Narmala Halstead
That an insider-outsider dialectic can allow for somewhat of a disjuncture with anthropological debates and revisionist approaches, notably from the latter part of the 20th century, appears unavoidably reliant both on the ‘immediacy’ of individual field experiences and context-specific power relations in the problematics of humans studying humans. Following on from such varied anthropological accounts, a significant body of studies has emerged on positionality and field reflections in this century, extending to differing interdisciplinary offerings.
An example of interdisciplinary work in 2024 is the co-edited volume, Out of Place, on fieldwork in law and society. The editors, Lynette J. Chua and Mark F. Massoud preface this work by mentioning briefly a “subjective turn” in social sciences and other areas (xiv). In this interdisciplinary volume (Chapter 9: Becoming a Familiar Outsider), Keebet von Benda-Beckmann reflects on 45 years of field experience from the 1970s, conducted mainly with her husband, Franz von Benda-Beckmann, to note different encounters of familiarity and out-of-placeness. While published in 2024, the chapter is suggestive of earlier periods of reflection on this very immersive fieldwork. von Benda-Beckmann goes on to explore the many familiar and unfamiliar moments of being with people in what became multi-sited work in various localities in Indonesia and the Netherlands. In becoming familiar outsiders, they had to consider how the interactions unmade this notion, not least in the insider treatment that they obtained in the field from neighbours, much beyond their expectations. This would also be opposite to moments where they needed to be or were ‘placed’ as more distinctly outsiders.
Such issues while specific to the field experiences that von Benda-Beckmann recounts will have recognisable moments, not least in perusals of some of the earlier literature on insider and outsider positionalities that emerged, more visibly so, following debates from the 1960s (e.g., Gwaltney 1976, Jarvie 1969, Jones 1970, Lewis 1973, Maquet 1964, Stocking 1991). Notably, such heightened critical examination of self and other subjectivities differed from much earlier 20th-century approaches: as Mariza Peirano (1998) points out, scholars studying their own societies were not obliged to pursue otherness. This was alongside recognition of researchers emerging from the traditional sites of study, given to such scholars as Hsiao-Tung Fei studying Chinese peasants. Bronislaw Malinowski (1939) in the preface to Hsiao-Tung Fei’s monograph, Peasant Life in China: A field study of country life in the Yangtze, would hail it as outstanding. Malinowski noted: “This book is not written by an outsider looking out for exotic impressions in a strange land; it contains observations carried on by a citizen upon his own people” (xix).
The readiness, decades later, by anthropologists to focus on self and/or others should not be read as any rigid discontinuity with this past. This has to be considered in terms of the spaces where periodic theoretical shifts in the discipline are fostered by critical approaches. Thus, the commonplace-ness today of exploring positionalities bears on significant disciplinary self-scrutiny and processual forms of knowledge-making (e.g. Halstead, Okely, Hirsch 2008).
This invited comment in indicating some of the earlier issues and related developments toward reflexive studies considers that an out-of-placeness (in relation to theoretical issues, analytical approaches, field processes etc.) can be made to appear in order to be questioned and displaced as critical processes of anthropological knowledge-making. This also turns to how roles of insider and outsider have had different levels of visibility, not least where the fixities of observer and observed both have to be maintained and made undone. These processes extend what may be considered context-dependent, where both the researcher and those being studied rely on curating their appearances to each other for particularised outcomes.
Situated Knowledge-Making
Emphases on subjective immersion and reflexive participants belie earlier theoretical traditions of the anthropologist as an objective observer, one somewhat retentive of a notion of being there and being apart, as well discussed. The notion of objective observers could not (easily) be separated from incoming strangers as researchers, inevitably imbued, if not necessarily willingly or knowingly so, with the power of the geopolitical colonial West as the empire. Such observers would nevertheless arrive in remote areas with the expectations of studying and understanding well the exotic others to be found. This provided for a different category of obtaining insider knowledge i.e., the capacity to study others while maintaining a separate stance, as a needed boundary.
As indicated, this boundary alongside the privileged non-visibility of the outsider anthropologist is now one much disturbed: both emerging researchers and those with decades of experience, reflect and write from explicitly stated vantage positions. This is whether they are questioning or are being questioned about their insider and/or outsider (in)visibility. The idea of the native fieldworker, as emergent from those being studied (no longer only particular others), had to be troubled beyond any acknowledged presence (e.g. Jacobs-Huey 2002, Narayan 1993). As Kuwayama (2003) noted, this focus disturbed prevailing approaches to question how natives were located “as objects of representation, which has excluded them as active agents in ethnographic reading and writing” (8).
