Engaging in the field : multiple positions, identities and actions

Recenzowane materiały z "Conference Held", która odbyła się w dniach 11-13 stycznia 2020 w Belgradzie

Among anthropologists in Poland, the notion of “engagement” still raises some incomprehensible concern. Th ere are probably many factors behind it. On the one hand, the positivist model of science, which dominated for quite a long time, caused many researchers to argue that they were “objective” in their endeavors. On the other hand, the “idle talk” concerning engagement seems to be based on the tactic of separating “proper” and “wrong” forms of engagement. “Wrong” implies here “politically engaged social activity” and thus is transformed into “activism, which means the loss of critical distance, enabling understanding”. Namely, the “proper” engagement turns out to be one that simply involves conducting ethnographic fieldwork. Yet, anthropology is always engaged, thus the question should not be “whether or why we should engage”, but rather “how to do it”? In this paper, based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, I focus on the possibilities and traps of feminist ethnography in the context of positionality, engaged feminist research and activism. To clarify the problematic position of the researcher, I propose to examine the methodological approach, which Jeffrey Juris describes as “militant ethnography”. Th is is a method of studying social movements and activism from within, which includes adopting many identities and roles and constantly moving between supportive actions and internal critique, as well as belonging and distance.