multi-layered, polyphonic dimension of dialogue and exchange’ beyond fieldwork to the writing-up stage (1993, 60). 3. See Brenneis (2016) for a discussion of metrics and their impact on the assessment of value in anthropological writing. By contrast Gottlieb (2016, 99) argues that in anthropology nowadays, ‘editors advise new authors: “More stories, less theory.”’ In the same volume, Hardtmann et al. (2016, 202) describe in passing the possibility of writing without or with few references in cooperations between activists and academics. 4. Gambrell (1997) uses the term ‘insider/outsider’ to convey the complex position of two of these women, Ella Cara Deloria and Zora Neale Hurston, vis-à-vis academia. 5. It is important to emphasise the particularly precarious position that Liria occupies vis-à-vis many of these women. For example, whilst both Ella Cara Deloria and Zora Neale Hurston had a higher education, Liria did not finish her primary schooling. 6. For a revealing instance of this process see Shanklin (1989), a review of Marianne Alverson’s and Edith Turner’s books. Shanklin explains how Edith Turner ‘had the advantage of being married to Victor Turner, who was one of the best ethnographers of this or any generation of anthropologists’ (1989, 146). 7. These contradictions were obviously not just intellectual, but rooted in systems of inequality which marginalised these women in multiple ways. Of Hurston, Jacobs states: ‘Trained by Boas in anthropological

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9.

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theory and methods, a part of the literary milieu of the Harlem Renaissance and debates about its modernist qualifications, exposed to popular discourses of the primitive, and immersed in African-American folk culture by personal history and profession, Hurston was situated in a conflictual vortex of hierarchical discourses involving race, artistry, and cultural attainment’ (1997, 335). See also Gambrell (1997, 99ff.). For example, in Speaking of Indians, Deloria attempted to explain to white Americans the lives of her own Native American people, placing herself as a cultural mediator (1988b). Here I am interested in Cotera’s approach to comparison in her analysis of the lives of Ella Cara Deloria, Zora Neale Hurston and Jovita González. Drawing on the work of Gloria Anzaldúa and Chéla Sandoval, she talks about the need to ‘embrace a form of “divergent thinking” that can reveal the ways in which similarities inhabit difference’ (2010, 9). Her approach involves ‘placing difference at the centre of the comparative project’ (2010, 7) in such a way that ‘we do not assimilate the experiences of others into our own’ (2010, 10) but look for points of connection or contrast that might throw light on the specificities of each trajectory and situation. See note 1 above. Toulson (2014) does provide a useful example about how to convey the tension between potential analyses of the same ethnographic events. And for relevant discussions of the role of ambiguity in ethnographic writing see the papers in Pandian and McLean (2017). Gambrell talks of Deloria’s ‘resistance to closure’ and describes it as ‘such an important philosophical premise’ in her work (1997, 183). This resistance, however, ‘cannot be celebrated in wholly unambiguous ways, as a triumph over or subversion of the positivistic tendencies of Boasian method’ (ibid.) but also as a result of the conditions of the academic world in which Deloria occupied such a marginal position. See also Toulson (2014). I am interested in the ways in which humanistic and literary ways of writing ethnography may also work as smoke screens between the lived experience of our informants and the reader. Jackson asks, ‘Surely it is not too far-fetched to speak of ethnographic writing as a transitional space or holding environment where the voices of one’s interlocutors can be heard, and where the writer refuses to cast too long a shadow, dominate the conversation or hog the limelight’ (Jackson 2017, 46), but I think his statement continues to privilege the ethnographer over the dialogue between the ethnographer and the informant. Collaborative and in particular reciprocal work is an attempt at shifting the emphasis.

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15. See in particular her book, The Spirit and the Drum (1987). Turner talks about how she and her husband developed the notion of communitas as an experiential process of spiritual transformation (2005, 92–94). 16. This is described at length by Lamphere (2004, 131), Babcock (1991, 16) and Deacon (1992). 17. Parsons is careful to always signal the preliminary or momentary nature of her accounts, as well as to remind readers of the fact that she is relaying information given to her by her informants. She often presents contrasting interpretations or accounts, and talks openly of her own uncertainty. 18. The following statement gives a flavour of Liria’s particular kind of feminism: Now that I am trying to finish writing the book I think about many other people, mainly women, who have gone through difficult situations, just like me, people who have found walls all around them, and who have seen that there is no way out. I think also that there must be anthropologists who have found themselves in situations like these. The great effort that Paloma and I have made with this book has been to fight for a world where there will be more understanding towards women. I do not mean to say that Gitana women must break with their culture, or with who they are. I do not wish to be a revolutionary who incites Gitana women, or women from any ethnicity, to abandon their families to get on with their lives. Don’t misunderstand me: I am proud of being Gitana. But I do encourage women not to allow themselves to be controlled by anybody. And I want people in Spain to become aware of these issues so that we women will not feel so neglected by society and by justice. (Gay y Blasco and Hernández 2020, 157) 19. This statement is Liria’s draft in response to the reviewer’s comments. It never made it into the book in this exact form but was split into smaller sections and each moved to different places in two chapters. 20. Of her key informant Marion Benedict says, ‘I had to touch the quick of her life as she touched the quick of mine… by becoming vulnerable myself, which involved, among other things, telling her my secrets as she had told me hers. It took my heart as well as my head, my intuition as well as my logic, my whole personality’ (1985, 23). 21. Edith Turner asks, ‘(i)s the book, then, a novel, a memoir, or an anthropological account? … I would like to call it advocacy anthropology in the female style, that is, speaking on behalf of a culture as a lover or a mother’ (2005, 10). Richman says of Edith Turner that her ‘take on

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the anthropology of ritual has to do with perception and mimesis, as opposed to cognition, objectivity, and detached observation’ (2003, 114), and explains that Turner ‘attunes her work to the law of mystical participation’ (2003, 15) and that her ‘vivid prose shows us how symbols are felt, perceived, and made known through the embodied imagination’ (2003, 115). In Speaking of Indians, Ela Cara Deloria states, ‘The vital concern is not where a people came from, physically, but where they are going, spiritually’ (1988b, 2). As described by Richman (2003, 114). I have explored the ways in which our project struggled against the conventions of the ethnographic genre in Gay y Blasco (2017). This of course is not a new problem. Anthropologist Bruce Albert, for example, explains how the text of the book he co-wrote with Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa, is told in the first person, in Davi Kopenawa’s inspiring and memorable voice. Yet this first person encompasses a double ‘I’. The words in this text are truly the narrator’s own words, rendered as faithfully as possible from a huge body of audio recordings. This narrator had a limited experience, however, and so the ‘I’ in this narrative also belongs somehow to me, his editorial alter ego. This book is thus a ‘written/spoken textual duet’ in which two people—the author of the spoken words and the author of their written form—produced a text working together as one’ (Kopenawa and Albert 2013, 445–46). Anthropologists have explored the nature of fiction and its capacity to deliver truth in many different ways. I am particularly interested in Nigel Rapport’s elaboration of the concept of fictional-cum-vital truth. The constraints we faced extended well beyond the text. When we tried to find ways to enable Liria to attend the 2014 EASA conference on Collaboration, we found it was impossible. My university would not pay for her trip, and the EASA had not considered ways of facilitating the attendance of local or indigenous collaborators. About a year before the conference I got in touch with the organising committee to raise the problem, and they suggested that I set up a round table to discuss the issue—rather than thinking of practical ways to transform the institutional set up. See also Tsao (2011) for an extensive discussion of this issue. Gandolfo and Ochoa argue that, as academics, ‘we are trained in ways of reading that seek to destroy or undermine’ (2017, 187), and explore the implications of this fact for ethnography.

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References Cited Abu-Lughod, Lila. 2006. “Writing Against Culture.” In Anthropology in Theory: Issues in Epistemology, edited by Henrietta L. Moore and Todd Sanders, 386– 99. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Babcock, Barbara. 1991. “Introduction: Elsie Clews Parsons and the Pueblo Construction of Gender.” In Pueblo Mothers and Children: Essays by Elsie Clews Parsons 1915-1924, edited by Barbara Babcock, 1–27. Santa Fe, New Mexico: Ancient City Press. Behar, Ruth. 1993. “Introduction to Women Writing Culture.” Critique of Anthropology 13 (4): 307–25. Benedict, Marion, and Burton Benedict. 1982. Men, Women, and Money in Seychelles. Berkeley: University of California Press. Benedict, Marion. 1985. “Fact Versus Fiction: An Ethnographic Paradox Set in the Seychelles.” Anthropology Today 1 (5): 21–23. Brenneis, Don. 2016. “Reading, Writing and Recognition in the Emerging Academy.” In The Anthropologist as Writer: Genres and Contexts in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Helena Wulff, 33–45. New York and Oxford: Berghahn. Castellanos, Daniela. 2015. “The Ordinary Envy of Aguabuena People: Revisiting Universalistic Ideas From Local Entanglements.” Anthropology and Humanism 40 (1): 20–34. Cohen, Anthony. 1992. “Post-Fieldwork Fieldwork.” Journal of Anthropological Research 84 (4): 339–54. Cotera, María Eugenia. 2010. Native Speakers: Ella Deloria, Zora Neale Hurston, Jovita Gonzalez, and the Poetics of Culture. Austin: University of Texas Press. Curran, Georgia. 2013. “The Dynamics off Collaborative Research Relationships: Examples from the Warlpiri Songlines Project.”Collaborative Anthropologies 6: 353–72. Deacon, Desley. 1992. “The Republic of the Spirit: Fieldwork in Elsie Clews Parsons’s Turn To Anthropology.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 12 (3): 13–38. Deloria, Ella Cara. 1988a. Waterlily. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ———. 1988b. Speaking of Indians. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Domínguez, Virginia. 2000. “For a Politics of Love and Rescue.” Cultural Anthropology 15 (3): 361–93. Engelke, Matthew. 2002. “Books Can Be Deceiving: Edith Turner and the Problem of Categories in Anthropology.” Anthropology and Humanism 26 (2): 124–33. Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. 2006. Engaging Anthropology: The Case for a Public Presence. Oxford: Berg. Gambrell, Alice. 1997. Women Intellectuals, Modernism and Difference: Transatlantic Culture 1919-1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Gandolfo, Daniella, and Todd Ramón Ochoa. 2017. “Ethnographic Excess.” In Crumpled Paper Boat: Experiments in Ethnographic Writing, edited by Anan Pandian and Stuart McLean, 185–88. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Gardner, Susan. 2009. Introduction to Waterlily, Second Edition, by Ella Cara Deloria, v–xxii. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Gay y Blasco, Paloma. 2017. “Doubts, Compromises and Ideals: Attempting a Reciprocal Life Story.” Anthropology and Humanism 42 (1): 91–108. Gay y Blasco, Paloma, and Liria Hernández. 2020. Writing Friendship: A Reciprocal Ethnography. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gay y Blasco, Paloma, and Huon Wardle. 2020. How to Read Ethnography. London: Routledge. Gottlieb, Alma. 2016. “The Anthropologist as Storyteller.” In The Anthropologist as Writer: Genres and Contexts in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Helena Wulff, 93–117. New York and Oxford: Berghahn. Haraway, Donna. 1997. Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleManMeetsOncomouse® : Feminism and Technoscience. New York: Routledge. Hardtmann, Eva-Maria, Vincent Manoharan, Urmila Devi, Jussi Eskola, and Swarna Sabrina Francis. 2016. “Writing Together: Tensions and Joys between Scholars and Activists.” In The Anthropologist as Writer: Genres and Contexts in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Helena Wulff, 188–214. New York and Oxford: Berghahn. Holmes, Douglas R., and George E. Marcus. 2008. “Collaboration Today and the Re-imagination of the Classic Scene of the Fieldwork Encounter.” Collaborative Anthropologies 1: 81–101. Jackson, Michael. 2012. Lifeworlds: Essays in Existential Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2017. “Writing with Care.” In Crumpled Paper Boat: Experiments in Ethnographic Writing, edited by Anan Pandian and Stuart McLean, 45–47. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Jacobs, Karen. 1997. “From ‘Spy-Glass’ to ‘Horizon:’ Tracking the Anthropological Gaze in Zora Neale Hurston.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 30 (3): 329–60. Kopenawa, D., and B. Albert. 2013. The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lamphere, Louise. 2004. “Unofficial Histories: A View of Anthropology from the Margins.” American Anthropologist 106 (1): 126–39. Lassiter, Luke Eric. 2001. “‘Reading Over the Shoulders of Natives’ to ‘Reading Alongside Natives,’ Literally: Toward a Collaborative and Reciprocal Ethnography.” Journal of Anthropological Research 57 (2): 137–49. ———. 2008. “Moving Past Public Anthropology and Doing Collaborative Research.”Napa Bulletin 29: 70–86.

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Lather, Patti. 2001. “Working the Ruins of Feminist Ethnography.” Signs 27 (10): 199–227. Lawless, Elaine. 1993. Holy Women, Wholly Women: Sharing Ministries Through Stories and Reciprocal Ethnography. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Majnep, Ian Saem, and Ralph Bulmer. 1977. Birds of My Kalam Country. Auckland and Oxford: Auckland University Press and Oxford University Press. Moskowitz, Nona. 2015. Engagement, Alienation, and Anthropology’s New Moral Dilemmas. Anthropology and Humanism 40 (1): 35–57. Pandian, Anan, and Stuart McLean, eds. 2017. Crumpled Paper Boat: Experiments in Ethnographic Writing. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Parsons, Elsie Clews. 1991. “Essays on Pueblo Mothers and Children.” In Pueblo Mothers and Children: Essays by Elsie Clews Parsons 1915-1924, edited by Barbara Babcock, 29–139. Santa Fe, New Mexico: Ancient City Press. Rappaport, Joanne. 2005. Intercultural Utopias: Public Intellectuals, Cultural Experimentation, and Ethnic Pluralism in Colombia. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2007. “Anthropological Collaborations in Colombia.” In Anthropology Put to Work, edited by Les Field and Richard G. Fox, 21–44. Oxford: Berg. Rapport, Nigel. 2015. “Sociality and Uncertainty: Between Avowing and Disavowing Concepts in Anthropology.” In Thinking Through Sociality: An Anthropological Interrogation of Key Concepts, edited by Vered Amit, 181–99. Oxford: Berghahn. Richman, K. E. 2003. “The Birth of Girl into Woman and Edie Turner, an Anthropologist of a Different Kind.” Anthropology and Humanism 28 (1): 114–17. Rios, Theodore, and Kathleen Mullen Sands. 2000. Telling a Good One: The Process of a Native American Collaborative Biography. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Samimian-Darash, Limor, and Paul Rabinow. 2015. “Introduction.” In Modes of Uncertainty: Anthropological Cases, edited by Limor Samimian-Darash and Paul Rabinow, 1–12. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shanklin, Eugenia. 1989. “Inside, Outside African Lives.” Anthropology and Humanism Quarterly 14 (4): 146–47. Toulson, Ruth E. 2014. “Eating the Food of the Gods: Interpretive Dilemmas in Anthropological Analysis.” Anthropology and Humanism 39 (2): 159–73. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tsao, Eugenia. 2011. “Walking the Walk: On the Epistemological Merits of Literary Ethnography.” Anthropology and Humanism 36 (2): 178–92.

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Thin, Cruisy, Queer: Writing Through Affect Omar Kasmani

Writing is an overture. Cruisy at best, it is a move seeking to land with a reader. It is a flirtation even, on part of the author, thinly carried over to a scene of reading. Yet neither as weak nor scanty, thin here denotes writing’s capacity to imbue, carry and work through streams of affect, emotional traffic, and queer excess. I propose that writing through affect is not mere writing up of ethnographic data but cruising in queer zones of inter-subjective knowing that open up during fieldwork or become available in its wake through wispy registers of memory and intimacy. Permeable, partial, personal—thin, cruisy, queer modes of writing, as I elaborate, help trouble anthropological habits of form, content and knowledge epistemes. This rumination on ethnographic writing re/turns to Thin Attachments (Kasmani 2019), a continuing body of work that pursues ideas of public intimacy and brings personal memoir to bear on the material and affective geography of Berlin.1 My tryst with thin is an inheritance that I trace to Heather Love (2013) and Ann Armbrecht (2009). In methodological terms, I am interested in the tenuous ways in which affects carry

O. Kasmani (B) Freie Universität, Berlin, Germany © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 E. Tauber and D. L. Zinn (eds.), Gender and Genre in Ethnographic Writing, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71726-1_7

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over to scenes of reading. This, on the one hand, is about how might we preserve in text, a heightened awareness for being ‘raw and exposed’, as one is in the field, or specifically in places and situations ‘where one’s nerve endings are bare’ (Armbrecht 2009, 204).2 On the other hand, it considers how writing through affect can allow for shapes of reading to emerge, which in Love’s terms of thin description (2013, 404), do not entirely hinge or speculate on ‘interiority, meaning or depth’. In formal terms, this work is a constellation of porous and non-linear fragments, better conceived as scenes, written in the third-person masculine form— not I but he.3 That such writing is (already) bodied by how and what he (an anthropologist) engages in the field means that gender pervades the text, not as an applied tool of analysis, rather as writing’s most ordinary refrain. Its scenic genre serves to re/gather a range of felt and enfleshed intimacies that fold up/in/out/along scenes, and which tie, at times only tenuously so, otherwise disparate objects around the figure of the author. Writing as I do, in the modality of autotheory, necessitates that the text affords the ‘impropriety of the autobiographical gesture’ (Gordon 2008, 41). To the extent that such writing entails a creative reflection on life arising from an empirical context, autotheory shares with ethnographic fiction a readiness to deal with ‘emotions, affect and the untold’ (Ingridsdotter and Kallenberg 2018, 72). While both transgress genre conventions and disciplinary boundaries, autotheory stops short of mixing up facts with elements of fiction or fantasy (52). It is also distinct in that autotheory allows us to integrate ‘autobiography and other explicitly subjective and embodied modes with discourses of philosophy and theory’ (Fournier 2018, n.p.). That the genre is gaining renewed traction, particularly through the works of Maggie Nelson (2009, 2015) and more recently, Julietta Singh (2018), should not take away from the fact that such impulse has long been familiar to queer and intersectional feminist writings. My own reasons to draw on the personal follow more closely the imperatives of the Public Feelings Project (Berlant 1997; Cvetkovich 2012; Stewart 2007) by which I illustrate how ostensibly private feelings continue to bear upon social and political formations of belonging in Berlin. It ensures as much that feeling sticks and desire is not expunged out of ethnography. This isn’t simply a memoir. To write the self, to disclose by way of coming close, is to open up the private as public archive, to offer oneself as scene and site of knowledge making. It also doesn’t mean that anything personal goes. This isn’t naval-gazing either. As Ruth Behar persuasively notes, ‘the exposure of the self who is also