The confessional mode, not to be confined to styles of earlier materialisations (e.g. fictionalised account of Laura Bohannan’s Return to Laughter: Anthropological Novel under the pseudonym Eleanor Smith-Bowen 1964), earned ordinary status. Autobiographical explorations were to be accepted. In 1987, however, this was not without strong resistance as occurred when Judith Okely and Helen Carraway proposed the theme of “Anthropology and Autobiography” for the Association of Social Anthropologists’ conference, scheduled for 1989. Okely (2022) recalls the atmosphere surrounding this proposal with such reactions as “near crazy” (1). Yet, the proposal was selected and the 1989 conference oversubscribed. It led to the published volume of that title (Okely and Carraway 1992). “One applicant, later appearing in the book, had once been our theme’s most vocal critic” (Okely 2022, 3). Such was the mode of debates and revisionist approaches. Okely (2022) notes:
Decades later, many aspects of the volume are taken for granted and younger generations, if not my own, are bewildered by and incredulous at the 1980s opposition to confronting the specificity of the fieldworker, the effects of her/his interaction and the varying accessibility of indigenous allies in the field (1).
The fieldworker figure would act for further types of displacement, as anthropologists turning to the physical sites of departure rather than the now de-exoticized remote locales, studied at home. Here, the insider as a native was a local expert ‘in place’ reversing the study gaze to back home sites. George Spindler reflecting in 1983 on contributions in the edited volume, Anthropologists at Home in North America: Methods and Issues in the Study of One’s Own Society (Messerschmidt 1981) deemed it apt to note the strangeness within the familiar and his own variously located presence whether at home or elsewhere He reflected:
I have found much in my own society that is much stranger to me than anything I have experienced elsewhere in the field or that I have read about in others’ ethnographies. And whether I work at home or abroad I will carry with me a personal history, a social role, a power position, and encounter prejudices, some of the more important my own (225).
Anthropologists at home became a category to trouble notions of native and remote research locales. In particular, this became an unsettling of placeness in favour of knowledgeable persons. In the research processes and disciplinary scrutiny neither the anthropologist at home nor the native researcher (of the erstwhile exotic place) could be separated into any neatly defined position without attentiveness to shifting forms of these roles and why one might supersede the other in any given context. Thus, the visibility and constructs of nativized as specific to locality became enmeshed in other debates that would continue. This was amidst reflexive accounts and considerations of when the boundaries between the anthropologist and research participants had to be reinforced or reconsidered. These discussions arguably overshadowed earlier critical approaches amid prevailing theoretical paradigms — see, for example, Chris Fuller’s interview with M.N. Srinivas (1999).
Accounts would become interspersed with critical commentary speaking to related questions and problems, to bear on openness to positionality and other shifting of categories and approaches. For example, Nazif Shahrani (1994) pondered: what did it mean as a native to join with Western anthropologists with all the power and dominance that implied conducting research on “familiar surroundings of one’s own dependent, underdeveloped Third World and Muslim culture of orientation?” (20). Shahrani noted the greater bewilderment of the locals to his insistence on compensating for “any goods and services” he needed. This was in the context where “other educated and visiting Afghans” did not similarly do so (40). This was suggestive of the ways locals were also looking to make sense of his explicit anthropological presence, so that he in turn began to interrogate his own emphasis on this convention of payment.
Process of Discovery: Revisiting Analytical Categories
Accounts such as those by Renaldo Rosaldo (1993) attracted significant attention, with his self-scrutiny of his analysis and categories some fourteen years after he conducted fieldwork among the Ilongot of northern Luzon, Philippines. Taking into better consideration how they understood their reasons for headhunting to be rage from grief, Rosaldo would rethink his own critical analysis and assumptions. This was after he himself experienced until then unimaginable depth of grief at the loss of his wife, Michelle Rosaldo. At the inception, Rosaldo could not comprehend the view of an Ilongot that “grief, rage, and headhunting go together in a self-evident manner.” He added, “And, in fact, for the longest time I simply did not” (167); (for opposing views on how he re-positioned himself see Roth et al 1989 and Carrithers et al 1990, separately, see also, Cohen 1992, among others). Coming to new realisations, Rosaldo was to note: “If classic ethnography’s vice was the slippage from the ideal of detachment to actual indifference, that of present-day reflexivity is the tendency for the self-absorbed Self to lose sight altogether of the culturally different Other” (169).
In accounts elsewhere, the Other in the spaces for “un-positioning” would turn back the gaze to look into, or hear or mishear conversations about what was being written (e.g. Brettel 1993). This returns to Kuwayama (2003) who noted that native researchers were at a disadvantage in terms of a particular power imbalance experienced, allowing for insufficient acknowledgement of their work by their external counterparts. Pointing to various accusations of misinformation against anthropologists, he notes that “these misconceptions have more to do with the natives’ outsider status in the study of their own culture than with factual errors anthropologists may have made” (10). He considered that issues would be addressed by relocating native anthropologists dialogically within the power structures of ethnographic representations. The revisionist idea of co-authorship also attracted its own upturning, counterclaims and heated exchanges (see also Crocombe 1976; Strathern 1987, 20).
Notions of interlocutors also came into ‘consciousness’ as those needing to be recognised through their own positioning (as a critical interrogation of any isolated analytical framing and meaning-making). Those speaking back and managing how they were to be seen by those who study them allowed for recognition of forms of field curation, if not so named in these earlier stages. This participant-led curation can be more obvious today on accounts of how those being studied guide their forms of being seen and represented, not least on social media. Further, as Rosaldo reflecting on his revisionist view of the Ilongot’s self-understandings pointed out: “Social analysis must now grapple with the realization that its objects of analysis are also analyzing subjects who critically interrogate ethnographers—their writings, their ethics, and their politics” (176).
