A Manifesto for Patchwork Ethnography

09 June 2020


Read the full manifesto

 


“A Manifesto for Patchwork Ethnography” has been translated into:

(Portuguese) 2023 “Etnografia de Retalhos: Diálogos, dilemas e perspectivas metodológicas feministas para a antropologia,” Anuário Antropológico 48(1): 221–236, translated by Renata Albuquerque, Ana Carolina S. Teixeira e Diego Netto. https://journals.openedition.org/aa/10626#tocto1n2

(Arabic) 2021 Hekmah website, translated by Abdullah Sami. https://tinyurl.com/4ur4sv5b

(Indonesian) 2020 Eutenika website, translated by Anton Novenanto, in consultation with Hatib Abdul Kadir and Dédé Oetomo. https://jurnal.eutenika.org/edisi/vol-1/etnografi-tambal-sulam

 
 

Even prior to the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic, “traditional” anthropological fieldwork was in trouble. For some time now, ethnographers have been questioning fieldwork truisms: separations between “field” and “home,” the gendered (masculinist) assumptions of the always available and up-for-anything fieldworker, and anthropology’s proclivities toward suffering subjects (Anjaria and Anjaria 2020; Robbins 2013). At the same time, neoliberal university labor conditions, the “feminization” of anthropology, expectations of work-life balance, environmental concerns, and feminist and decolonial critiques of anthropology have demanded a rethinking of fieldwork as a process that entails spending a year or longer in a faraway place. Family obligations, precarity, other hidden, stigmatized, or unspoken factors—and now Covid-19—have made long-term, in-person fieldwork difficult, if not impossible, for many scholars. The pandemic has evaporated many a future fieldwork plan and the prospect of continued ethnographic research in the same vein seems uncertain. A growing number of medical experts and observers believe that we might never return to “normal,” suggesting that long-term “traditional” fieldwork could become an impossibility.

See the manifesto’s Google Scholar page and click on “Cited by…” for a list of works that have cited the manifesto.