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a spectator has to take us somewhere’—a place in writing—‘we couldn’t otherwise get to’ (1996, 14). Journeying is indeed a compelling metaphor when it comes to writing. This project, after all, is a result of radical alterations in my access to Berlin, set into motion in 2016, the year I started research with TurkishGerman Sufis of my neighbourhood. The original scope of this project was in fact limited to a mosque community and involved observing and participating in a Sufi ritual of godly remembrance (Zikr).4 Soon enough, the anthropologist’s fiction of the field would come undone as writing grew out of the mosque and turned coterminous with the extending field (Gibbs 2015). Studying migrant belonging in a city I was myself making home in, also meant that trajectories of research and the researcher would invariably collide and coalesce, make varying demands on my time and energies, loves and other involvements. It is of little surprise that a lot got blurred in the process since I was no longer able, possibly neither willing, to observe the line one usually draws between home and field, the work of life and fieldwork. In years since, I have come to believe that this writing is predominantly borne of anxieties of and in the field. What does it mean to research a postmigrant community in Berlin while being a migrant myself? What does it mean to be privy to a very intimate ritual that takes place behind closed doors? How do I make sure that my scholarly disclosures do not give volume to the discourse on Parallelgesellschaft —the lack of integration ascribed to migrant communities in German public discourse—or do not serve for that matter a particular cultural appetite for quote–unquote, the place of Islam in Europe. In more macro terms, what are the privileges that inhere in my cisgendered and class-defined access to the city? What is the place of the queer researcher in the homosociality of the mosque, better still, how might we remedy, analytically speaking, the exclusion of non-male, non-believing bodies in such religious gatherings? Or, how can we account for the oblique ways in which the city infiltrates the mosque? In so long as questions lurk, these also attest that such writing is shaped as much by feeling conflicted as it has nurtured in the numerous and now partly recalled conversations around those conflicts, and which at the time I was having with friends, colleagues, research-partners, lovers and strangers, be it at work, in cafes, at the mosque, online or at times also in bed. Writing, as I have come to experience and understand, is also longing in so long as it performs the affective labour of belonging in a new

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place, in between places or in place of another place. If to long, as Elizabeth Freeman (2007, 299) describes is a growing bigger, to extend and endure both in time and place, writing can be aching for one’s own histories to gather, stick and sediment in new places through the labour of memory, a remembering-through-writing if you will, that what might feel distant, possibly, dismembered. It should partly explain why this writing is an unfixed and unfinished constellation. Its non-linear scenes, only partially connected and moving between bedrooms, cafes, mosques, bars, street-corners and parks, illustrate how postmigrant expressivity attests to the numerous ‘worlds that intermingle’ in the city’s folds, ‘but whose differences are never fully dissolved’ (Lim 2009, 133).5 Folding cultural variance and abundance of the city into text without straightening or burnishing its edges embraces a greater (cosmo-)political challenge of the urban, which in Farias and Blok’s (2016, 5) words is ‘shaped not by that which is absent, but rather by situations of radical co-presence; (…) and where what unfolds is a conflictual politics of actual urban things’, and might I add, values. To write in scenes is one way of working with co-presence even if fragmented arrangements allow yet cannot entirely predict echoes that might evolve or emerge between otherwise disparate units of a constellation. Fragments invite queer forms of gathering while reaffirming the view that objects are only brought into relation by the scalar labours of the observer. Such gathering in the case at hand is not in service of encompassing, neither capturing the city, but in Strathern’s (2004) terms, is an exercise in partial connections that is here produced by the writer’s deliberated act of foregrounding chosen objects, privileging some configurations over certain others. It follows that thin, cruisy, queer modes can involve an arrangement of texts and con/texts that are contingently brought into an arena of correlation simply by virtue of their place alongside one another. Beside is an interesting proposition for planar relations, in Eve K. Sedgwick’s words, that ‘permits a spacious agnosticism about several of the linear logics that enforce dualistic thinking’ and which, if we are also to think in terms of ethnographic form, resists the fantasy of egalitarian relations but comprises nonetheless ‘a wide range of desiring, identifying, representing, repelling, paralleling, differentiating, rivaling, leaning, twisting, mimicking, withdrawing, attracting, aggressing, warping’ (2003, 8). Envisioning such relations in text, what the scenic genre or fragmented form in ethnography also makes possible is the side-by-side occurrence of the narrational and the theoretical. Such paralleling obviates, in scenes of reading, what Catherine Lutz (1995,

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251) has identified as their gendered division and characterization— theory as male writing (and might I add, straight) and the personal as intrinsically feminine (and by such logic, queer). Moreover, interspersed scenes allow for a kind of surface reading or readers’ planar movement between the slowness of ethnographic passage and a slowing down that comes with reading/making theory.6 Thin structures of text also allow for shared imaginations to prosper as much as these enable partial meeting grounds for readers and listeners to come in, make meaning with the ethnographer-as-writer, find coherence—or not. Writing turns cruisy. By this I mean how the author and reader linger, roam about, seek encounters in a defined field, whose possibilities grow or shrink through contact, intelligibility and desire, and where certain intimacies and meanings are invariably bound to unfold, whether these align with our wants or not, become real or remain unfulfilled. Cruising is an interesting metaphor to think of queer-affective writing: anyone who has cruised will know that it is a be/coming closer, a constant seeking and striving that involves skills for spotting, moving, eyeballing, approaching, receding, following, turning, touching or that it bears forth an entire suite of affects ranging from hope to loss, doubt to disappointment, between impulse and excitement, rivalry and release. In provoking a comparison, I am, however, not suggesting that writing through affect is a project-specific to gay experience or a desirous relation between male objects. It is to illustrate rather that cruisy writing takes us beyond capture or a holding to a loosely situated though targeted pursuit, which is driven as much by the hope that one’s paths would cross as it is acutely aware that certain moves might not land, that one’s overtures can be rejected, advances unwelcomed—though none of its attendant failings is an argument for not cruising, not writing. Locating conceptual and political possibility in sites of possible loss does not equal a celebration of precarity. To deal with uncertainty of the worlds they parse, modes of ethnographic writing must flirt with sparse intelligibilities and partial knowings of the field. Writing thin, cruisy or queer is a tarrying with the knowledge that text always comes short of what one witnesses, experiences or testifies to.7 If the promise of anthropology, as the Paper Boat Collective (2017, 23) observes, ‘is to affirm that actual, existing circumstances are always imbued with the possibility of being otherwise’, the precise challenge of writing as I propose is to venture ‘far from the deadness of the literal’, to find ‘a side angle’ onto the real, in a sense, to allow the thin to emerge in the thick of affect

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(Stewart 2017, 227).8 Viewed another way, such writing, even when allowing layers of senses, emotions, affect and imagination to gather in and permeate the text, does not yield a thickness nor certitude of interpretation. To name ethnographic writing as ‘a seeing that doubts itself’ (Taussig 2011, 2) or to recognize that ‘fidelity to the real may consist in acknowledging that it will always exceed the accounts we are able to give of it’ (Paper Boat Collective 2017, 23), comes a tad closer to a feeling that all good ethnography shares with fiction, including its potential for emphatic identification.9 To compare, however, is not to say that ethnographic knowledge is fictive and fabular or any less credible, rather by inhabiting the limits of what is possible to say in academic terms, the ethnographer might also embrace value inscribed in other forms of knowing and telling. Also, by emphasizing opportunities that lie between observing and writing, I am not suggesting that writing always comes after-the-fact but even when ethnographic writing is an attunement (Gibbs 2015), it moves as much as it is removed, fails and falls short, tarries or carries forth, saunters in and out of our minds and diaries, arrives in the wake of things. Neither does this imply that writing is a mere embellishment of an idea, in the sense that it is an afterthought, but rather the very means through which thought comes to the world. The novelist Garth Greenwell puts it rather succinctly, ‘It is not that I have a thought and I’m finding a shape for it’, he says, ‘it really is that the shape the sentence takes is productive of the thought’ (Ho 2020). Whether writing is coterminous with the field, experienced as an attunement, or arrives only in the wake of things, thin keeps temporal possibilities of returning to a scene of affect open. Such permissiveness in form allows a non-linear narrative to thrive in writing with little regard for straight time. It eases a veering off from scene to scene, or cruises, more critically, between times or places. To write the city as porous is to say that it is not a fixed entity, neither entirely external to the self, a place out there to which the researcher must go to observe, define or capture. It is rather continuous, felt in the interface of inward and external modes, subjectively and piecemeal, a gradually accruing geography of rhythms, rallies, refrains and relations. It also follows that Berlin is both particular and expansive. Places beyond it, and in this particular iteration, Bozen-Bolzano where some of this writing was shared, discussed and advanced—saunter in and out of an urban whose boundaries are never sharply drawn, whether temporally or in spatial terms. It advances my position that the postmigrant city is not simply material context but a historically charged and

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impressed upon breathing figure of affect, marked by influx and efflux to lean on Jane Bennett (2020), and which just as much ‘thickens’ through experiences of migration—as Aydemir and Rotas (2008, 7) have put it—as it is in my view rendered thin by modes of feeling and acts of remembrance. This, I would hasten to add, is not an exclusive privileging of the immaterial or the invisible. Felt archives of Berlin are like the city itself evolving constellations—and always incomplete lest we enfold or restore to such gatherings their affective extensions: spectral, non-corporeal and differently material volumes, bodies and objects. Thin, in this regard, can also be an approach to write the hauntological urban, full of ghosts, memories, trauma. This isn’t specific to Sufi rituals of summoning historical saints in the contemporary; haunting, as we know, is not exclusively a province of migration or religion. That cities are haunted and weighed down by their own histories is nowhere more pronounced than in Berlin. The material memory of its own ruination—25 million cubic metres of rubble produced during World War II—is not erased but buried in the city’s seven rubble hills, enfolded as it were in a geography designed for forgetting (Anderson 2017). Infrastructure, demographics, architecture of this once-divided city, no less the alarming rise of right-wing politics or Berlin’s infamous Neo-Nazi edges, serve as concrete reminders that not always what is hidden, is actually forgotten; that certain pasts are never finished, overcome or done away with. Whether sticky or returning, visible or otherwise, religious or not, materially present or simply recalled to mind, thin allows for an abundance whereby minority and migrant inheritances can endure in a diverse constellation without compromising on the politics of their co-presence. So long as thin folds other places, times and inheritances into the present, such writing bears epistemic and political purpose: it brings us a tad closer to asking what might porosity make possible in political and analytical terms especially if such thinness is a critique made to work against enduring colonial and imperial separations of space, time and bodies. The porous constitution of this text and order of places and times it evokes, dilates or unsettles is a sharp reminder that Berlin in this case, and by extension Europe, cannot only count as fieldsites or sites of fieldwork but these are—in Arondekar and Patel’s (2016) critique, Area Impossible—homing devices to which salutary epistemologies are continually oriented. Thus, much more than a memoir, writing a particular self in the city is also about how might we learn to extend the archive or think queer with migrant aesthetics and religious affect.10 It indicates, more broadly speaking, the work’s critical awareness for the

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epistemological assumptions and emphases through which we, that is to say those who are framed by Euro-American histories, institutions, disciplines and frameworks, come to know theory, its objects, geography and history. Thin, cruisy, queer reveal how the politics of time, sex, migration and religion in the city can be brought into a conversation not on antagonistic terms but as dynamically entangled and critically coincident. The city, to put it one more time, is not a mere context for research or a thing to capture but a thin, always-evading, breathing ground of feeling, a porous geography of disparate times and momentums, conflicting memories and motivations, the now and the not-yet, the here and the also-here. In cruising the felt and intimate of the city, in writing queer and thin, we turn to what lies beneath, beyond, behind or exists beside, in-between and alongside, or that what impinges on life obliquely, gently intrudes our view of the present through the corner of our eye, refracting sounds, dreams, memories, trauma, histories. The postmigrant city, like the migrant’s sense of time is compound, interrupted at times, at times stretched, but almost always is the urban a morethan-material constellation. Writing through affect means that writing can breathe such abundance. So long as summoning other times, other figures, other inheritances through writing is an aching for one’s own histories to stick and sediment in our places of migration—a gathering anew that what might feel distant, possibly, at risk of loss—it is also a path to feeling futures.

Scenes of Daily Loves Späti (Late-Night Shop) There is a woman he sees almost every day. From where he usually sits outside this café on the street where he lives, there is but just a line of three potted plants that separate the café from the Späti, where she sits, sipping tea. And just now as he is jotting down these lines, a man from across this plant line reaches out to him. Hasan from Morocco introduces himself and inquires a little bit about him too. ‘Ich komme aus Pakistan’, he responds in German. In this moment, his eyes meet the eyes of the woman but they do not exchange greetings. ‘They will kill my father’, Hasan’s next words leave him stunned as he quotes Benazir Bhutto out of the blue from a TV interview aired on the BBC sometime

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in the late 1970s. Affected as he is, he immediately thinks about how a mere sound bite was enough to recollect an entire history. Hasan raises his hand towards his heart, shaking it to tell him how those words still stir his emotions. He also tells him that he lives right above the Späti. Even after he thinks the conversation is long finished, Hasan keeps interrupting his daily ritual of writing, offering German cultural trivia like how to end an email in German: MfG, he recommends from across the plants, Mit freundlichen Grüßen! Longing for Love, in Circles A lyrically buoyant circle of men has come to a still. Chants and recitations, odd screams and intermittent howls are no more. But the air is pregnant with its resonances. There is a sense of nascent repose. Smells of fragrant oils linger on, even if in less pungent forms as sweat softens the contours of men’s bodies, mostly men in their twenties who until moments ago were oscillating on their feet, singing hallowed praises, swaying rhythmically left to right and back to left, their forearms locked with one another. But no more. Tired, sweaty, overcome with feelings, the men are now seated on the carpeted floor, gasping. The puff and pant of heavy breathing is fairly audible; their bodies not upright like moments ago but curled up such that their heads almost meet the ground. Forty minutes of an intense ritual are over in a room in Neukölln, longer than it is wide and oriented obliquely towards Mecca. A five-minute walk from where he lives is a mosque. He goes there every week, where 25–30 men gather around a sheikh, who leads them into Zikr, the Sufi performance of mindful remembrance of Allah. In circles of godly remembrance, the men are young and Turkish-German, sons of Gastarbeiters (guest-worker migrants).11 When they sing and chant, laugh and cry, move and are moved or simply fall to the ground, they remember and long with their bodies. Some of these men tell him that there are other persons in the circle, ones he cannot see. And that when, with their eyes shut, they sing and chant praises of saints and holy men, holy men and saints appear, intimacies take hold, even if only in passing.

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The Potted Line When Hasan asked him if he could join him at his table, the potted divide felt a lot more real to him. Mixed as it is here in this neighbourhood, dog-owning, breakfast eating, coffee drinking yukis, or ‘young urban kreative internationals’ as The Guardian (Dykhoff 2011) once described Berliners of Neukölln, hardly mingle with those that leisurely hang outside Spätis, speaking Arabic, Turkish, Romanian and what not. Yet certain intimacies were inevitable. For instance, on other days, when looking out from this café, framed by its window front, he sees passersby, possibly his neighbours. Ones that are routinely caught in fleeting passages: For example, this woman dressed in shalwar-kamiz dragging a wheeled bag of groceries. Every time he sees her, he tries to quickly piece together the finer details of the cursory scene like the length of her kamiz or the precise cut of her garment, all cues that he thinks will lead him to assess whether she might be Pakistani or Indian, possibly even Bangladeshi. He is of the conviction that Pakistanis dress better but that’s beside the point. These neighbours, he notes, never stop at cafes, they hardly peek in. They just keep walking on. Right across is another café, a tad fancier than this one, where the coffee is 20 cents more expensive and candles in dark interiors peek out of large windows, even during the day. Tables are hard to get, especially outside even though, unlike a Parisian cafe, there isn’t much going on to gaze upon. A Kinderwagen-pushing mother stops by to chat with a dogowner. A scene of likely white intimacy, he thinks. Breakfasts continue. The light drizzle too. The leisure of cafes is palpably different from leisures of a Späti, it suddenly dawns on him. He is immediately reminded of his hatred for Zucchini cakes, which so often announce the hipster-ness of cafes. There is one like that on the other street where the coffee costs 50 cents more, where Ashram-pants upend the outline of headscarves; vegan sandwiches frown at kebabs of the Kiez (hood). Annoyed by the thought, he returns to the scene that is now, back where cheese platters and bread baskets stop at potted lines and so does the eclectic style of mismatching furniture. But not always are potted lines legible, he thinks. By night on the same street candle-lit bars glimmer unlike game-rooms whose fluorescent glow outs them as men’s-only migrant spaces. He never goes there.

