Situating the ‘Crisis of Representation’ in Ethnographic Approaches to Theology and Working Toward Community-Centered, Dialogic Approaches

In this article we unpack the significance of the ‘crisis in representation’ in the field of anthropology for ethnographic approaches to academic theology. The article summarizes and draws connections among other works in this themed issue and presents possibilities for moving forwards with ethnographic theologies that attune carefully to issues of representation. Attending to questions of method, identity, and ethnographic writing, it lifts up some of the diverse and genuinely collaborative approaches to fieldwork that are made possible by the hybrid and complex roles theologians play in relation to the communities and cultures with which they engage.

The Writer as Anthropologist: Teaching Ethnography Through Literature

Literature and ethnographic writing have at least one thing in common - they are both about ‘putting things to paper’. As observed by Clifford Geertz in his Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (Geertz, 1988), the concern with how ethnographic texts are constructed has for a long time been considered irrelevant, even ‘unanthropological’. As a consequence, important aspects concerning the style, imagery and metaphor of great anthropological works have not been included in the standard teaching curricula. This paper tries to see things from a reverse Geertz perspective: how can contemporary prose be used to expand ethnographic knowledge, as well as refresh the sometimes stale scientific discourse. The few chosen examples serve as illustrations of the great potential of fiction storytelling to challenge dominant modes of ethnographic writing, and to teach anthropological concepts and ideas.

Data, Methods and Writing

Methods have been recognised in STS as mattering for a long time. STS ethnographies establish a boundary object with which STS scholars weave a pattern: From such ethnographic accounts we learn that knowledge is produced locally. Ethnography has over the recent decades been highlighted as a key method in STS. And that STS ethnography is specifically shaped by being often configured to consider its forms of collaboration or intervention in the field. This special issue focuses on how methods matter, specifically on how STS ethnographic collaboration and its data are translated into ethnographic writing, or performative of other reality effects. Exploring STS’s own methods-in-action brings to attention the messy landscape of method practice. Our objective in this exploration is to develop a genre of writing about method that fosters response-ability and enables the audience of research output to position themselves between the research materials and practices that were invested into the study. This special issue hopes to contribute to STS engagement with its methods by way of methodography. Methodography serves as a genre of analytic writing, that articulates specificity and scrutinises the situated practices of producing STS knowledge.

Critical Reflections on the Konyak Naga Ethnography

The Konyak Nagas who inhabit the state of Nagaland in Northeast India have generated considerable anthropological interests since the colonial period. This eastern Naga tribe was mentioned in several colonial reports, but they came into prominence in anthropological literature, following Fürer-Haimendorf’s ethnographic monograph The Naked Nagas: Head-hunters of Assam in Peace and War. Fürer-Haimendorf had conducted fieldwork in Wakching village in the present Mon district between 1936 and 1937, setting off a new genre of ethnographic writing on the Naga tribes. Sifting through Fürer-Haimendorf’s writings, this article attempts a critical analysis of Konyak society and culture in light of recent developments in ethnographic studies. As argued, the Konyak Nagas are far removed from the colonial representations, but they still suffer from exotic imageries in the popular imagination that, in turn, has influenced ethnographic works. This article reflexively analyzes the Konyak Naga ethnography against the backdrop of a rapid sociocultural change facing the community.

Homonational tongue?

This ethnographic writing animates the communal role of language through onē-kotoba (queen’s language) among Ni-chōme volleyballers (amateur volleyball-loving gay men in Tokyo). This gayly effeminate speech style remains firmly entrenched in Japanese media-representations of gay male characters despite its alleged rejection by actual gay men as well as its problematic characterization as being disrespectful to women. By adopting an ethnographic approach anchored in performance studies, I address onē-kotoba not in media but one real, perhaps unexpected, context of use. As Ni-chōme volleyballers swing between discretion and disclosure by fashioning language(/gender), such tactical performance of onē-kotoba lubricates an aesthetically pro-silence erotic play in tension with Japan’s – retrospectively and arguably – family-oriented, if not homophobic, sociocultural orientation resistant to “out-and-proud” activism. Overall, this ethnographic research highlights the enduring difficulty of radical coalition among diverse populations, as I spotlight Ni-chōme volleyballers by discussing what has been in Japan in relation to the Euro-American resistance-minded queer theory.

Digital Encounters of Surrogacy: Nodes of a Fictional Ethnography

The article addresses the question of alternative ways to writing ethnography and more specifically, the ethnography of surrogacy. It focuses on the example of a digital ethnographic artifact that was created in order to host fictional representations of surrogacy practices. The article presents ethnographic material from a recent research project that focused on experiences of surrogate parenthood of Greek and Cypriot intended parents. The digital artifact demonstrates how multimodal anthropological narrations may represent, and simultaneously evoke, sensory experience through the temporal and spatial digital unfolding of interlocutors’ stories. Indeed, the article explains the structure of the artifact and discusses specific digital nodes which depict interlocutors’ testimonies of longing, waiting, uncertainty, vulnerability, pain, loss, joy, and safekeeping before, during, and after surrogacy procedures. In the context of the ethnographic artifact narratives and non-narratives of motherhood, fatherhood, and pregnancy refer to a variety of precarious contexts of placeness/emplacement, legality/illegality, and connectedness/disconnectedness without relying on conventional textual ethnographic writing. Drawing from selected ethnographic examples as they relate to the literature of assisted reproduction, the authors argue that digital nodal narration enables both the cultural contextualization of individual experience as well as its affective and intellectual correlation with similar and antithetical experiences of other field interlocutors.

Richang: An Affect-Inflected Ethnography of Chinese Livestreams

I tracked one Chinese livestreaming platform Douyu from its emergence as experimental subsidiary of a Video on Demand platform in 2013 to its status as an ordinary medium of mass entertainment in 2018. This affect-inflected ethnography is written based on participant observation of three channels on Douyu as I exhibit the microcontexts of each channel in chronicles of affective events, long pauses of silence, repetitive and incoherent dialogues, asymmetrical debates, and sporadic moments of emotional meltdown. This ethnographic writing is a contact zone, a provocation, and, by proxy, a dialogue between academic theories (especially from television studies), user practices, and my informants’ own attempts at theorising how and what livestream feels and means for them.

The bystander and the passerby

Berlant, Lauren and Kathleen Stewart. 2019. The hundreds. Durham: Duke University Press.Pandian, Anand and Stuart McLean, eds. 2017. Crumpled paper boat: Experiments in ethnographic writing. Durham: Duke University Press.

A Confessional Representation of Ethnographic Fieldwork in an Academy Sport Setting

Methodological “confessions” are an established genre of ethnographic writing and have contributed to the development of reflexivity in the practice of qualitative research. Yet despite their prevalence, methodological reflections on the specific challenges of conducting ethnography in institutional sport settings have not been developed. The aim of this article, therefore, is to provide a confessional representation of ethnographic fieldwork in a male academy sport environment in the United Kingdom which exhibited several institutional characteristics. Five images are used as stimuli for further methodological reflection in order to illustrate and analyze some practical, ethical, and relational qualities of ethnographic fieldwork. The interpretation and analysis draw attention to strategic ways ethnographers adapt their ethnographic presence in response to specific contextual challenges and constraints. The article concludes with a series of recommendations to guide ethnographic fieldworkers (especially novice ethnographers) in settings of a similar nature.