Carceral and Colonial Memory During Pandemic Times in the Philippines

#CommunityPantryPH is a mutual aid movement that began in the Philippines in April 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic. The movement is founded on the slogan ‘give what you can afford, take what you need.’ Instead of the movement receiving an overwhelming welcome, especially within conditions of food scarcity and health insecurity during the long-lasting pandemic, the Duterte government attacked volunteers with ‘red-tagging’ tactics—the malicious calling out of individuals as communists, which may result in harm both online and in real life to those red-tagged. The public response also circulated myths about the supposed indolence of Filipinos receiving aid and how the volunteers are fanning a culture of dependence among the poor. In this article, I introduce the concepts of ‘carceral memory’ and ‘colonial memory’ in understanding colonially inherited punitive, civilising, and self-deprecatory logics that have become embedded in postcolonial disciplinary regimes, and which suppress dissent and shape popular attitude and consciousness in the Global South.

Introducing Volume 4

Welcome to Volume 4 of Commoning Ethnography.

‘My Grandmother Never Told Me That Before!’

Hmong ethnic minority populations in Vietnam’s northern borderlands have a long history of oral tradition and story-telling. Yet with an historical absence of literacy and no self-created written archives, the first-hand knowledge and experiences of Hmong elders is seldom communicated beyond their kin. At the request of a Hmong community member we developed a collaborative, intergenerational oral history project that would allow stories of Hmong elders to be shared on the internet. Concurrently, we trained Hmong youth in research methods, helping to improve their English skills and contribute to inter-generational knowledge transfer. Drawing on debates regarding collaborative North-South ethnography, positionality and critical reflexivity, and feminist fieldwork approaches, we contemplate our roles as two Global North researchers interacting with Global South ethnic minority youth and elders, and the degree to which we were able to help support the creation of subaltern counter-narratives to Vietnamese state discourses of upland minority histories.’

What Dreams May Come

What dreams may come is a piece of ethnofiction that tells the story of a young girl and her grandmother, displaced by the climate crisis and conflict. The story centres on the strong, abiding relationship between the girl and her grandmother. Their relationship is the anchor point for their survival in the new unhappy world that they find themselves in. As an anthropologist of displacement, this short story is an attempt to tell the story of climate crisis, displacement and conflict through a fictional lens, a place where fable and reality coincide and collide.

On Reflexivity in Ethnographic Practice and Knowledge Production

Deployed as much during fieldwork as in writing, reflexivity is itself positioned, its saliency as an epistemological device having transformed over time and space. Re-tracing its initial absence, subsequent rise in popularity and eventual routinization in academia, we position ourselves against reflexivity’s near-total displacement today by a narrow and increasingly prevalent understanding of positionality. We argue for a return to a broader and more relational understanding of reflexivity, proposing a methodological program to achieve and maintain its critical, ethical and political edge. Our aim is to engage in conversation about the value of reflexivity as an iterative and collaborative ethnographic endeavour with potential to produce more relational and engaged knowledge about increasingly overbearing field-sites in the Arab region and beyond.

Dividing the Light

Images can be powerful – and the choices that go into their making, both revealing and obscuring. In 2019 I undertook to make a stained-glass window, based on a photo I had taken ten years prior at a missionary base in South Sudan. I use reflections on this art project to highlight the idea of memory as practice, with a focus on the slippery and sometimes problematic ethics of ethnographic representation as a positioned, porous, and ‘becoming’ subject. Through explaining the context in which the photo was taken, alongside the process of the window’s construction, I reflect critically on discomfort, desire, risk, and imagination, considering the work of the (white) gaze and my own internalised structures of colonial feeling. I evoke ghosts, haunting, and the phantasmal to consider affective connections between (personal and historical) pasts and present, as well as self and other – with acknowledgement that sometimes a past self can also become an other that we must learn to recognise, and dwell with, as part of grappling with the ‘splinters’ of anthropological practice and being.

Graphic Poesis

The author offers a prose and visual analysis of how things make sense only in relation to other things, and experiments with unleashing these obligations.

Cover page

Cover page volume 3

I Said No

Research is an always already whole-self endeavour. As researchers we do not get to choose what parts of us to leave behind at home when we go to work; this is especially clear in the doing of fieldwork. Additionally, what happens in “the field” does not stay there. In fact that is the point. We move between fieldwork and reflection at varying intervals; it is through this corrugated process that research emerges. Research institutions need to recognize and provide appropriate preparation and support systems for researchers when their work takes them outside of the institutions’ walls. What follows is an account of the fieldwork experience that lead me to think about these dynamics of research and a window into those thoughts.