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Not I but He Berlin conjures up his past like no other city does. He’s lived here for ten years but the spectres that keep returning to it are from all over. So, he decides to write them into his text making it porous, as porous as he finds the city. No wonder, his writing saunters in and out of Berlin with little outcry. Yet it also dwells. It dwells in Jetztzeit, a chewed-over, hereand-now account of how places turn dense ever so slowly in the traffic of dreams, memories, imaginations and anxieties. So, he seeks in his writings the accumulated weight of these presents, just as much such writing ‘constellates multiple histories that do not usually get told together’ (Yildiz 2017, 214). Eventually, he will come to see how he is implicated in the passages he writes for what is the migrant’s act of writing the city if not engaging with the city as a complicated home. But for now, when he refers to himself in the third person—not I but he—he follows Kathleen Stewart’s (2007) idea of gaining distance from one’s own subjectivity in these scenes while recording at the same time the privileges and particularities that inhere in his class-specific, cisgendered ways of inhabiting Berlin. The texts he writes are not about him though he is integral to their compositions. In a way, these act like artist Nina Katchadourian’s (2017) Lavatory Self-portraits in the Flemish Style, which are not selfies, as she claims, but other portraits of the self. In the Thick of It, Bare For Heather Love, thinness of description involves ‘exhaustive, finegrained attention to phenomena’; close but not deep reading (2013, 404). His own interest in thin insists on what is there in a scene, rather than what is not there. Curbing the urge for thick description is his way to chip on the edifice of anthropological truth and make room (he hopes) for other modes of thinking: modes that do not simply rest on the been-there, seen-that-ness of the anthropologist; and thinking that is not entirely in service of positivist coherence and certitude. Thin, he thinks, lets us in into an already porous scene, it allows us to dwell in its passage as much as it eases a veering off to other scenes. It describes what’s going on as opposed to explicating what’s really going on. Thin attachments it follows are attachments that don’t stick, that do not last. Yet they bear a spectral depth; their charge lives on, returning, unfolding in other forms, arresting us ever so tenuously. He is particularly seduced by

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the endurance of intimacy, especially intimacy as a genre of futuring. He believes intimacy (across its forms) is a way of extending into the world in companionship be it through ritual, language, time or sex—pointing us/orienting us to certain kinds of becomings, beings, temporalities, not only in the moment it plays out but also how it impinges on us and the world afterwards, takes various afterlives so to speak.12 And in this sense, intimacy is always futural because it illuminates potentials and possibilities, howsoever they are realized or even if they are unrealized, eventually lost. ‘I’m so Exciting’ (Insert French Accent) In Bluets, Maggie Nelson writes: ‘Fucking may in no way interfere with the actual use of language’ (2009, 8). Yet he thinks of the cute Parisian chemist who in the thickest of French accents kept saying to himself ‘I’m so exciting’ as they fucked. In that moment he had clearly held himself back curbing the urge to correct his grammar. And even though he must have reacted with some manner of smile, he had seriously deliberated whether or not to intervene in that exchange of passion and to tell him that grammatically speaking he would have had to be excited, not exciting. He had thought of the pros and cons of such an intervention. He marvelled at his ability to be cerebral when it wasn’t really necessary; to articulate a whole line of thought while having sex; of arriving at a decision, which he was meanwhile able to meditate upon; and equally at his generosity to suffer while making room for other pleasures to take hold in its stead. How strange that language could affect him to this extent, he would wonder a few days later. To himself, he would then say with a smile: ‘I’m so exciting’! Marilyn in Third Person ‘You must be professor Strathern’ he addressed her almost from behind while turning towards her on the street. In tracing her steps, metres to the university entrance in Bolzano, he had already weighed the chances if the woman walking ahead of him was in fact Marilyn Strathern. Why else would they both, a woman of such stature and him a tiny body, be heading the same way. It was the morning of the conference. When he had introduced himself, she had retorted with the loveliest of glow in her eyes, the kind one doesn’t expect but gets used to rather easily in her

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presence. And in that very instance, she would tell him ‘I thought your paper was rather extraordinary’! He knew that as the discussant to the conference she would have had to read Thin Attachments, a most nervewracking prospect he had nursed in days leading to this one. And just then her words rather extraordinary enunciated in the most British of ways, ringed with all shades of not knowing what this could actually mean: was it extraordinarily strange or indulgent in unordinary proportions? It was clearly his nervousness speaking. Soon enough, he would call her Marilyn, like others did. They would also take a selfie. Though what would make his day, is when on the next day, in reading her response to his paper, she would refer to herself in the third person: Not I but she! Furniture with Memories He couldn’t have known why he wished to photograph the bed. It wasn’t his own; it wasn’t his either. Perhaps it was the whiteness doubled by that of his lover or its hotel-like anonymity that had struck something in him. Its white sheets came with an Airbnb in Barcelona. Each morning as they got out of it, he felt that in unmaking the bed through the night, they had made it their own. Where does one look for traces of a brown body amidst so much whiteness, he would wonder years later as he went through the nine photographs on a train to Bolzano. Intimacy in this constellation of images wasn’t an abstract idea but a concrete presence pressing upon fabric, affect had a way of imprinting itself not just on bodies: Some of it had found its way in that spot where the mattress sagged just a wee bit, or in the crumpled sheets willowing with ghostlike presence, in the disheveled feathers full of gossip inside pillows. He wouldn’t have articulated what he was feeling in these exact terms just then but he knew as much that what he captured in a photograph each morning was all the same and yet not the same: creases, folds, volumes of intimacy and sunlight that entered the room were all unique, ones he then would himself out-crease, fold up, cover, flatten—making the bed each morning so that it could return to its anonymous white self. This wasn’t destined to be furniture without memories, Toni Morrison’s phrase that Avery Gordon (2008, 4) repurposes to describe the effects of those rituals, habits, structures, and behaviours whose history we do not ask for, so ingrained in our ways of being that we never pause to question their purpose. This, he reckoned, was furniture with memory, imprints he

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knew he wanted to return to long after the queer folds of nine nights had been straightened out, morning after morning, ready, almost waiting as if for other bodies of colour to arrive, take cover in its engulfing whiteness. Worlds of the ‘Unknown Crying Man’ As he walked through the door, he met him first in the mirror. Little did he know he was walking into the silhouette of the Unknown Crying Man. Affected as he was by the encounter, he couldn’t quite recall the exact features of his face though he knew he had seen a face like his. After all, it had flashed repeatedly across TV screens in 2001, when the Unknown Crying Man was accused of practicing debauchery, of offending religion. But there were 52 of them, caught. The Egyptian authorities had cracked down on a boat of merrymakers on the Nile. At the trial, 52 faces hid behind white tissue, covered in fear, in fact, the fear of being identified. The Unknown Crying Man stood out because he was doubly arrested; the camera’s eye had caught him crying. He knew what crying felt like. He was familiar with etiquettes of hiding. He had also twice tasted the fear of being identified. But this city wasn’t Cairo, nor Karachi. And the year they met in the mirror, no longer 2001. Sixteen years on, he was a loosely defined flâneur in Berlin and he was a melancholic dandy in Istanbul. So, on his second visit to Istanbul, he tried looking for the Unknown Crying Man. Some knew where he lived but none had seen him. If word on the street was anything to go by and if one were to buy into the life that artist Mahmoud Khaled (2017) had now imagined for him, the Unknown Crying Man was a recluse, confined to his Bauhaus-inspired home in socially upwards Cihangir, surrounded only by pictures of Giovanni Bragolin’s famous kitsch images of crying children. Only metres away from the home of the Unknown Crying Man, is an abandoned park. There, just the previous night, resting on the edge of a rock, he faced the Sea of Marmara. As he shared beers with Ahmet, he had felt the weight of the city surging behind them. Yet Istanbul sprawled to their left and to their right. From where they sat, they saw it in Asia; they saw it in Europe. He was unfailingly bewitched by cities that afforded vistas on to themselves, convinced as though of their own charms. Berlin, he knew, had no such airs. He had often described it as a mendicant among cities. That night, the view of Istanbul that he liked so much felt so terribly burdensome. How does one turn away from a city as present

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and self-aware as Istanbul, he would say to himself without uttering these exact words. The rest of the time Ahmet and he would speak of a whole assortment of things: of ghost-like fathers; of the intimacy of strangers; their cocky preference for anthropology over sociology; of the nature of divine; and of the divinely attracted. All this while, he feels a restlessness, perhaps for the reason that he was once again gradually coming to terms with multiple cities in one. This neighbourhood of dandies in Istanbul from where the city could admire itself in its own reflection was a far cry from the working-class neighbourhood of the newly rising district of Esenyurt where he had met the Sufis a few nights prior to this one. So far that it had taken him two hours to reach. But when he did arrive, a metro-train and two bus rides later, translator in hand, he found over 150 men chanting names of Allah, reciting praises of saints, immersed in sonic atmospheres, like the ones he had observed in Berlin. Here too men were known to cry but for radically different fears. But they too like the Unknown Crying Man were arrested, charged, moved to tears. It was both strange and peculiarly familiar to him. Thinking Through Thin To bring memoir to bear on geography is to consider how time binds the narration of one life to the many affective mappings of a city. In pursuing the matter of Thin Attachments, he points to tentative mappings as much as to shapes of relating intimately in the city that do not transact in values of density or tightness; these are intimacies that dwell in their infirmness and which even in their nursed, stretched out or temporally drawn illuminations betray what is futural in the logic of be/longing; or which flourish, at times only endure with little or no optimism in what Berlant calls ‘intimacy’s long middle’ (Berlant and Edelman 2014, 22). Thin is what survives in and of relating on a map without investing in the stability or coherence of objects that comprise those relations (Berlant and Edelman 2014, 30). It speculates less in objects that map than in affectivities and affections that make up modes of relating to those objects, whether those are acts of pursuing or disinvesting, the condition of being drawn or desiring withdrawal.

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It’s Not You ‘Why do they smell’? Just when they were about to part ways, a local guy in Bolzano he had been on a date with, inquired about Pakistani migrants in the city. He couldn’t believe his ears. As his face dropped, the guy continued to dig further into the horror, and if he recalls well, in these approximate words: ‘these Pakistani men, I don’t understand why they don’t shower. It is one thing to not have soap in their country but now they’re in Europe, we have soaps’! Just as he was gathering his wits, meanwhile also deliberating whether he should give him a dressing down, walk away in fury or patiently engage so as to address his racist and classist views, he heard the words, ‘but of course you are different’. This, it’s not you who I am talking about, is that very exceptionalism extended as if it were a compliment. On another occasion in Berlin, an elderly German woman, a complete stranger eavesdropping on his conversation with a friend, would in passing tell him—in German of course—that she can perfectly follow his English because he doesn’t sound like people from India. Or, that time when a German academic casually remarked how his style of dressing was unlike Pakistanis. In all such moments, he is reminded how class markers come to remedy anxieties that usually cluster around migrant bodies. If only he spoke with a certain accent, dressed a certain way, smelled of curry or whatever people expected him to smell of, his experience of the city would have been radically different. Even in their positive appraisal, migrants know what the burden of expectations feels like, what assumptions are made of. It was not so infrequent when German guys on dating platforms, learning he is from Pakistan, would remark ‘wie exotisch’! (how exotic!). Or, that one time when exchanging names in chat, the German guy on the other side asked: ‘So, what middle eastern country are you from, Omar’? Or, the other who presumptively responded in Arabic. Folded in such knowing-before-knowing, acts of complimenting or curiosity is an enduring history of power. It’s not you is also code for I know where you are from, my people were once there, I know who you are! Roast Beef, Rolling Eyes! There were days when he was reminded how German, imperfect as it was in his case, had settled into his ordinary ways of speaking. One has lived far too long in Deutschland, he once declared to his friends on

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Facebook, when one replaces intransitive verbs with machen (to make), unfortunately in English and to its further detriment when one inadvertently closes one’s sentences with an open-ended word like ‘or’, just as Germans use oder. And then that kleinen (little) moment of horror, when he wondered if one day he too will sound like the refrain from Tracey Ullman’s parody of Angela Merkel: ‘Oh mein Gott, I’m rolling ze eyes’ (2017). He stood at the counter at Rewe asking for 100 grams of roast beef. Though he had done so in German, he had caught himself, like so many times before, germanizing his English words. He had learnt to make these little adjustments for the benefit of his listeners. He hadn’t arrived at this decision consciously. It had as if of its own will crept into his ways of being in the city. It had often lent his German a certain kind of authenticity, the kind that comes with not pronouncing English words in any English way. So, on that day, as he stood before the counter, he asked for Roast Beef when in fact he had meant roast beef. Despite his German enunciation of the word, the German man at the counter picks the wrong sort of meat, the one he hadn’t asked for, as if his generous gesture of germanizing was entirely lost on him. Disappointed, he uttered the same words once again, this time pointing to the roast beef … to which the guy responded, das ist aber Roast Beef ! This time, like Merkel, he just rolled his eyes and though he did roll his eyes in English, he was confident it couldn’t be lost in translation. Endlich (finally), he was eine kleine (a tiny) bit happy! City Inside Out He has been reading Diane Chisholm. Her reading of the gay bathhouse points to the ways in which the labyrinthine logic of cruising for sex mimics the architecture of the city in a way that it ‘interiorizes the passages and meeting places of the external city’ (2005, 45), makes contact among city-goers safe yet retains, in fact, magnifies its cruising potentials and desirous contours: a kind of expanding, even testing of the Erwartungshorizont of the city—he loves this German word he had recently picked up. It literally means the horizon of expectations. But such inversion has extraneous impacts. Men emerging from the interiorized urbanity of the gay bathhouse return to the city transformed, with deeper knowledge—both of their bodies and the city—a kind of knowledge that renders them ever more skilled and adept at cruising the city. It all sounds expectedly familiar to him. In fact, even before reading this work, he had

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already begun thinking of whether or not what the young men did during Zikr could be read in terms of a form of cruising, cruising for saints, as he had noted down in his field notes. Porous City, Porosity He uses porosity like Avery Gordon does haunting—in her words: ‘to describe those singular yet repetitive instances when home becomes unfamiliar, when your bearings on the world lose direction, when the over-and-done-with comes alive, when what’s been in your blind spot comes into view’. Haunting, in Gordon’s terms, ‘raises specters, and it alters the experience of being in time, the way we separate the past, the present and the future’ (2008, xvi). For instance, when it comes to his observations in the mosque and believers’ descriptions of saintly encounters in ritual time, he reads migrant hauntings as a fragile form of coming close to subliminal figures and inheritances that in so long as these last in ritual or remain effective alter and mitigate spatial, temporal, embodied and affective divisions of the postmigrant city at large. It confirms his feeling that intimacy matters not only in the moment migrants call out or come into affective contact with religious-spectral objects—saintly ghosts, shared pasts, sacred heritage—but also afterwards, and outwards, thus enfolding in intimacy’s architecture that what lies in excess to the ritual or might unfold in its wake. Sex in Lieu of Celibacy He is waiting to hear from a monastery: a revelation that kept returning like a wilful ghost while they made out. He felt its presence most certainly in the moment he had briefly pulled away from him to take off the thread from around his neck. It carried a wooden cross, painted yellow; he had kissed it before parting with it. Or in moments when his complete and utter surrender to giving pleasure felt like a testimony, so powerfully transparent that he could picture a life spent in devotion even if vows of celibacy made little or no sense to him. He was no stranger to it. He had known celibacy though only vicariously—through the lives of the fakirs he had worked with for so many years. Fragments of his first fieldwork in Pakistan would brush past. Yet surprisingly none of this traffic was distracting. Just intriguing almost to the point of being meditative, keeping him immersed in the present, ever more engrossed, attached.

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Afterwards, they talked about the inferences he had been drawing all this while. His earlier talk of BDSM didn’t quite extend to his impending life with brothers at the monastery. At the same time, it wasn’t exactly hard to imagine how his declared fetish for roleplay could come to rest in Church vestments. There was a piercing gentleness to him, the kind he had always associated with tablighi (missionary) Muslims. His humility was not without an air of righteousness, the kind he thought proselytizing Christians managed best. And his talk of capitalistic worship and ascetic regimes conjured up familiar yet very distant fakir lives. One more day when he would marvel at how life’s currents had their ways of circuiting, flowing in more or less circular, somewhat closed paths, starting and finishing at roughly the same place. The Teary Moons of Istanbul When she caught him crying in a church, he didn’t know how to explain his tears. It was their first week living together and they had decided to spend it in Istanbul. It was there she had named him the maker of dreams. And dream-like it was. January and icy cold. They were young and full of hope in a city of new beginnings yet each one of them scarred, each one of them burdened with dreams of their own. On an afternoon stroll one day, when he had briefly drifted from her, he had found some comfort inside a church. Places of worship had always had a way with him. As he sat on the old wooden pew, alone, he felt searing towards him what had passed and the gush of what was yet to come. On the muddled borderlands of sensing and (not really) knowing, his eyes teared up. He couldn’t contain the surge. He may have cried like a baby. Twelve years, nine months and some 10 days later he was back in Istanbul, this time by himself. When he found himself at the home of the Unknown Crying Man, he knew he too had cried in Istanbul. Then a week or so later, without actually wanting to, he stumbled upon the same church. He did not go inside. He did not cry this time. But in returning to the scene years later, he had come closer to his past and to Istanbul, a city where, as he would eventually read on a plane back to Berlin, ‘jeder hatte ein bisschen Mond in seinen Händen’ (everyone had a little bit of moon in their hands). In the company of Özdamar’s writing, he would begin to see why in 2005, in Istanbul, their dreams had appeared like planets within reach; why many moons later the future still shined here as if it stood at arms-length. ‘The moon was so big as if it only lived in the

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Istanbul sky, loved just Istanbul, and polished itself each day for this city alone. Wherever one grasped, one caught hold of the moon’ (Özdamar 2005, 68, author’s translation). Writing in the Wake To write thin is to write in the wake, which as Christina Sharpe notes, is a process, both reprise and elaboration (2016, 21). In this sense, to recollect through writing, to remember, to recall a thing, past event or experience is not to write after the fact but rather to intimately tarry with that thing. His ways of re/membering turn thin with time; his memory stretched to its seams, but in so doing it also makes room for a regathering of objects of the mind. These are coterminous in that the moments he writes about are sticky, linger around, secretly remain with him, turn and return long after he thought they were gone. He proceeds in the knowledge that writing through affect is, in some measure, also writing for affect. Not simply a placeholder for feeling, affect in his work is tied to an interest in the ethical–political stakes of intimacy and refers to a felt and unfolding mode of knowing. And so, when he speaks of attachments and affection, he tries to chart how intimacy folds in, out or how it unfolds over time and the forms of affective knowing it yields in the process. Intimacy thus serves as that critical but also sensuous interface by which he traces continuities that might otherwise remain implausible: between ostensibly straight pasts and queer futures, between men and saints in Berlin, between the bedroom and the mosque. A Sheikh Walks into a Cafe … He had often wondered how he would feel if men from the mosque would run into him in the Kiez (hood) where lovers like him were known to kiss on street corners, genau wie im Film (exactly like in films).13 On a Thursday in February many moons later, just when he was engrossed in his daily ritual of writing in the cafe, he saw walking towards him not men from the circle but the sheikh himself. He couldn’t believe his eyes. So, he looked down and then up again and there he stood with his gentle smile. He had paused to wonder how this was in fact possible in a cafe with zucchini cakes. As he stood up to greet the sheikh, he felt his body shrink, just enough to signal a reverence he had seen other followers give him in the mosque,

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his head lowered, his body folding inwards. Salam-aleikum, they both greeted. Two white women looked up. He spoke with him in German. Rare occasions where his German fared better than his fellow-speaker, he thought. He feared he might ask him why he hadn’t been to the mosque in almost a year. Instead he told him it was his first time in the cafe. When the sheikh came and sat next to him, his image of passing-by neighbours had also cracked a little. There he was, not passing by as other neighbours did but inside his café, a place where the mosque and his writing the mosque were eventually crossing paths. It was in search of such dilations and permeations that he had begun to write about intimacies of the mosque beyond the mosque in the first place. Soon enough, the sheikh would be on his way to a German lesson at the Integrationskurs (integration course) right next door. In that moment, he takes a break from writing what he was writing. He knows he must grasp what fades. He writes a scene. Missing Bani He watches the leaves fall. From where he usually sits outside this café on the street where he lives, the scene is pretty much the same. Breakfasts continue on both sides of the street. A woman walks past dragging a wheeled bag of groceries, another familiar scene within the scene. She, however, is not Pakistani. The wind is colder, the sun scarcer than it was just a month ago. It is only late August. He watches the leaves fall. He doesn’t smell autumn. Not yet. But then he was never sure of his olfactory aptitudes to begin with. He misses Bani. When she left for Karachi less than a month ago, he couldn’t really understand why someone would want to leave Berlin in the summer. Precious, he now sees it slipping away. He writes her a message on Whatsapp. He’s anxious to hear what she thinks of his prologue to Thin Attachments. He usually bounces his ideas off her, mostly because she has an oddly superior talent for sifting through academic bullshit. She tells him she loves the title. He’s now sure she hasn’t read it beyond the title. He misses her even more. He watches the leaves fall. The Last Day of a Mosque Bir, iki, üç, dört ….. or so counted the young men in Turkish, all as one, keeping score as they took turns doing push-ups. In this almost empty

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room in Neukölln, there was hardly much left: just the fervour of voices reverberating off its now bare surfaces and cold fluorescent lights that dodged contours of well-toned bodies. The setting, drab with a palpable ease, was almost pallid. Yet none of this was routine. Vivid or spirited, too green or painfully yellow, words that he would’ve once used to describe the character of this room were no longer imaginable. The Koranic calligraphy that had long adorned the walls was now buried in multiple coats of white paint. The last cycle of sonic chants and haptic rituals was already a faint memory. An even if the elderly sheikh was still in audience, an earlier mood of reverence was no more. In fact, the rolled-up carpets on which the men sat had been removed only minutes ago. Its coiling, as if, had unfurled an air of playfulness. One after the other, amid bouts of praise and cheer, the young men showed off their physical prowess, their heavy biceps taut against the concrete floor. In this moment, even the sheikh, who until now only smilingly watched, knew well that at some point, he too, would have to take the floor. How remarkable were these moments, he had said to myself as he observed the space of the mosque gradually transform from a room of prayer to that of leisure, recording it photographically over the span of an evening. The last features of the mosque had been dismantled, an entire mosque and its 15 years put away in boxes. Left behind was a bare concrete floor that now stood haunted with traces of colour. Faint but stubborn vestiges of the carpet had stuck to the floor, a memory far easier to arrest than the many immaterial trails lost to the eye of the camera. Loss, as he would eventually come to appreciate, was not a closure but an opening. Those who apprehend the world in delicacies of the revealed and the hidden know that potentiality is distinct from a thing that simply might happen; that it involves a certain mode of nonbeing; or that fear, loss, disappointment, indeterminacy are potentiality’s affective contours, indispensable to the work of imagining the world otherwise. When Sufis in Neukölln long for the unrevealed, they know well that as much as a tactfully hidden world of saints, spirits, djinns, and holy men is at arm’s length during Zikr, it is not exactly durable outside it—illuminating as a potentiality, hence present without actually existing in the present tense (Muñoz 2009, 9). As leisure took hold in the room that day, departing from its air were rhythms of the body, sounds of joy and fear, and possibly the saints too who were known to haunt the room week after week. Of the last traces of a mosque that the room now bore, this moment of laughter was most fleeting, he had thought: hard to photograph, least

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likely to stick to its surfaces, lesser still to be carried along in boxes. How do we belong in a site of loss, he had then asked himself in line with Ann Armbrecht (2009, 176), how do we hold on to its parting knowledge, especially once something comes to an end?

Notes 1. Parts of this work have formerly appeared in Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry, 1(3) as part of the author’s article, ‘Thin Attachments: Writing Berlin in Scenes of Daily Loves’ (2019). In its present iteration, it features a new introduction as well as a modified curation of scenes, which involves removing some and the addition of seven new fragments. This work and its conceptual underpinnings constitute an independent line of research resulting from the author’s joint project with Hansjörg Dilger and Dominik Mattes. It is carried out within the framework of the Affective Societies Collaborative Research Center at Freie Universität Berlin (FUB) and funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). 2. In a highly personal ethnography of a place of pilgrimage in Nepal, Ann Armbrecht (2009) turns to the idea of thin places. While this work is substantially different from her project, it has helped me arrive at the notion of thin attachments. 3. This mode of writing in third person is inspired by the scholarship of Kathleen Stewart, in particular her work, Ordinary Affects (2007). 4. For an ethnographic reading of the ritual by the author, see Mattes et al (2019). 5. I use postmigrant not as a reference to being past the condition of migration, but rather to accentuate what it means to endure with or remain in the wake of historical affects of migration. For more on postmigrant research, see Römhild (2017). 6. I remain aware that by providing ahead of the scenes, a conceptual and formal deliberation, I have in this instance decisively introduced a not-soideal separation. The intent here is to offer readers, in addition to a sample of writing thin, a methodological reflection on how and why I came to it, what informs the form or what the form brings to ethnography. 7. For ethnographer as witness, see Michael Jackson (2017, 47). 8. Affect as Kathleen Stewart (2007) argues is ordinary and indeed always already part of how we experience the world. 9. For more on crossovers of ethnography and fiction, see Ingridsdotter and Kallenberg (2018). 10. For a deliberation on religious affects, see Schaefer (2015). 11. As part of a formal ‘guest-worker’ program, migrants sought work in former West Germany from the 1950s up until the early 1970s.

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12. For more on endurance of intimacy, see Berlant (1998). 13. This image of street-corners is borrowed from Aras Oren’s (1973) poem, Was will Niyazi in der Naunynstraße.

References Anderson, Benedict. 2017. Buried City, Unearthing Teufelsberg: Berlin and Its Geography of Forgetting. London: Routledge. Armbrecht, Ann. 2009. Thin Places: A Pilgrimage Home. New York: Columbia University Press. Arondekar, Anjali, and Patel, Geeta. 2016. “Area Impossible: Notes toward an Introduction.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 22 (2): 151–71. Aydemir, Murat, and Rotas, Alex. 2008. “Introduction: Migratory Settings.” Thamyris/Intersecting 19: 7–32. Behar, Ruth. 1996. The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart. Boston: Beacon Press. Berlant, Lauren. 1997. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 1998. “Intimacy.” Critical Inquiry 24 (2): 281–88. Berlant, Lauren, and Lee Edelman. 2014. Sex, or the Unbearable. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bennett, Jane. 2020. Influx and Efflux: Writing Up with Walt Whitman. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Chisholm, Diane. 2005. Queer Constellations: Subcultural Space in the Wake of the City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Cvetkovich, Ann. 2012. Depression: A Public Feeling. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Dykhoff, Tom. 2011. “Let’s Move to Kreuzkölln, Berlin.” The Guardian website, March 19. Accessed [June 1, 2020]. https://www.theguardian.com/ money/2011/mar/19/move-to-kreuzkolln-berlin. Farias, Ignacio, and Anders Blok. 2016. “Introducing Urban Cosmopolitics: Multiplicity and the Search for a Common World.” In Urban Cosmopolitics, edited by Anders Blok and Ignacio Farias, 1–22. London: Routledge. Freeman, Elizabeth. 2007. “Queer Belongings: Kinship Theory and Queer Theory.” In A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies, edited by George E. Haggerty and Molly McGarry, 295–304. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Fournier, Lauren. 2018. “Autotheory.” Lauren Fournier website. Accessed [October 1, 2020]. https://www.laurenfournier.net/Autotheory. Gibbs, Anna. 2015. “Writing as Method: Attunement, Resonance, and Rhythm.” In Affective Methodologies, edited by Britta T. Knudsen and Carsten Stage, 222–36. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Gordon, Avery. 2008. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ho, Rosemarie. 2020. “Garth Greenwell on the Poetics of Cruising.” The Nation website, January 30. Accessed [June 2, 2020]. https://www.thenation.com/ article/culture/garth-greenwell-cleanness-interview/ Ingridsdotter, Jenny, and Kallenberg, Kim S. 2018. “Ethnography and the Arts: Examining Social Complexities through Ethnographic Fiction.” Etnofoor 30 (1): 57–75. Jackson, Michael. 2017. “Writing with Care.” In Crumpled Paper Boat: Experiments in Ethnographic Writing, edited by Anand Pandian and Stuart McLean, 45–47. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kasmani, Omar. 2019. “Thin Attachments: Writing Berlin in Scenes of Daily Loves.” Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry 1 (3): 33–53. Katchadourian, Nina. 2017. Lavatory Self-Portraits in the Flemish Style, Seat Assignment. Austin: The Blanton Museum of Art. Digital Photograph and Video. Khaled, Mahmoud. 2017. Proposal for House Museum of an Unknown Crying Man. Istanbul: 15th Istanbul Biennial. Art Installation. Lim, Bliss C. 2009. Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Love, Heather. 2013. “Close Reading and Thin Description.” Public Culture 25 (3): 401–34. Lutz, Catherine. 1995. “The Gender of Theory.” In Women Writing Culture/Culture Writing Women, edited by Ruth Behar and Deborah Gordon, 249–66. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mattes, Dominik, Omar Kasmani, and Hansjörg Dilger. 2019. “‘All Eyes Closed’: Dis/Sensing in Comparative Fieldwork on Affective-Religious Experiences.” In Analyzing Affective Societies: Methods and Methodologies, edited by Antje Kahl, 65–78. London: Routledge. Muñoz, J. Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press. Nelson, Maggie. 2009. Bluets. New York: Wave Books. ———. 2015. The Argonauts. Minnesota: Graywolf Press. Ören, Aras. 1973. Was Will Niyazi in der Naunynstraße. Berlin: Rotbuch Verlag. Özdamar, Emine S. 2005. “Mein Istanbul.” In Der Hof im Spiegel: Erzählungen, Emine S. Özdamar, 67–76. Cologne: Kiepenheuer and Witsch. Paper Boat Collective. 2017. “Introduction: Archipelagos, a Voyage in Writing.” In Crumpled Paper Boat: Experiments in Ethnographic Writing, edited by Anand Pandian and Stuart McLean, 11–28. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Römhild. Regina. 2017. “Beyond the Bounds of the Ethnic: For Postmigrant Cultural and Social Research.” Journal of Aesthetics and Culture 9 (2): 69–75.

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Schaefer, Donovan O. 2015. Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sedgwick, Eve K. 2003. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sharpe, Christina. 2016. In the Wake of Intimacy: On Blackness and Being. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Singh, Julietta. 2018. No Archive Will Restore You. Montréal, Quebec: 3Ecologies Books. Stewart, Kathleen. 2007. Ordinary Affects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2010. “Worlding Refrains.” In The Affect Theory Reader, edited by Melissa Gregg and Greg Seigworth, 339–53. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2017. “Epilogue.” In Crumpled Paper Boat: Experiments in Ethnographic Writing, edited by Anand Pandian and Stuart McLean, 225–30. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Strathern, Marilyn. 2004 (1991). Partial Connections. Lanham: Altamira Press. Taussig, Michael. 2011. I Swear I Saw This: Drawing in Fieldwork Notebooks, Namely My Own. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Ullman, Tracey, 2017. Tracey Ullman Show, Season 2. 2017. London: BBC One. TV Program. Yildiz, Yasemin. 2017. “Berlin as a Migratory Setting.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Berlin, edited by Andrew J. Webber, 206–26. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Incorporated Genre and Gender: Elsie Masson, Her Writings, and Her Contribution to Malinowski’s Career Daniela Salvucci

Introduction This chapter aims to give an overview of the works by Elsie Masson (1890–1935), including her book, newspapers articles, reports, and letters. It draws on bibliographical and biographical sources, and refers to postmodern and feminist theories on anthropological writing. In relation to genre, it underlines Masson’s originality in writing, and her politically engaged point of view, stressing the multiple connections in-between literature, journalism, and anthropological sensitivity. With reference to gender, it highlights Masson’s ‘writerly incorporation’ as a ‘hidden scholar’ in the work of her husband, the social anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942), according to a ‘two-person, single career’ model based on gender asymmetry. Thereby, the article introduces the main themes of my two-direction ongoing research on Elsie Masson’s whole work and on her contribution to Malinowski’s career.1

D. Salvucci (B) Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Bolzano, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 E. Tauber and D. L. Zinn (eds.), Gender and Genre in Ethnographic Writing, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71726-1_8

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Elsie Masson’s Travels, Writings, and Work as Mrs. Malinowski The following enthusiastic review of the book An Untamed Territory: The Northern Territories of Australia, authored by Elsie Masson in 1915, appeared in the Geographical Journal of the British Royal Geographical Society in March 1916: This book, short as it is and dealing mostly with the personal experiences of a visitor to the Northern Territory of Australia, is a really valuable addition to the literature on that territory. It is so because the writer has an excellent gift of description and a power of avoiding trivialities. Her accounts of a motor journey into the bush – a pioneer journey by car – of the deserted station of Port Essington, of the trip up the Roper River, and of the trial of natives for the murder of a white man, are admirable of their kind, and these are only a few examples of a series of vivid pictures. (…) the book is both well written and well constructed, and if it be the first the writer has put forth, it may be hoped that opportunities for further work of this character will not be denied to her. (The Geographical Journal, March 1916, vol. 47 (3), p. 215)

Although Elsie Masson was a talented journalist and writer, and one of the first women to take part in the scientific explorations of the Australian North,2 she did not have many opportunities to further this kind of work. It is probably because she started helping Bronislaw Malinowski with his own work, and contributed to his career as his wife and intellectual supporter. The following sections will give an overview of her writings, suggesting that her labour as a writer and as a wife was ‘incorporated’ in her husband’s career according to an asymmetrical gender pattern. Elsie Masson was born in 1890 in Melbourne to Mary and Orme Masson; the latter was a Scottish chemistry professor who had moved to Australia to hold a position at Melbourne University. Although Orme Masson had been promoting women’s admission to university, neither he nor his wife encouraged their two daughters to attend public school and university (Young 2004, 450–51). Like many other girls of their time and social class, Elsie and her sister Marnie were educated at home, while their brother went to grammar school. The two girls had trained in languages and literature and visited Europe as teenagers together with their mother to study music and art (Selleck 2013; Young 2004).

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In 1913, as a young woman in her early twenties, Elsie Masson moved to Port Darwin in the Northern Territory of Australia to work as a tutor and companion of the daughters of the new Administrator of the Northern Territory, John Gilruth, an academic friend of her father. Living there for a year and a half, and travelling through this still ‘untamed’ region of the country, Masson had the opportunity to observe and describe different aspects of the local social life, publishing her notes first in several regional newspapers and subsequently in the book An Untamed Territory: The Northern Territories of Australia (Masson 1915). During World War I, she was politically involved in supporting the ‘humanitarian principles of socialism’ (Young 2004, 454) and, as a nurse trainee, highly engaged in the struggle for better working conditions for nurses, as well as for women’s suffrage (Wayne 1995, I; Young 2004). When young Bronislaw Malinowski was living in Melbourne, from April 1916 to October 1917—between his two long field stays in the Trobriand Islands—Baldwin Spencer, Orme Masson, and other professors on Trobriand culture introduced him to their academic milieu, and to Elsie Masson. At that time, Malinowski was examining ethnographic data from his first Trobriand fieldwork expedition (March 1915–March 1916). Being interested in Australian indigenous life himself (Malinowski 1913), and having read and appreciated Masson’s book, he asked her for help in processing his material and revising his manuscript on Trobriand culture. During Malinowski’s second fieldwork expedition in the Trobriands (October 1917–October 1918), Masson corresponded with him, commented on his fieldwork accounts and discussed novels and literature they both were reading in their spare time. They got married in 1919 and moved to Europe a year later, making South Tyrol their home, where Masson lived and raised their three daughters while Malinowski taught in London. Although Masson continued to write short stories and newspaper articles from Oberbozen-Soprabolzano and Bozen-Bolzano in South Tyrol, she mostly devoted herself to family care after marriage, and supported her husband’s career. As early as 1925, she discovered the symptoms of a serious illness, later diagnosed as multiple sclerosis, which progressively robbed her of her mobility and led to her death in 1935. The letters Masson and Malinowski exchanged, collected and edited in 1995 by their younger daughter Helena Malinowska Wayne (1925– 2018), show that Masson assisted Malinowski as a copyeditor and discussant in the most important period of his career (Wayne 1995, I, II). Her role seems to have been particularly important in the long gestation of

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Malinowski’s masterpiece Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea (Malinowski 1922). With reference to their Melbourne period, Malinowski’s biographer Michael Young (2004) points out that Masson worked together with Malinowski at Victoria Library in Melbourne already in 1917, helping him to process his ethnographic material for a manuscript from which Argonauts and further anthropological monographs were elaborated. Young defined Masson as Malinowski’s ‘chief editor’, emphasizing that her influence allowed him to use a very appealing style—one that is both academic and popular (Young 2004, 467). Helena Malinowska Wayne highlighted that Masson actively assisted Malinowski in writing Argonauts as ‘aide and critic, not least with his style’ (Wayne 1985, 535). Raymond Firth, Malinowski’s assistant and friend, stated that although Masson did not influence Malinowski’s theoretical thought, ‘she was an acute appraiser and critic of it, and helped him much with it in draft’ (Firth 1988, 27), and Malinowski ‘relied very greatly upon her judgment’ (Firth 2004, 79). In her travelogue on the Northern Territory of Australia, Masson (1915) developed a young, fresh, usually ironic and humorous style, collecting personal impressions and descriptions of people, situations, and landscapes. According to Lydon (2016, 77–96), on the one hand Masson’s book contributed to popularize the evolutionist theory promoted by her mentor and family friend, Baldwin Spencer. On the other hand, she proposed a humanitarian approach to the aboriginal question, which showed her independent mind and her more democratic attitude compared to that of her parents’ generation and of the middle-class milieu in which she socialized (Lydon 2016; Richardson 2016; Young 2004). During his career, Malinowski, too, was concerned with popularizing his work—and social anthropology as a new discipline—by writing books that sold well, publishing in both academic journals and newspapers, participating in public debates, and promoting applied anthropology. The key to his success in cultivating large popularity was a less abstract and more narrative writing approach, according to MacClancy (1996, 11–15, 30). Historian Payne (1981) considered Argonauts to be Malinowski’s first experiment with a new, captivating style, which features vivid descriptions of characters, actions, and landscapes, uses the rhetoric of the travelogue, and applies a literary imagination that recalls Sir James Frazer’s bestseller (Frazer 1894), and above all, Joseph Conrad’s novels (Thompson 1995; Thornton 1985; Young 2018).

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Malinowski, in fact, referred directly to the Polish (naturalised English) novelist in his intimate private diary (Malinowski 1967), as anthropologists within the postmodern turn have remarked (Clifford 1986). He shared with Masson a veritable passion for adventure novels and especially for Conrad’s work to the point they used to apply the adjective ‘conradesque’ to the many picturesque situations they encountered within, as well as to their own writings, such as in the case of Masson’s authored tales in this sense (Wayne 1995, I, II). Although Young (2004) remarks on the strong interests in literature and art of young Malinowski, in his early writings Malinowski seems absorbed more by philosophical, sociological, and anthropological theoretical questions (Thornton and Skalník 1993, 2) rather than stylistic issues. Despite Malinowski’s interest in literature and his talent in writing, he apparently chose a more scientific writing approach in his early academic works written before Argonauts (e.g. Malinowski 1913, 1915). Thornton (1985, 8) highlights that, when writing on his masterpiece, ‘Malinowski thought of himself as a writer’, struggling between science and art, drawing on both Frazer and Conrad to develop an evocative literary imagination through the rhetoric of a travelogue. The intensive labour on his Kula manuscript, from which Argonauts took form (Young 2004, 468), was made in close collaboration with Elsie Masson, and this partnership probably fostered him to switch towards a more literary style by combining narrations and descriptions, and by applying the writing strategies of travelogues to make his work more appealing to a wider audience. In the following sections, I will first discuss concepts from the postmodern and feminist anthropology on the relations among literature, journalism, and ethnography, as well as on genre and gender exclusion in the history of anthropology. I will then underline the originality of Elsie Masson’s gaze on social change in colonized indigenous Australia with the main focus on her book by highlighting her anthropological sensitivity as well as her political engagement. I will finally highlight Masson’s interest in South Tyrolean politics and society with reference to her correspondence with Malinowski and introduce some extracts from Masson’s article on fascism in South Tyrol. Throughout the chapter, I suggest that Masson’s appealing writing approach, based on a very personal narrative style, could have influenced Malinowski’s own writing style.

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Writing Genre and Gender Since the 1980s, postmodern scholars have underlined the strong connection among ethnographic-anthropological writing, travel literature, and journalism (Clifford 1996; Pratt 1986). Even though professional modern anthropology was defined as a new discipline, precisely by establishing a rigid border between the scientific ethnographic method and writing when compared with all the other genres dealing with travels and sociocultural life, some authors claim that ‘blurred genres’ (Geertz 1980) and experimental ‘artistic ethnographies’ (Behar 2007) have challenged such a frontier. Scholars even tend to recognize that professional ethnography itself evolved from travel writing (Stagl and Pinney 1996). With reference to literature, Craith and Kockel (2014), literary critics in search for connections between British literature and anthropology, have stressed that Victorian social novelists, such as the authors Masson and Malinowski read, were themselves interested in describing the sociocultural customs of their time: Many Victorian Writers in the XIX century Britain engaged with anthropological themes. (…) Like anthropologists, Victorian writers such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, George Meredith and William Makepeace Thackeray endeavored to describe life authentically and without idealization. These authors regarded their novels as objective (i.e. scientific) accounts of human behavior. (Craith and Kockel 2014, 690)

To this argument, Salomon (2005) adds the connection with journalism, as some of these authors, such as Thackeray and Dickens, had previously trained as journalists: (J)ournalism rather than poetry, can be seen as the ‘precursor’ of the Victorian novel, both in terms of the formative professional experience of many novelists and the formal development of the genre. (Salomon 2005, 140)

Several hidden interconnections, reciprocal influences, and intertextual relations can be traced in line with these scholars that link travelogues, journalism, and social and adventure novels to the ethnographic and anthropological writings in the epoch of the rise of the discipline. The so-called ‘Imperial romance’, which refers to British adventure novels in colonial settings written between the 1880s and 1920s (Jones 2004, 406)—including, among others, Conrad’s, Stevenson’s, and Kipling’s

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novels—is considered to have been directly influenced by the new anthropological and ethnographic knowledge of the time. These works often show a critical approach to colonialism and seem to have had a reciprocal influence on travelogues and journalistic reportages as well as on ethnographic and anthropological writings, promoting narrative rhetoric and style, but also fostering skepticism towards imperialism. In the case of Malinowski’s Argonauts, as already noted, scholars have emphasized the several connections with Conrad’s novels (Thompson 1995; Thornton 1985), an author with whom Malinowski himself identified (Malinowski 1967). Postmodern anthropologists consider the ethnographer and anthropologist specifically as an author, looking at ‘works and lives’ (Geertz 1988), and arguing that anthropological toil consists ultimately in ‘writing culture’ (Clifford and Marcus 1986). Thereby, they have suggested putting aside the scientific epistemology of the discipline and deconstructing the politics and poetics of classical anthropological texts, among which Malinowski’s bestsellers; at the same time they have promoted experimenting with more explicitly subjective and dialogic ethnographic writings. Feminist anthropologists, however—although there have been many differences within feminist anthropology (Strathern 1987, 284–85)— have critically highlighted the fact that this postmodern approach has neglected gender in dealing with ethnographic-anthropological writing as a genre (Abu-Lughod 1990; Behar and Gordon 1995; Lewin and Silverstein 2016; Reed-Danahay 2001). They emphasize that many female scholars have produced experimental ethnographic writings and anthropological accounts that were unfortunately deemed too narrative, i.e. not sufficiently scientific, at the beginning of modern anthropology. These ‘hidden scholars’ (Parezo et al. 1993) were marginalized and excluded from the oft-cited genealogy of the male founding fathers of the discipline (Applegarth 2014; Lamphere 2004; Parezo et al. 1993; Tedlock 1995). It also happened where the pioneers of the field were almost all women, as is the case in South Africa (Bank 2016). The same previous contribution of women travelers and social observers who popularized an anthropological sensitivity through travelogues and journalism, as Elsie Masson did by disseminating among a wider audience the scientific and political endeavours of her mentor Baldwin Spencer, has never been considered pertinent to the history of the discipline.

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As the historical research in rhetoric has pointed out, professionalization in early modern anthropology went hand in hand with strategies of control over genre, producing a regime of rhetorical scarcity (Applegarth 2012), which artificially reduced the range of rhetorical tools deemed appropriate for the writing of a proper ethnographic account. Through this process of definition and production of modern anthropology as a professional, scientific, academic, and therefore bounded discipline, ethnographic-anthropological writing became a more specific and controlled genre. Although Malinowski, likely supported by Masson, clearly gave both a narrative and descriptive literary inflection to his masterpiece Argonauts, thereby promoting and popularizing anthropology, after him, even most of his students opted for a more abstract and theoretical writing approach. As MacClancy puts it: Until the 1930s, most anthropological articles and books could be read by any educated person with a sense of dedication. But within two decades the language of university-based anthropologists had become sufficiently abstruse and their analyses sufficiently arcane as to bar the majority of readers who had not been trained in the subject. (1996, 14)

Scholars disseminating ethnographic-anthropological knowledge through a narrative writing style started being devaluated and marginalized. It is relevant that the majority of them were ‘those female graduates of anthropology who did not enter the university hierarchy’ (MacClancy 1996, 34–35). The increasing valorization of theory within the academy was thus one of the many mechanisms of the institutionalisation of gender asymmetry within the discipline, as male scholars were associated with highly valued theoretical work, while female scholars with less prized descriptive tasks (Lutz 1995). In the several husband-wife anthropological couples, this ‘sexual division of textual labor’ (Tedlock 1995, 267) was at work, producing a general misrecognition of the labour of women in anthropology. Many of the hidden scholars of the discipline were indeed anthropologists’ wives who—without public recognition—helped their husbands with both fieldwork and anthropological writing, as Tedlock (1995) pointed out mocking Geertz, and focusing on ‘works and wives’, rather than ‘lives’.

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From the beginning of the discipline, anthropologists’ co-working wives have done their fair share of the work by taking fieldwork notes, discussing, copyediting, and proofreading their husbands’ texts (Mead 1986; Tedlock 1995), according to a ‘two-person, single career’ model. This concept, formulated by Papanek (1973), refers to the multiple, nonremunerated, and publicly unacknowledged contributions of wives to the work and career of their husbands, above all in middle-class professions and academic employment. Before the struggles of the women’s movement for gender equality began in earnest in the 1970s, this ‘two-person, single career’ pattern pushed women to interrupt their own careers in order to devote themselves to those of their husbands. Wives were supposed to take charge of domestic duties and raise their children, as well as to manage public relations and even work as ‘incorporated wives’ (Callan and Ardener 1984) to the benefit of the institutes, among which there were many universities that employed their husbands (Ardener 1984; Sciama 1984). Within anthropology, although these invisible and silent wife-coworkers have generally accepted a ‘writerly incorporation’ in their husbands’ books (Tedlock 1995, 271), many of them, such as Rosemary Firth (1972), Edith Turner (Engelke 2000; Turner 1987), and Elizabeth Fernea (Fernea and Fernea 1989), among others, started their own careers as anthropologists, led their own fieldwork research, and wrote their own books. Nonetheless, collaboration in anthropological ‘wife-husband-teams’ (Parezo et al. 1993, 352–54) has rarely been publicly recognized and even less investigated (Ariëns and Strijp 1989; Gottlieb 1995). The ambiguities of this ‘academic intimacy’ (Gottlieb 1995, 21) mirror the contradictions of both academia and intimacy. Although Malinowski and Masson developed their relationship as ‘pure love’ (Giddens 1992) according to the modern ideology of intimacy and family (Richardson 2016), their work collaboration seems to be a good example of the ‘two-person, single career’ model, as Bauer (1998) suggested when reviewing Wayne’s book (Wayne 1995, I–II).

Untamed Territory: Masson’s Gaze on Indigenous Australia Elsie Masson’s book An Untamed Territory: The Northern Territories of Australia (1915) is a travel account of her stay in Port Darwin and her excursions in the region. It is mostly composed of texts from different

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articles she had previously published in regional newspapers in 1913, such as the Melbourne Argus, the Wellington Evening Post, the Auckland Herald, the Christchurch Press, and the Otago Daily Times (Masson 1915, viii). Masson dedicates the book to Mr. and Mrs. Gilruth, who hosted her in Port Darwin, making it possible for her to travel and take part in several exploratory missions. In the preface, she thanks Professor Baldwin Spencer, who facilitated her to move to Darwin and fostered her publications with his editor, MacMillan. Spencer was a Darwinist biologist and anthropologist who had carried out research on Australian aboriginal groups; he promoted an evolutionist perspective and supported the claim for the protection of indigenous people in reserves (Stocking 1995). Masson’s book contains some pictures taken by Spencer, as well as by Masson herself,3 and by Mervyn Holmes, who was at that time Chief of the Health Office in Darwin, and two maps. In the introduction, Masson presents the Northern Territory as an ‘untamed’, exotic, and fascinating space that resists civilization. She summarizes the history of the region, from the ancient presence of Malaysian fishermen and trepangers (fishermen of trepang, or sea cucumbers) on the Northern coast, to the several failed historical attempts to explore and colonize this area by Europeans. With some humour, she recalls the steps of the slow, uncertain English colonization of the Australian North in the second half of the XIX century, underlining the lack of infrastructure and productive activities that had affected this region until that moment. Because of this, in 1907, the federal government of the Commonwealth took over the responsibility of such an ‘underdeveloped’ territory, sending scientists and politicians, such as Spencer and Gilruth, to promote colonization4 in a region where no more than 1500 Europeans, a similar number of Chinese people, and approximately 40,000 Aborigines lived at the beginning of the XX century (Masson 1915, 23). Although Masson supports the political efforts of her mentors, sharing mainstream opinions from her parents’ social milieu about the value of colonization as civilization, she seems to openly enjoy the resistance of the northern territories to colonization and its romantic appeal made of ‘indifference and mystery’ (Masson 1915, 3). She argues that ‘the official and political side is not the only one of interest; from the picturesque point of view the Territory is endlessly fascinating’ (Masson 1915, 24). Her presentation of places aims to transport the readers, allowing them

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to imagine being there in person to taste the ‘romance of the life’ and the flavour of the tropics: The Australian [the ‘white Australian’]5 who visits it [the Northern Territory] is surprised and strangely entranced with this portion of his continent. He is fascinated by the romance of the life and by the varied elements that compose it – the crude beginnings of white man’s civilization, the savage state of the Stone Age Aboriginal, and foreign to both, the peculiar flavour of the East, reminding him that he is now within tropic regions. (Masson 1915, 1)

In the following three chapters (II, III, IV), Masson proposes to ‘study life in Darwin’, dealing with the colonial town and its mixed population of Chinese, Japanese, Aboriginals, Malayans, Mestizos, and British people. Giving an account of this multicultural society, she focuses on colonial relations and sharply remarks that, even if interconnected, these different sociocultural ‘little worlds’ remain separated: Life in Darwin is made up of many little worlds, each continuing in its own way, impinging on, but never mingling with the others. There is the life of white officialdom, the Eastern life of Chinatown, the life of the pearling fleets and, under all, the life of the native camps. (Masson 1915, 51)

In her ‘vivid pictures’ of the colonial life in the town, Masson gives space to the ‘servant question’, presenting portraits of the local working class, remarking on the asymmetrical racial social relations between work employers and labourers. British owners live in their comfortable houses, the most important space of which is the tidy verandah, where ‘the family lives, eats and sleeps’ (Masson 1915, 32). Among them, white traders commercialize tortoiseshells and pearls, employing Japanese divers who are ‘paid according to the weight of (their) catch’, promoting ‘intense rivalry’ between them (Masson 1915, 52–57). By considering the exploitation of the Japanese divers, Masson emphatically reflects on the ‘social life of things’ (Appadurai 1986), stressing the worldwide connections incorporated even in the most ordinary pearl product: A row of neat pearl buttons on a card – how commonplace, how quietly domestic they are! Nothing could appear more uninteresting than the material of which they are made, yet through what strange scenes of

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romance it has passed – calling men from sleepy Eastern villages, gathering them together in far-off countries, there to sail upon uncharted seas, to walk the bottom of the ocean, to laugh, to fight, to cheat, and perhaps to die. (Masson 1915, 57)

Describing Chinatown, Masson gives a picture of the Chinese migrants’ social position within the local job market as small retail salespeople, fishermen with their sampan-traditional boats, likely opium smugglers, as well as cooks, housekeepers, and door-to-door salespeople in British households. Above all, she seems to be strongly attracted by the ever-present ‘undercurrent’ of the town, the world of the indigenous people (Chapter IV), also called ‘blacks’: the aboriginal migrants who dwell in different camps at the periphery of Port Darwin according to their tribes (Chapters II, III, IV). Throughout the book, Masson underlines that these aboriginal migrants come from different regions and speak very diverse languages, often using Pidgin English to communicate with each other (Masson 1915, 57). At the end of chapter IV, Masson describes a ‘corroboree’, a nightly aboriginal ritual in which she took part, allowing the readers to encounter the ceremony together with her: (…) all the Borroloola natives who were already in Darwin would collect when the day’s work was over. Every night. As soon as darkness fell, the regular beating of sticks and clapping of hands (…) announced that the corroboree had begun. On the third night the clapping was more insistent than ever (…). We made our way across the road (…), and found ourselves at the scene of a corroboree. (Masson 1915, 62–67)

Masson remarks on her attempts to investigate the meanings of this ritual while the ceremony was going on by posing questions, which remained without answers as people she asked were too engaged in the performance (Masson 1915, 63–67). In the subsequent chapters (V, VI, VII, VIII, IX), Masson reports on her adventures ‘out bush’ together with her mentors’ group to explore the region and enter the so-called ‘Never-Never’6 to “experience to the full the fascinations of the Northern Territory bush” (Masson 1915, 75). In a very appealing writing style, she describes first-person adventures of the small group of explorers. They travel by train and by coach along the Overland telegraph, ride horses, and camp in the forest dwelled in by aboriginals and some ‘solitary man – a miner, a carter or a stockman’

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(Masson 1915, 80–81). She also gives an account of the pioneering travel through the bush by motorcar (VI) she took part in and of the first exploration of the Alligator River (VII) where, in a cave near the bank, her group discovered an indigenous rock painting (Masson 1915, 108–9). On one of these explorative excursions, Masson had the opportunity to visit, as ‘the first white woman’, a buffalo hunter’s settlement at Oenpelli (VII), close to the Alligator River. Describing the daily life of his family and their relations with the aboriginals who work for them, she praises the respectful attitude towards the indigenous people shown by the hunter and ‘his wonderful sympathy with their customs and beliefs. He never laughs at them; he speaks to them in their own language, and calls them by their indigenous names. In return, they give him their confidence, and no ceremony is too sacred to be enacted before him’ (Masson 1915, 103). Masson instead regrets the attitude of the missionaries who run the Church of England Mission to Aborigines, whom she visited at Leichardt’s Bar, during an expedition up the Roper River, which she describes both in her report ‘Impressions of the Church of England Mission to Aborigines’ (written for Spencer) and in chapter IX of her book. In ‘Impressions…’ she emphasizes that: ‘A very unsympathetic attitude is adopted by the missionaries toward any of the natives’ own customs and traditions’ (Masson 1913, 2). To a certain extent, she questions the entire missionary approach, which aims to evangelize the indigenous people and to ‘preserve’ them by keeping them apart both from the colonial society and from indigenous society, whereas she argues it would be better to allow them their autonomy or to integrate them into the new society (Masson 1915, 141). Although Masson follows racial stereotypes and sometimes describes black servants and guides as ‘funny’ and ‘lazy’, she looks at aboriginal cultures and cultural change with great interest. Taking into consideration the effects of colonial processes on the indigenous cultures, she sheds light on the relations between ‘wild’ indigenous people—at the time deprecatingly called ‘myall’—and ‘black fellows’, the aboriginals who work for the colonizers (Masson 1915, 111, 133–34). Sailing up the Roper River, for example, she describes how the ‘black fellows’ who accompany the exploration group react to the presence of ‘wild’ indigenous people along the river by wearing all the clothes and hats they own as a status symbol or to probably protect themselves against the magic of the others (Masson 1915, 134). Masson remarks on the different attitudes the indigenous show towards objects and possessions: ‘If he [the indigenous person]

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himself is not actually using a possession at the moment, any one else is welcome to it’ (Masson 1915, 155). She also notices aboriginal kinship taboos and reports on the following episode, which happened on the way to the Oenpelli station. A few wild blacks had collected round us, and presently one pointed to an object moving towards us in the distance – a black boy on horseback. As he approached the edge of the creek that wound across the plain, one of the wild blacks suddenly threw up his arms. Romula (a ‘black fellow’) stopped dead, while the blackfellow plunged into the jungle bordering the stream and vanished. Some little bit of tribal law this must have been that forbade them to meet face to face. This bit of by-play, so swiftly passed, seemed strangely full of meaning. (Masson 1915, 112)

She also observes and describes a kinship taboo performed during the religious service at the Church of England Mission, with a certain ethnographic-anthropological sensitivity: In the midst of this orthodox Christian service, some of the blacks sat with their hands over their eyes so that they might not see those of their relatives on the opposite benches whom they were forbidden by aboriginal law ever to behold. (Masson 1915, 139)

Masson’s Political Engagement In the concluding chapters of her book (X, XI), Masson explicitly presents her political perspective and her open approval of the new administrative regulation based on the mandate of the Protectors of Aboriginals to limit abuses against aboriginals and prevent cultural ‘contamination’ (Masson 1915, 151), praising Spencer’s anthropological research and his political proposals to save indigenous cultures from destruction and disappearance: It is the more pathetic that every service he (the ‘black fellow’) renders the white man today is helping towards the destruction of his own race, and hastening the time when the aborigines of the Northern Territory will be but a myth to the young and a memory to the old. Must the native of the Territory die out as he has done in the South? (Masson 1915, 150)

In Chapter XI, reporting on the trial for a murder of a white man who had brutally killed one of his aboriginal workers and was killed in revenge

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by other aboriginal workers of the group, Masson takes on the political point of view of the indigenous, underlining their right to ‘their own moral law’ and complaining against the ‘savage white’: Who can blame them for what they did? Who can say they committed a crime in ridding themselves of this cruel intruder into their bush world, who acted towards them with deliberate brutality. Were they not justified in obeying their own moral laws (…)? [T]he savage black who commits an act of violence is simply avenging equal outrages done to his own race by the savage white. (Masson 1915, 177)

As Lydon (2016) argues, on the one hand, Masson’s book links to her sociocultural context and contributes to popularize a specific scientific and political view promoted by a particular social group. On the other, she shows a new interest in sociocultural differences and takes on the aboriginal question directly by proposing a humanitarian approach to the issue, also by publishing in her book photographic portraits of indigenous people to show their humanity beyond racial stereotypes (Lydon 2016, 2018). Although her book is a travelogue and not a scientific work, based on personal impressions rather than on systematically collected data, it shows a new anthropological sensitivity in paying attention to colonial relations, social change, acculturation, and hybridization processes. As a form of political engagement, this book points out the contradictions of colonization as well as the paradoxes of ‘civilization’, which would explode in the coming years, becoming one of the main anthropological subjects of study throughout the modernday. Back to Melbourne, in 1914, Masson started a nurse-training course and was engaged in the battle for better nurses’ working conditions already in 1915 when, together with her colleagues, she openly insisted on the public acknowledgement of the nurses’ position in response to a journalist’s attack after an accident in the ward published in two local newspapers, the Argus and the Ages. As a member of the committee of nurses of the Melbourne Hospital, together with her colleagues, Masson denounced the exploitation of nurses as workers in the hospital. The nurses of the Melbourne Hospital give to the public at least ten hours of service, mental and physical, on six days of every week, and for this they are ‘paid by the public’ a salary which, beginning at nothing a week, rises

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in the fourth year of training to 15/5 a week. Let the public think over this, and it will see that the nurses are in the position of givers of charity. (Dobson, Hudson, Mackay, Masson, Rogers, Tucker 1915, 11)

In the following years, during WWI, Masson was also politically involved—publicly debating within the socialist movement, taking positions against the anti-war radical socialists and writing her opinions in the weekly newspaper The Socialist, published in Melbourne since 1906 (Wayne 1995, I, 20). As a nurse trainee whose first beloved fiancée had been killed in the battle of Gallipoli, she was tragically aware of the consequences of aggressive German politics, and thought of the current war as needed in order to reach a new, hopefully peaceful and democratic, global order. She expressed her opinions speaking publicly at the Yarra Bank, an open space for citizens in Melbourne, which was later closed and forbidden by the authorities. On 23 July 1917, she participated in a public debate organized by the Socialist Party of the State of Victoria at the Socialist Hall of Melbourne, promoting the idea that socialists should support the war and vote for conscription at the following referendum on the matter. She discussed this issue in opposition to Adela Pankhurst, one of the main leaders of the anti-war movement (Young 2004, 454). In 1917 and 1918, during her training as a nurse, Masson continued to be deeply engaged in the struggle to improve nurses’ working conditions by promoting reform in the State of Victoria to reduce the number of working hours and the length of training. She tried to raise awareness on this issue among the militants of the Women’s National League, and among politicians from both the Liberal and the Labour Party (Wayne 1995, I, 38), eventually presenting a petition to the parliament of the State of Victoria. She used to refer to her political activity with some humour as ‘bolsheviking’ (Wayne 1995, I, 98, 101, 102), whereas within the hospital she was apparently nicknamed ‘Trotsky’ (Young 2004, 456). Masson was engaged in the struggle for women’s suffrage, too, and firmly discussed this subject with Malinowski, who seemed to have opposed the women’s suffrage movement, at least at the beginning of their relationship. In November 1917, she wrote to him: Of course I do not think the sexes are equal. I feel more strongly than I did that sex affects psychology profoundly (…). But I don’t regard the vote as anything to do with this. It seems almost a technicality… there are really practical difficulties which confront women who try to earn their livings

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in England, such as being able to practice at the Bar though qualified as lawyer, and not be able to get a degree though qualified, at the two main universities. These things are symptoms of the same sentiment which won’t allow them to vote… On these practical grounds I shall always be suffragette. (…) We do agree au fond on this subject, but it’s you who won’t concede this. (Wayne 1995, I, 55)

Masson and Malinowski’s letters show their attempts to understand each other and to negotiate their positions on this subject. Eventually, Malinowski recognized the influence Masson had upon his own interests and attitudes—above all, in terms of political issues.7 From Oburaku, Trobriands, he wrote to her on 8 January 1918: I am much more interested in ever so many things (politics, actualités, etc.) through you than I would be on my own account and my ideas are deeply modified through your influence… it makes for a broadening and deepening of my mind and a greater equity of my character…. (Wayne 1995, I, 97)

Incorporated Genre and Gender During Malinowski’s second stint of fieldwork in the Trobriands (October 1917–October 1918), Masson corresponded with him, not only to exchange political opinions, but also to give feedback on his reports from fieldwork, becoming progressively more involved in his research work. From Melbourne Hospital, where she was training as a nurse, Masson wrote to Malinowski on 18 January 1918: I am most intensely interested in every step of your progress (...). I am keeping your letters very carefully, not only for my own sake as I would do anyhow, but because so much of them will be of use for your descriptive book…. (Wayne 1995, I, 99–100)

Masson’s feedback often remarks on the narrative aspect of Malinowski’s descriptions of his experiences, stressing their literary potential, as in the following extract from her letter to him on May 29, 1918: I think the thrill of the ethnologist as he approaches and arrives at a new hunting ground of which he has heard, as you did at Vakuta, must be different to anything else…your arrival there was most fascinating. It is like being ‘in’ a story to row up a creek, or follow a road, and literally not

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know what happens round the next bend, although you know your object in general. It is like the description I once read on a properly constructed dramatic dialogue: -‘leading by a series of small surprises to a foreseen close’…. (Wayne, 1995, I, 144)

In this period, as their correspondence shows, they used to discuss novels and literature, as they shared a veritable passion for adventure and social novels. Both of them grew up in an intellectual milieu, and some of their relatives and friends were writers and poets: one of Masson’s aunts (Flora Masson) was an author (Wayne 1995, I, 31), while Malinowski’s best friend in Cracow was Stanislaw Witkiewick, known as Witkacy, who became a famous expressionist painter, writer, and playwright (Skalník 1995). During their relationship in Melbourne, Malinowski and Masson often exchanged books. They appreciated the same authors and continued to send novels to each other even when Malinowski was doing fieldwork in the Trobriands. In his private diaries—diaries ‘in the strict sense of the term’—Malinowski (1967) referred to the many novels, among which masterpieces by Charles Dickens, George Meredith, and William Makepeace Thackeray were to be found, and magazines he used to read to escape from reality, nostalgia, illness, and boredom during fieldwork, as Christina Thompson (1995) has pointed out. In their letters, Masson and Malinowski compared their own writing approaches to those of their favourite authors, along with many Victorian novelists. On their different strategies of narrative description, for instance, Masson—referring to Dickens and Kipling—wrote to Malinowski in 1919: Your description of the bush fire was most complete and I realized every word of it to myself. In the way you describe things you remind me of Dickens. I, on the other hand, might modestly liken me to Kipling. The difference seems to be that I aim at giving one realistic flashlight of the scene in words that by their sound and association somehow convoy the feeling evoked. You on the other hand carefully pile up one effect after another, giving, in the most deliberate and awfully well selected language the entire history of the scene as it unfolds before you …. (Wayne 1995, I, 184)

Masson also commented on the social novel La terre by Zola that Malinowski had given to her, as well as on Robert Louis Stevenson’s letters she had sent to Malinowski, who identified immediately with this author and his struggle against illness while living in Samoa with his wife and his

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mother. As Young (2004, 535) suggests, likely prompted by Stevenson’s example, Malinowski and Masson dreamed of a joint voyage and even of shared fieldwork to carry out ethnographic research as a couple. Masson wrote to Malinowski from Melbourne Hospital about this on 18 January 1918: Together we will pitch a tent not far from one of the villages, and I shall learn from one of the women how to make their pots…Do you think it would be feasible for me to go back with you to New Guinea as assistant ethnographer? … I am sure if I learned the language I could get a lot out of the women that perhaps has been never found out. Tell me seriously if it could be …. (Wayne 1995, I, 100)

Unfortunately, it did not happen, and Malinowski failed to collect enough ethnographic material on women’s practices, as Annette Weiner (1976) later underlined, critically updating Malinowski’s work both ethnographically and theoretically, promoting the anthropology of women in the Trobriands and filling in the missed gendered pieces of a more complex cultural puzzle. Malinowski and Masson’s interest in literature included autobiographic novels, travelogues, and journalistic reportages on ‘exotic’ regions, too. Masson quoted in her book the novel We of the Never Never, written by Jeannie Gunn, whereas in his private diary Malinowski referred to the travelogues by Beatrice Grimshaw, an Irish-Australian writer and traveler who spent many years in Papua New Guinea, just to give a few examples. Above all, they seemed to share a true passion for adventure novels: both of them highly appreciated Kipling and were literally fascinated by the novels of Joseph Conrad, whom Malinowski once even met during a train journey through England (Young 2004). Because of this common literary background, and because of Masson’s talent in writing, as well as her anthropological sensitivity and her interest in Malinowski’s research, she was progressively incorporated into Malinowski’s work and writings, as shown in her correspondence, at least from December 1917: All my interests and any ambitions I may have had seem to have been deflected. It isn’t so with you, because your work is ‘our’ big interest, and is bound up with us and we with it. (Wayne 1995, I, 67–68)

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They got married in 1919 after Malinowski came back to Melbourne from the Trobriands, and went to Europe the next year, visiting England and then Scotland, where their first daughter was born. While waiting for an academic position for Malinowski, they chose to stay on the Canary Islands for some months, rented a house—called el Boquín—in Tenerife, where they used to work together (Wayne 1995, 14). Here, Malinowski wrote Argonauts (the title of which had originally to be ‘The Kula’) in a very short time, using his material previously elaborated with Masson’s help. In a letter to Masson, after having submitted the manuscript for publication, Malinowski recalled their collaboration at home in Tenerife: (…) by the way Boquín has been already sublimated into a wonderful experience and I am looking back upon some of our times, from the departure of Rivers to the arrival of the Johnstons, as the happiest of my life. The way we dealt with the Kula was very pleasant and the walks and the general domestic atmosphere and routine we created. (Wayne 1995, II, 22)

In a handwritten note on the copy of Argonauts Malinowski gave to Masson, he acknowledged her merit with the dedication on the copy: ‘To my collaborator, who had half the share at least and more than half the merit in writing this book’ (Wayne 1995, II, 26). The couple moved from Tenerife to Southern France, where their second daughter was born near Marseille, and then to Cracow, Malinowski’s native city in the search for a suitable place to work. In 1922, they eventually moved to Oberbozen-Soprabolzano, on the mountains over Bozen-Bolzano, in South Tyrol, a region that belonged to the Austrian-Hungarian Empire until 1919 and passed to the Italian Kingdom after WWI. They arrived there following a suggestion of a friend from Vienna (Wayne 1995, II, 27), and then chose to stay, bought a little country house to enjoy the healthy place, to write and to raise their children, the youngest of whom, Helena, was born in Bolzano in 1925, in the old hospital that is now part of the university campus. Over the next ten years, they made a home in Oberbozen and Bolzano8 (Stocking 1997; Salvucci et al. 2019; Tauber and Zinn 2018; Wayne 1995 II), where Masson settled with the children, whereas Malinowski was travelling between London and Oberbozen, since he had obtained a position as a lecturer (1924) and subsequently as a professor (1927) of Social Anthropology at the London School of Economics (LSE). In Oberbozen, Malinowski wrote articles and parts of his most

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famous monographs. He was likely assisted by Masson in this endeavour. She also took care of his students, who used to visit him in summer (Firth 1957; Kuper 1996; Powdermaker 1966). Referring to the publication of The Sexual Life of Savages (1929), Malinowski wrote to Masson: ‘I shall love this book which in a way is as much ours as the Argonauts ’ (Wayne 1995, II, 118), and she commented: … I like the sound of your volume immensely. (...) I have always a feeling of faint surprise when I think of the embryo of our spiritual child. It seems a wonder that the little creature should suddenly spring all armed with pictures, index, and other ornaments out of your head. (Wayne 1995, II, 133)

As Selleck (2013, 280) underlines, in the foreword of this book, Malinowski explicitly acknowledges Masson’s contribution to the writing enterprise of both Argonauts and The Sexual Life of Savages: My greatest debt in this book, as in most I have written, is to my wife. Her counsel and practical co-operation have made the writing of the Argonauts of the Western Pacific and of this an agreeable task instead of a drudgery. If there is any value and interest in these books for me personally, it comes from her share in the common work. (Malinowski 1929, XLIX)

In her first years in South Tyrol, Masson had also worked on her own, writing newspaper articles on the Italian political situation, describing the politics of fascism in the region (Wayne 1995, II, 28). In 1923, she published an article titled ‘Viva il Fascio! Black Shirts at Bolzano’ in the Australian Journal Forum: A Journal for Thinking Australians. Masson gives an account of the presence of the fascists in Bolzano in the text, describes first person their performances in the public space and reports on the opinions and fears of the local people. She introduces the article by sharing her personal experience: My first sight of a flesh-and-blood Fascista was on autumn evening in the little Tyrolean town of Bozen, or Bolzano, as the young Black Shirt himself would certainly insist on my calling it. Bozen, once a proud part of the Austrian Tyrol, but, since the Treaty of Versailles, torn off from its motherland and given over to Italy, to the helpless indignation of its inhabitants. Nevertheless, the Italian rule has so far not lain heavy upon it.

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German is freely spoken (…). But the Italian Government was one thing and the Fascio another.

Then, she reports on the climax of the political events that affect the daily life of the local people in Bolzano: When I returned three weeks later to Bolzano (Bozen) things had gone much further. The Fascisti had seized the municipality, dissatisfied with the not sufficiently Italian way things were being carried on. (…) The statue of Walther von der Vogelweide, the famous Tyrolean Minnesänger, which looks down, inartistic and stiff, but not without a certain simple dignity, on the main place of Bozen, the Walther Platz, had two flags of red, white and green, thrust impudently through the passive arms. (…) Within a week came the Coup d’Etat, the proclamation of martial law, its withdrawal and the triumph of Mussolini.

Finally, she addresses the political contradiction within fascism, prefiguring its metamorphoses into a state regime: Well, what is to happen now? Fascismo cannot continue to exist now that Fascismo is in power. One of the two things must go –Fascismo or the State. It is a precarious matter to be raised to power by the physical force of half a million hot-heated youths. (Masson 1923, 12)

In the 1920s and 1930s, Masson reported to Malinowski by letter on the impositions and abuses of the fascists, referring to press censorship, the banning of German newspapers and German schools, as well as the banning of the German language in general (Wayne 1995, II, 46, 51, 86, 95, 101, 109, 111). Due to Masson’s health condition, the family moved to London in 1929, but continued to holiday in Oberbozen, where Masson often stayed to easily reach the Austrian and German spas she used to attend for treatment. As Helena Malinowska Wayne has suggested (Wayne 1995, II, 162), Masson’s works remained committed to humanitarian principles and continued to express her critical point of view against colonial acculturation and political oppression of individual rights. At the end of the 1920s, she tried to publish a play against imperialism, in which she also mocked anthropological ethnographical practices.

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Elsie had begun to write a play. The theme was ‘what if’ the Europeans, the British, were subject peoples within a black empire, and what would the role reversal mean? (…) Elsie drew parallels not only from within the British Empire but also from dictatorships such as Mussolini’s and the intolerances of Hitler’s growing movement in Germany. (Wayne 1995, II, 162)

Conclusion In her writings, Elsie Masson expressed her original and politically engaged opinions, as well as her talent as a writer and a social observer. In her 1915 book, she described the social life of a frontier territory, and paid attention to sociocultural aspects and Australian indigenous lives. Even if she shared the racial ideology of the time and the fascination for the exoticism, she developed a personal point of view on the contradictions of colonization as civilization, calling for humanitarianism towards the indigenous people and showing an anthropological sensitivity towards cultural difference and social change. In her book, Masson often constructs amusing dialogues and little humoristic scenes, but she also writes more literary prose that recalls the novels of Joseph Conrad. Her narrative voice is usually a ‘we’ that often overlaps with ‘the traveler’, and the readers discover the Northern Territory together with her. This particular writing technique, as well as her style, made of humour, a popularizing attitude, and descriptions of picturesque and literary landscapes, could have influenced Bronislaw Malinowski’s own writing approach. Narrative and descriptive strategies of travelogue and journalism seem to have been incorporated in ethnographic-anthropological writing, above all in the case of Malinowski’s first bestseller Argonauts. In the introduction of this book he defined the ethnographic method as a professional one promoting modern anthropology as a scientific discipline in opposition to nonprofessional data-collection or to literary writing genres as travelogues and journalism were thought to be. Nevertheless, he drew on literary sources and imagination in writing his masterpiece. In doing so, he was supported by his wife and her talent in writing, as well as by their shared interest in literature and their discussions on authors of adventure and social novels. Masson, instead, deflected her attention from her own interests in travels, journalism, and literary writing to devote herself to her family duties and to her husband’s work and career, as the incorporated gender of the

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two-person, single career model. In spite of their anthropological sensitivity, their critical political perspectives, and their literary relevance, Elsie Masson’s works are scarcely known, and their contribution to Bronislaw Malinowski’s career remains to be acknowledged.

Notes 1. Based at Free University of Bolzano-Bozen (unibz), I am currently carrying out research on Elsie Masson’s work and on her contribution to Malinowski’s career, in collaboration with the MFEA-Malinowski Forum for Ethnography and Anthropology is coordinated by Dorothy Zinn and Elisabeth Tauber (website: https://mfea.projects.unibz.it/). 2. In 2018, on the online information-and-dissemination platform Conversation. Academic rigour, journalistic flair, connected to the academic world, the historian and anthropologist Jane Lydon defined Elsie Masson as ‘photographer, writer and intrepid traveler’ for the new series of the platform ‘Hidden women of History’. See the webpage: https://thecon versation.com/hidden-women-of-history-elsie-masson-photographer-wri ter-intrepid-traveller-107808. 3. The pictures Masson took during her stay in the Northern Territory are held at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford (https://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/) as Lydon (2016) highlights. 4. In 1911, Spencer and Gilruth, both scientists from Melbourne University, were appointed by the Commonwealth government to undertake a Preliminary Scientific Expedition in the Northern Territory. In 1912, Spencer moved to Port Darwin as a Special Commissioner and Chief Protector of Aborigines, while Gilruth became Administrator of the Northern Territory in 1913 to promote the development of the territories (Lydon 2016, 78). 5. Enclosed in brackets within the quotes are my own notes to the original text. 6. In her book, Masson refers to the autobiographical novel We of the Never Never published in 1908 by Jeannie Gunn on her experiences as a settler woman in the Northern Territory of Australia at the beginning of the twentieth century. 7. As Michael Young also highlights, Malinowski’s ‘political convictions had “crystalized” (as he put it) during his third epoch in Melbourne. This was largely due to the stimulus of Elsie’s engagement with the socialists (…)’ (Young 2004, 455). 8. Since 1926, the family started spending winters in Bolzano, in the district of Gries, which had been a ‘Kurort’ (a spa town) since the second half of the nineteenth century. As we know from Helena Malinowska Wayne

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(Wayne 1995, II), in Gries, the Malinowski family rented a flat first in Villa Elisabeth (in 1926), and subsequently in Villa Marienheim (in 1928).

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Afterword Marilyn Strathern

This stimulating volume relives for me many of the intellectual pleasures of the Bozen-Bolzano symposium on gender and genre in ethnographic writing, at which these comments were initially delivered. Recalling something of the impact of the original programme, and given that Elisabeth Tauber and Dorothy Zinn have already taken us through diverse themes in how they have woven the chapters together, I keep to that first order of presentation. The intersection of genre and gender proved a hugely generative symposium focus. Among the issues that rose to the surface was the self-consciousness with which ethnographers write—as at once a matter of how to harness it and how to keep it at bay. Time and again, it is the people ethnographers work with who help keep it at bay.

Silence in an Ethnographic Key (Chapter 1) It is appropriate to begin with Nigel Rapport, unusual among anthropologists for the way in which he draws direct inspiration from literature. The

M. Strathern (B) Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 E. Tauber and D. L. Zinn (eds.), Gender and Genre in Ethnographic Writing, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71726-1_9

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central conceptual problematic of how life escapes the writing of it comes from the novelist Virginia Woolf, whom he puts in the company of certain philosophers (life escapes the thinking of it) and a painter (who could never paint his self enough). Writing is but one genre among others that also dwell on the vernacular relationship between individual and society. Here, as an ethnographer in such a world, Rapport keys us into gender in an arresting way. He reports on two contrasting situations: the crossgender relations between him and the farmer’s wife (Doris) who took him in when he was still an anthropological recruit, and the same-gender relations between him and a hospital porter (Ian). Of course each had others at their back—it was Doris and Fred together who tried to make something of the young Nigel, and Ian is a gatekeeper among many porters. Through his own writing, Rapport bridges these field experiences and what many have written about experience as a matter of individual interiority, only to take a surprising direction. A writerly preoccupation with words is displaced by a focus on the silence people keep; whether words are seemingly absent or instead animate constant internal dialogue, the consequences for giving an account of silence defy any simple narrative. On the one hand, many of those he cites describe how silence may simultaneously conserve people’s sense of themselves and join them in their common humanity. This is a theme thoroughly embedded in English literature as a search for authenticity, and the space where it may be found when the clutter of social life is cleared away.1 On the other hand, in debate with fellow anthropologist James Fernandez, interested in how interiority is translated into sociocultural interchange, Rapport points to keeping silent as itself a socially visible action. A thing-in-itself, it bears (he puts it) not only on individual consciousness but on ‘those social others with whom the individual acts’. Rapport’s own motives for keeping silent when faced with Doris’s attempts to teach him how to belong by talking properly are instructive. He was in a dilemma, since engaging reciprocally by voicing his own opinions would be to refuse the hospitality on which he depended. Getting a public reputation for silence was an escape. A cross-gender relation was acted out as a cross-generational one, literally through his infantilization in her eyes as an object of parenting. By contrast, in the company of male hospital porters, he encountered a situation where among themselves porters valued silence from time to time but were the judges of when that time could be taken. Keeping silent was an institutionalized

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privilege: it had to be earned. Only by belonging to their community could a porter be allowed to be left alone. All this has consequences for ethnographic writing, namely what it is that one can or cannot take from what people say, and what they say when they are not speaking. If we regard silence as the kind of comfortable being-at-home relation that someone has with themselves, then it also throws up diverse instrumental uses, as well as the ethical issues on which the essay concludes. Offering his disquisition on silence in terms of his own reticence about the kind of language that has already decided (objectified) what ‘others’ (non-selves) are, Rapport leaves the reader with the project of writing itself. When that writing is a matter of argument and demonstration, analysis and description, what is its object? Intersubjectively, between persons, silence might be an aid to de-objectification. But is it not also—despite Woolf—the writer’s task to create objects: objects to be read, objects of attention, of aesthetic response, of sharing, interpretation, appropriation? We return to the writer’s genre, (object-making) words, not just to their deployment but—we have learnt—to realizing their frequent confinement to those that are speakable and spoken. How, Rapport ponders, might a writer, anthropologically speaking, take care of the rest?

An Ethnographic Inflection to Feminist Writing? (Chapter 4) Traffic between literary sensibility and anthropology is given a further turn by Hande Birkalan-Gedik’s invitation to enter a world until now largely unmapped: the development of feminist praxis in Turkish scholarship over the last four decades. The turn is not just in her search, across diverse writings, for self-conscious textuality. What elsewhere one might take for granted as a relation internal to ethnographic writing, a literary genre tied to a special kind of anthropological investigation, is here uncoupled by a history of events. For the trajectory that feminism took in Turkey requires differentiating and recombining ethnography and anthropology in very specific ways. Unravelling these interconnections— intellectual, institutional—leads to silence, a term that Birkalan-Gedik herself uses for certain feminist-perceived experiences. As I understand it, Turkey from the 1980s onwards witnessed a surge of scholarly interest that knew itself as feminist. With a strong activist

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presence, it took gender to be primarily an issue about women, academically manifest in centres or institutes of gender and women’s studies, as well as in a stream of publications. It was immediately lodged in—thus burgeoned along with—a cross-disciplinary milieu. This kind of milieu, which in the United States (and one might add the UK, Australia and elsewhere) had only slowly unfolded over the previous 15 years, sprang up so to speak fully formed in Turkey, and was receptive of the new surge of scholarly interest. When ‘ethnography’ later became a generic practice for feminist studies, this was the milieu that nourished it; it was never tied to ‘anthropology’ alone. Rather, places where anthropology was taught were (silently) left or kept themselves somewhat to one side, and anthropology was not the impetus it had been elsewhere to developing feminist scholarship at large. What Birkalan-Gedik derives from her historical investigations is that, in turn, the reflexive sensibilities that feminist scholarship brought to anthropology in those elsewheres—and arguably enhanced, even if such scholarship did not alone open up space for, the literary and political sensitivity of the ‘Writing culture’ programme—was a moment that in Turkey never happened. The specificity of the case makes one realize how much indeed gets taken for granted in diverse traditions. With considerable candour, Birkalan-Gedik sets against this history a delineation of ‘feminist ethnography’. If, in Turkey, mainstream anthropology was in this regard left behind, many cross-disciplinary ethnographies seem to her to suffer from what she calls ‘weak textuality’. Their power has lain in developing a feminist analysis largely independent of any one academic discipline (e.g. promoting the method and theory of intersectionality), as well as in continuing to speak to feminist activism. But that aside, they often fail to engage critically with the practice of writing itself. Is that because other kinds of practice, such as long-term fieldwork, do not or cannot provide a model? The feminist conviction is in place, but the reflexive and experimental possibilities she would seek in a fully ethnographic self-consciousness may be passed by. This chapter provokes two pertinent questions. The first is in relation to what anthropologists know about themselves, and the histories that have made them. Outside Turkey, anthropologists often complain about other disciplines claiming to do ethnography, but what about the varied differentiations and recombinations of theirs with just such other disciplines? In the United States, in particular, the radical–critical potential of feminist anthropology came to join with other work on sexualities,

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including queer studies and masculinities, while many feminist anthropologists have turned their attention to biotechnology and the new genetics, to science studies, to inter- and multi-species ecologies, and so on. The second is about the potentiality and limitations of different kinds of literary genres, and what helps propel a writer to analytical experimentation. Above all, an anthropological ethnography produces interlocutors, whether or not their hand is visible. Rapport’s hosts did not hold back from instructing the fieldworker; in her writing Birkalan-Gedik came to cultivate a ‘non-distanced, sincere, intersubjective and emotional stance in representing the lives of women, children, and men alike’, and perhaps we can discern here a more implicit set of instructions from hers.

Writing with and Against the Grain (Chapter 6) Birkalan-Gedik’s starting point (after Abu-Lughod) was whether the descriptive reportage supposedly characteristic of ethnographic—rather than anthropological—writing does not challenge the possibility of a feminist ethnography. Daniela Salvucci offers an astute commentary from the perspective of one who had worked as a reporter of sorts. Apparently Elsie Masson had no problem developing an observational style that ran against the grain of white prejudice. In turn this seems to have infused her husband’s writing, for that was to go both with and against the grain of scientific and literary narration alike. The feminist challenge depends on an earlier one: how the genre of ethnography as such became possible. It is refreshing to hear of Masson’s work, rather than simply of her adjunct status; by focusing on her writing, Salvucci raises questions about Malinowski’s. She dwells on the sharpness of Masson’s observations, as well as on the broad and probing nature of her interests, which covered several strands of a population whose differing perspectives she tried— insofar as she could—to adopt. This visitor to the Northern Territory certainly does not seem to have held back from commenting frankly on what struck her as untoward in people’s behaviour or missing from current convention. Yet here an uncoupling is again necessary, for when it came to categorizing persons Masson’s use of the language of the time is not kind to how her ideas might be appreciated a century later. Salvucci has to steer a tricky passage between moments that history has since treated differently—the everyday racial overtones of Masson’s vocabulary—and the then journalist’s innovative approach to describing white and black Australian life. Masson reported with both condescension and

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empathy. But above all it seems to have been curiosity that compelled her to address the situations she encountered, with whatever section of the heterogeneous populace it happened to be. This then seemingly became part of the descriptive magic with which she wrote, magical insofar as her style ‘sympathetically’ aroused corresponding curiosity and then fascination in the reader. Such a facility is not so far from the skill an anthropologist needs in raising and then answering questions in the course of unfolding an argument. Here the diverse genres of composition that were part of the literary milieu in which Masson and Malinowski lived—travel writing, adventure stories, social novels, all turning on the organization of persuasive narrative—have something to tell us: how to move from one episode or topic to another. Latter-day critics have sometimes said that, without the socialstructural or ‘systemic’ theorizing that was still embryonic in the early twentieth century, Malinowski had no reason to write about one aspect of Trobriand life rather than another. Indeed anthropological accounts were very often organized as just that, lists of topics. To me, of all that Salvucci has brought to our attention,2 Masson’s letter of 29 May 1918 conveys a wonderful prescience. She is writing about Malinowski’s arrival on Vakuta during his pursuit of kula exchanges. ‘It is like being “in” a story to row up a creek or follow a road, and literally not know what happens around the next bend’. The story line! In the end, the famous Argonauts gathers what he then wanted to say about the Trobriands into an account of kula voyaging, from landing place to landing place, simultaneously construed as a travel narrative and a journey through Trobriand culture. How Masson became ‘the incorporated wife’, incorporated as Salvucci suggests into her spouse’s career just as different genres remain enclosed within anthropology, suddenly becomes clear. By the time she was 35 and diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, so much had already happened in terms of children, moving houses, Argonauts published, Malinowski’s London appointment; who knows what another 35 years might have brought. But it is especially the perspective from an institutionalized discipline that subsequently rendered her invisible, that is, from anthropology’s growing professionalism, evident in the tenor of her husband’s departmental life, the succession of students, the famous LSE seminar, collegial networks and so forth. Authorial collaboration alone could never hold its own against that level of visible ‘anthropological’ activity.

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Devising Reciprocity (Chapter 3) Alongside Paloma Gay y Blasco’s conviction that making knowledge through ethnography is inherently collaborative, the idea of collaboration is thoroughly complicated by Liria and Paloma’s tale. First, though, note that what becomes a strong presence in this chapter was foreshadowed by Salvucci’s comments on that diverse cluster of women who collaborated with established anthropologists on the point of gaining professional prominence.3 As the former appear today, the more visible were themselves writing, sometimes experimentally, sometimes fictionally. This was the time when ethnography was emerging as a genre of its own, and long before it became theorized (as dialogical or whatever). Otherwise put, a kind of periphery was created in the early effort to define professional prominence: anthropology was to be driven by theoretical agendas. Making an anthropological life outside such theoretical framing may be welcomed as a challenge; it takes courage to talk of the anguish. What happens when the often (perhaps too easily) acknowledged collaborations with interlocutors include collaborative effort not just in authorship but in the praxis of writing? Gay y Blasco’s experiment in writing with Hernández, the Liria whose life she had documented but who now made her (Paloma) step out of accepted modes of analysis, was based on a commitment as much experiential as theoretical. On Paloma’s side it was a means to engaging with Liria on recognizably reciprocal terms. But to organize a text on such terms plunged Gay y Blasco into a changing terrain of expectations and interpretations, and she became uncertain of—among other things—how to proceed methodologically. In finding a counterpart engagement with uncertainty in the works of some of those earlier women—exemplars, forebears—she also found something else. If she was echoing previous struggles with the unreliability of reporting/reportage, with the instability of knowing, and a sense of narrational failure, were their efforts not saying something about any ethnographic enterprise? Like attention to Masson’s writing exposing something of Malinowski’s, were they not revealing fault-lines that invariably accompany the making of social knowledge? From among those who tried writing themselves, several had stressed the value put on being prepared to let people choose the terms through which to speak to an anthropological audience. Here, in effect, they were creating other kinds of collaborators, subjects of study, anticipated in those situations where the scholarly collaborator was already herself an

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interlocutor. Many anthropologists have hoped to bring about something like this, for one purpose or another, and indeed the actor’s voice, long seen as part of the data, has increasingly been seen as part of the analysis too. But Gay y Blasco and Hernández’s joint writing pushes the boat out much further. As a theoretical object, reciprocity is one of those summative anthropological concepts that encapsulate some of the complexities of social life through deducing guiding principles, if only indirectly articulated as such. Turning it around, against the current, they were forcing reciprocity to behave as a literal and voiced guide to their creation of texts. Gay y Blasco’s chapter has necessarily to fall short of much that lay behind her collaboration with Hernández, but as an ethnographic effort she says enough for the reader to imagine that her colleague would approve. Paloma does not have to apologize for writing anthropology, at least insofar as Liria has her own purposes for it. Moreover, Liria is unimpressed with inequality as a baseline: she knows how to measure reciprocity. Or, rather, we might add, differences among mortals pale beside the difference it makes to be doing God’s work—hence the insistence that God’s will be brought into the picture. Gay y Blasco casts Hernández’s openness to her in a humanistic vocabulary, but I do wonder whether talk of common humanity was an idiom that Liria needed. Anthropologists might draw on it, but I revert to the observation that the writing the two undertook revolved around their friendship. If on Liria’s side it was friendship in the sense that one might speak (say) of love between ritual friends, sworn brothers or co-parents, then perhaps it was carrying its own sturdy inflection of loyalty and commitment. Co-writers they were indeed.

Not I but He (Chapter 5) I retain part of Omar Kasmani’s original title, noting that in these recollections of writing Berlin the Bolzano conference also figures. On the occasion I had been struck by the way Gay y Blasco’s paper led into them. For her ‘patchwork’ comes his ‘scenes’, although Kasmani is less inventing a genre than working inventively upon a genre already in fruition. Her friendship with Liria involved struggling with incompatible expectations about ‘writing together’, and if the anthropologist felt they failed, neither completely seeing the other’s view, perhaps this was bound up with the other author’s continuing presence. Kasmani draws in various persons, yet

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conserves them in rather different terms: he is not looking to see Berlin through another’s eyes (one path to thick description). Instead something else happens. The anthropologist is seen to be already with these people, part of the same milieu as they, appearing as another third person. The passage to which ‘Not I but he’ is now attached directly addresses a withdrawal from self-consciousness, that is, from an ‘I’ who plumbs the depths of itself. Instead he hopes to recount his memories as though they were street furniture, and himself a passer-by. Yet there is nothing casual about this exposure to the present; in the end the accumulated presents acquire their own weight. Almost, in a way, it is the genre to which he is contributing that emerges as an enduring friend: in this chapter, the prospect of ‘writing thin’ is peopled with those scholars making the effort alongside him. Kasmani asks what it means for a migrant to study a postmigrant community, and we are shown how words perpetuate prejudice. His answer is a writing mode that attends to his present habitation, that does the affective labour of belonging, a longing to be (in the new place) (present/loved/understood/comforted). So he is writing Berlin through himself, while it is a self deliberately avoiding nostalgia for elsewhere, a deliberateness pushed to the edge through the device of recollecting other times and places (even daring to mention missing someone) from which longing is displaced to make the recollection itself stick. The past comes into the picture as a being of the present place. Moreover, his friend, the genre, deploys a figurative language that hardly draws on other people’s words, not needing to give them ‘voice’ as is frequently the idiom of (ethnographic) depth. Cultivating descriptive thinness takes away some of the power words ordinarily have. Instead of using more words to get out of the problems that words get one into, this writer pares them down to make room for the abundance of everything else.4 Gender, Kasmani observes, pervades the text. If the cultivation of affect, knowing through feeling, is to be drawn entirely from the way he is presently ‘in Berlin’, then it matters the kind of third-person he is. It affects where he sits, what he observes, who talks to him, the intimacies he seeks. And if his conceptual offering is a ‘scenic genre’ then we can take his diverse scenes, felt modes of city dwelling, as gendered too. Yet that is not because his writing is organized from the perspective—selfconsciousness—of himself as an identifiably coherent subject; rather it is surely because of the writing’s own queering effect. Ethnographic writing can be allowed, as he puts it, to tarry, carry forth or saunter in and out

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of minds and diaries. In his telling phrase, such writing turns (itself, him, us) cruisy. Scenes within scenes. On the occasion I said: ‘I was captivated by this writing. At the same time, I confess to a certain awkwardness. This is what I wrote before I came here: “This is lovely as a piece for silent reading, but I do not feel entirely comfortable as a commentator. I wonder if the awkwardness comes in part from the fact that I cannot use the third person device for Omar in order to create the distance that commentary ordinarily requires – it is already pre-empted. Perhaps she will not feel so awkward in his presence, listening to him speak”’.

Experiments in Engagement (Chapter 2) Kasmani created a situation where no one need observe the observer. By contrast, as an activist, Marina Della Rocca is observed and described: stepping into an arena of which she is already part, she has to make herself freshly visible to it. Her account brings us into a differently gendered space from that of the previous chapter, although it too concerns migrants. It is a space institutionally focused on women (seeking help, offering help), and to which she brought a set of ameliorative intentions: the hope that studying a familiar workplace would bring an increment in understanding how to improve things. The passion with which she pursued this sprang partly from her former role as at once an antiviolence operator and a feminist activist. So she was already an insider of sorts. However—and we might look back on the temporality of Kasmani’s piece—the space was also a kind of time, since what she saw as a continuity of care on her part was not received that way by those in charge. Her private motivation had not generated public entitlement. The theoretical perspective on which Della Rocca draws, intersectionality, aims to overcome rather than encourage marshalling information into different areas, at least insofar as it opens up policy-oriented research to the overlapping nature of organizational demands. Where official response is concerned, a welfare system unable to deal with the way problems in one area affects those in others perpetuates an institutional vacuum. What feminist debate makes all too clear with respect to the multidimensional nature of structural violence is here woven into a practical agenda with respect to bureaucracy on the ground That same multidimensionality also leads to the research questions that make this chapter an apt ending point for the Afterword. Women’s predicaments do

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not vanish from their being inside the shelter, nor for that matter inside a project of research, and here Della Rocca pursues another very practical agenda through her writerly experimentations, how to speak politically. The women’s shelter also gave shelter to her: the project it stood for allowed her to finesse both analytical and activist concerns. It also provided her with interlocutors, the other operators,5 who helped at each step. Thus she scrutinized her previous work in the company of some in order to query how she had reproduced herself (‘not her but I’); collaborated with them and others in the compilation of her texts (here ‘voice’ has a positive inflection), and made them all a reference point for her subsequent advocacy writings. Contouring this account are the intersections of Della Rocca’s own multiple position. If her policy orientation required her to articulate a specific lexicon, then it was with not only feminist and anthropological axioms in mind but also her ethnographic placement. The terms of analysis and description had to resonate with the operators’ language, while opening that up to innovative moves in the apprehension of migrants’ sufferings, for example through promoting the concept of agency. Similarly, consider how she handles the concept of vulnerability, a term often used to conceal inequalities and injustices (‘the vulnerable’, en masse, becomes a label similar to that of victim). However, Della Rocca effectively deploys the concept to describe the strategy by which she exposed herself to those co-operators rendered vulnerable by her enquiries: she made herself in turn ‘vulnerable to their critical analysis’. Yet what might be somewhat momentous for an author afforded insufficient credibility for her to be awarded automatic access to the shelter on night-service. The operators had other people to think about. And, when it came, the newly approved ethnographer had in turn to undo much previous learning. This included the kinds of relations she had with the migrants, who were looking for (her old practices of) bureaucratic advocacy; she notes she was also told that perceiving her personal ties to the operators made some of the migrants guard their responses. In sum, in aiming for a public focused ethnography beyond academic debate, she serves the latter too. Della Rocca at once harnesses authorial self-consciousness and makes room for the people who help keep it at bay.

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We, the Readers The focus on ethnography reminds us that every time Malinowski is recalled as a founder of fieldwork he is being recalled through his—‘his’, ‘her’, ‘their’—writing. There is no doubt as to the spell it has cast. That these days readers might wish to celebrate it, or criticize it, as a work of multiple hands does of course reflect present times. We think we want to get out from under the spell, that we see things with clearer eyes. Yet what is so invigorating about the discussion that the editors have put on the table, as it extends across these contributions, is that it also invites us to witness the power of new spells in the very weaving of them.

Notes 1. In vernacular terms authenticity or integrity thus trump criticism; like sincerity, the supposed inaccessibility of ‘true’ feelings appears beyond reproach. 2. Already encompassed no doubt in the observations of Harry Payne, and others who have noted the influence of the travelogue, to which Salvucci refers. 3. It involved both cross-gender relations as between husband-wife pairs, such as Edith and Victor Turner, and same-gender ones as between Ruth Benedict and Ella Deloria—the woman from the area Benedict was studying who knew so much. 4. I realise that I attribute to Kasmani (one kind of) an answer to the question I attributed to Rapport [above]. 5. As well as the migrants (such as the cohort of ‘interviewed women’), who were not involved in the writing. As for the antiviolence operators, did their role create a common viewpoint on their part? The operators became writers (including authoring a chapter of her Ph.D. dissertation), but not anthropologists, ready as they were to engage with one. Perhaps, to the extent that feminist thought was a rubric they held in common, they shared something of a conceptual field among themselves.

Index

A Abu-Lughod, Lila, 20, 22, 24, 102, 104 Academia, 10, 15, 23, 25 Academy/academic, 8–12, 14–18, 20, 22–28, 31, 32, 36 Adventure, 52 Affect/affective, 34–36, 163 Affective turn, 34, 35 Agency, 72, 77–79, 83 Alterethnograpy, 30 Alverson, Marianne, 137 Ambiguity, 138, 141 Anthropology, 224 Applegarth, Risa, 12–14, 16–18, 21, 36, 37 Argonauts , 224 Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal, 109, 111 Audience, 22 Australian aboriginal groups, 198 Australian indigenous life, 191, 211 Author, 114 Authority, 8, 10, 20, 21, 104

Authorship, 27, 101 Autobiography, 21 Autoethnography, 12, 21, 22, 28, 30, 34, 37 Autotheory, 34, 164 B Behar, Ruth, 12, 13, 18, 28, 30, 31, 103, 106, 118 Belonging, 47, 59, 227 Benedict, Marion, 137, 141 Benedict, Ruth, 138, 150 Berlin, 163, 226, 227 Birkalan-Gedik, Hande, 221, 222 Boas, Franz, 138 Boundary work, 18 Bureaucracy, 228, 229 C Canonical, 10, 12, 14, 20, 23, 36 Central discourse, 14 City, 165

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 E. Tauber and D. L. Zinn (eds.), Gender and Genre in Ethnographic Writing, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71726-1

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INDEX

Co-authored, 108 Collaboration, 26–30, 35, 36, 108, 114, 118, 120, 133, 193, 197, 208, 229 Collaborators, 225 Collins, Hill, 11 Colonialism, 195 Colonial life, 199 Colonial relations, 199, 203 Colonial society, 201 Colonized indigenous Australia, 193 Consciousness, 45, 46, 48, 49, 52, 53, 56, 57, 220 Conversation, 49, 56 Cosmopolitan politesse, 49 Cotera, María Eugenia, 147 Cross-gender relations, 220, 230 Cruisy(ing), 163 D Death, 103, 104 De-colonialism, 14 Delbo, Charlotte, 57 Della Rocca, Marina, 228, 229 Deloria, Ella, 137, 141, 147, 150 Descriptive, 9, 19, 20, 211 Desire, 53, 167 Dialogue, 152 Differences, 100–104, 108–110, 115 Domínguez, Virginia, 147 E Ecevit, Yıldız, 116, 117 Écriture féminine, 114 Eliot, George, 57 Embodiment, 20, 21, 34, 53 Emotion/emotional, 53, 103, 104, 107 Empowerment, 76–78, 82, 87, 90 Epistemology, 14, 18, 22, 101, 116 Ethnographic fiction, 164

Ethnographic genre, 136 Ethnographic novel, 106 Ethnographic writing, 133 Ethnography, 166, 222, 223, 225 Ethnonationalism, 109 Experience(s), 100–103 Experimentation, 11, 12, 16, 18, 26, 27, 33, 153

F Failure, 138, 149 Feeling, 170 Feminism, 9, 19, 21, 26, 30, 31, 221 Feminist, 10–12, 15, 17, 24–36 activism, 100, 108, 115, 117–119, 123 activist, 228 anthropology, 108, 117, 222 challenge, 223 debate, 228 embodiment, 22 epistemology, 100, 107 ethnography, 18, 99–103, 105, 108, 113, 115, 117–121, 123, 124, 222 fieldwork, 101 perspective, 71, 72, 76 scholarship, 222 textuality, 100, 101, 103, 113, 116, 122–124 Feminization, 12 Fernandez, James, 47, 48, 52, 220 Fiction, 46, 56, 168 Fieldwork, 8, 9, 11, 16, 21, 23, 35, 180, 222, 230 Fieldworker, 223 Freedom, 51 Friction, 144 Friendship, 226

INDEX

G Gardner, Susan, 150 Gay, 179 Gay y Blasco, Paloma, 225, 226 Gecekondu, 102, 103, 105 Gender, 99, 102, 104, 110, 111, 114, 116–120, 124 asymmetrical, 190, 196 exclusion, 193 incorporated, 211 studies, 117, 118 textuality, 104 Gender-based violence, 73, 74, 91 Genre, 99, 100, 118, 122 Geography, 169 German, 183 Gieryn, Thomas, 18 González, Jovita, 137, 147 Greene, Graham, 68 H Haraway, Donna, 22, 25, 152 Haunting, 180 Hegemony, 30, 33 Hernández, Liria, 225, 226 Homeliness, 49 Howard, Elizabeth Jane, 46, 66 Humanism, 147 Hurston, Zora Neale, 17, 20, 21, 137, 147 I Identity, 48 Inchoate, 47, 48, 52, 68 Indigenization, 17 Indigenous Australia, 197 Indigenous authors, 18 Indigenous knowledge, 18 Indigenous scholars, 17 Individual, 46–57, 59, 64, 67, 68 Interiority, 48, 49, 220

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Interlocutors, 226, 229 Intersectionality, 11, 13, 31, 74, 78 Intersectional perspective, 74, 77 Intimacy, 163 Introspection, 53 Irigaray, Luce, 46, 66, 67 Ironic, 52, 65 Islam, 165

K Kasmani, Omar, 226–228 Kurdish, 103, 106, 107, 110, 111, 115

L Ł˛acka, Józefa, 2 Language(s), 8, 13–15, 25 Larkin, Philip, 52 Lather, Patti, 152 Lawless, Elaine, 29 Levinas, Emmanuel, 46, 67 Life projects, 49, 52 Life story, 134 Literary, 11 Literary genres, 223 Literature, 16, 219, 220 Love, 54, 55 Lutz, Catherine, 19

M Malinowska, Helena, 1, 3, 5, 6 Malinowska, Jozefa, 1, 3–6 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 7–10, 16, 19, 22, 27, 35, 133, 223–225, 230 Masculinity, 32, 33 Masson, Elsie, 3, 7–10, 19, 22, 36, 223–225 Mead, Margaret, 16, 19, 23, 37 Memoir, 136, 177 Migrant belonging, 165

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INDEX

Migrants, 227–229 Migration, 170 Mosque, 184 Motherhood, 107, 108

N Narrative aspect, 205 Narrative description, 206 Narrative rhetoric and style, 195 Narrative strategy, 211 Narrative style, 193 Narrative writing approach, 192 Narrative writing style, 196 National, 100, 109, 110, 123 Nationalism, 100, 109, 112 Nationalist, 101, 109 Nationalistic, 112, 113 Nation-building, 109 Nation-state, 110 Neukölln, 184 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 53 Non-academic, 23 Non-canonical, 23 Novel, 114 Novelistic writing, 123

O Objectivist, 12 Otherness, 46, 55, 66–68

P Parsons, Elsie Clewes, 137, 143 Passion, 54 People of colour, 10, 11, 16 Peripheral discourse, 14 Phenomenological, 47, 48, 56 Poetry, 114 Political engagement, 193, 202, 203 Popularization, 22, 23, 192, 196, 211 Porous scene, 173

Positionality, 11, 22, 29, 31, 32, 36 Positioning, 71, 79, 83, 85, 86, 89 Positivist, 12 Postcolonialism, 14 Postmigrant, 165 Postmodernism, 18 Power, 71, 74, 83–85, 89, 91 Private archive, 164 Professionalism, 224, 225 Public, 23–27, 164

Q Queerness, 32, 163

R Rappaport, Joanne, 149 Rapport, Nigel, 142, 219, 220 Reciprocity, 24, 29, 138, 142, 226 Reed-Danahay, Deborah, 21 Reflexive turn, 12, 20 Reflexivity, 11, 21, 28, 31, 112, 113 Religion, 170 Religious, 169

S Saints, 169 Salvucci, Daniela, 223, 225 Same-gender relations, 220 Sameness, 100, 101, 110, 112, 123 Scene, 163 Self, 47, 49, 51–53, 55 self-consciousness, 222, 227, 229 self-reflection, 12 self-reflectivity, 114 self-reflexivity, 101, 103, 104, 108, 113, 122, 124 Senses, 21 Sex, 170 Silence, 46–52, 56, 57, 61, 62, 64–66, 68, 220, 221

INDEX

adventures of, 55 anthropology of, 49 appreciation of, 46 ethics of, 66 explorations of, 49 feminity of, 45 focus on, 48 habitus of, 63, 66 homeliness of, 50, 66 humanity of, 68 mapping of, 66 meditative, 66 pragmatism of, 55 privilege of, 58 significance of, 66 Solitude, 52 South Tyrol, 191, 193, 208, 209 Spencer, Stanley, 54 Steiner, George, 55 Stirling, Nina, 3 Strathern, Marilyn, 8, 31, 36, 101, 108 Structural violence, 75, 76, 80, 82 Subjectivity, 20, 46–48, 56, 67 Sufi ritual, 165

T Tauber, Elisabeth, 219 Textual authority, 101 Theory, 20 Thick description, 173 Thin attachments, 173 Third-person, 175, 227 Time, 170 Trobriands, 224 Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, 144 Turkey, 221, 222 Turner, Edith, 137, 143, 151

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Turner, Victor, 138 U Uncertainty, 138–140, 142, 225 United States, 222 Urban, 166 V Victorian novel, 194 Victorian novelists, 194, 206 Visweswaran, Kamala, 13, 18, 19, 30, 32, 33, 37, 152 Voice, 8, 11, 17, 20, 25, 27–30, 57, 101, 113, 118, 119, 121, 122 Vulnerability, 74–77, 79, 80, 87, 229 W Welfare system, 228 Wolf, Margery, 11–13 Women, 7, 9–13, 15, 16, 18, 19, 21–24, 27, 28, 30–33, 35 migrant-origin, 72, 78, 79, 85, 90, 91 shelter, 72–75, 77, 78, 83, 85–87, 89, 90 Women Writing Culture, 12, 13, 15, 18, 19, 30, 31 Woolf, Virginia, 45–47, 50–52, 56, 66, 220, 221 Worldviews, 49, 52, 57 Writing Culture, 11–13, 15, 18, 20, 26, 31, 34, 36, 102, 103, 112, 222 Z Zinn, Dorothy, 219