Thus, analytical categories had to be better understood as problematic where these categories bypassed the significance of research participants’ self-positioning. This aligns with what Marilyn Strathern describes as “a routine reflexivity, the constant discovery that analytical concepts are context-dependent” (28). This scrutiny also relates to the level of understanding acquired in considering “one’s own culture while studying others” (30). The locatedness of the anthropologist unravelled into relationships and forms of organising knowledge rather than rest on such fixities as place of birth and self-identifications, as Strathern notes.
Boundaries, as Needed
Such issues of knowledge, within and beyond place, to consider insider and outsider roles would pertain to further debates that continued into the 21st century, allowing for an extensive body of research, as signalled (e.g. Anderson 2021, Halstead 2001, Mosher et al 2017, Tsuda 2015). The focus on positionality by researchers has also encircled studies in organisations inclusive of legal institutions where, for example, judicial officers among others can reflect on their work, with or without the researcher’s co-authorship. Such accounts are also concerned with issues of locatedness and insidership: claims of the researcher ‘going native’ (as seen to be no longer managing well the boundary and intersection between insider and outsider) persist, retaining the potential for harm.
This turns to a specific case of the anthropologist as an expert for the people being represented in a court of law. This case is discussed by Hermine Wiersinga (2021), a judge sitting on the judicial panel for what became known as the Dutch context case. The expert for this case, Martijn de Koning (2021), in a rejoinder to Wiersinga (2021) also discusses the misapprehension of his work and presence. de Koning discussed the harmful elements in how he was positioned and where his report was deployed into partial renderings to suit different bases of knowledge-making. He contended:
This also creates potential epistemological clashes regarding the interpretation of ethnographic data by anthropologists, judges, the Public Prosecutor and lawyers. All parties in the trial tried to create hermetically sealed categories that opposed the other side’s claims and everyone did this, at least partly, on the basis of my Expert Witness Report (de Koning 2021, 184).
In a preamble to distinguish how the category of insider and consequential knowledge-making is applied in court settings, Wiersinga opined that what the anthropologist ‘sees’, the judge would endeavour to keep hidden. “As such, in my view, anthropologists offer an outsider’s view whilst the judge, as part of the legal system, is an insider” (Wiersinga 2021, 151). Wiersinga argued that the overt distinction between the anthropologist as an outsider and the judge as an insider prevails, given the different considerations required for evidence-making and legal certainties (for the judge “a case-by-case approach” focusing on defendants’ “concrete deeds”; ibid, 154). Wiersinga pointed to minutes of the public part of the hearing where de Koning was being asked whether he concurred that he was insufficiently distant to the suspect. de Koning replied that he could not do so, noting the internal scrutiny in the discipline to constantly assess the “danger of going native” (ibid, 163).
To emphasise, Wiersinga did note that from the verdict in the case, de Koning was clearly considered to be “very trustworthy and as a matter of fact, as a sort of super witness” (ibid, 163). While noting the uncertainty of the way forward in terms of overcoming her view as a sitting judge, Wiersinga urged for “an attempt to come to more insight and more interest in both the judicial and the anthropological view and more reflection and evaluation” (ibid, 165). In the above case, a need to establish clear boundaries arises — the judge demarcates an insider boundary as a different form of evidence-making; the anthropologist while offering expert knowledge is made to restate an outsider boundary at the hearing, as noted.
How seeking too close an insidership with participants can be dangerous for the researcher comes out in the accounts of Carlos Fausto (2012). He noted his ritualistic transformation into a close friend with a research participant without understanding that such intimacy was tasked with rights to his new friend to be able to enact deadly violence against him. This drew on a customary practice to forestall ‘others’ from killing a friend (by protectively doing it first when required). “Friendship is a bond as intimate and ambiguous as the relationship between killer and victim. My friend is either ‘my future victim’ (jeremiaroma) or ‘my future executioner’ (jeropiaroma)” (203).
In a different way, an instant re-making of an insider into a potentially dangerous outsider is illuminated in the accounts of Shahram Khosravi (2007). He notes his remarkable journey across borders to arrive in Europe as an illegal migrant. Khosravi’s legal status as a Swedish citizen some eighteen years later would still make him liable to be classed as other and to be on the border. In recounting his experience at the Bristol Airport en route to a conference, Khosravi notes how his visibility as a Swedish citizen was made to disappear in the exchange with a security official who pulled him aside after he had cleared immigration. The official, in a “mini interrogation” turned to question him his parents. He refused to answer these questions given his parents’ histories of being persecuted. The official then spoke of the law that could be deployed against him. Khosravi was able to voice dissent, noting that he was being targeted racially, to which no denial came from the official. He thought of returning to Sweden immediately. “This was not an option either until I had answered the questions. Put into a petrifying immobility, I could neither move in nor out. I was indistinguishable from the border; I was the border. (…)” (332).
Khosravi notes that the realisation by the official that he would choose detainment over answering her questions, ended the ordeal with the official wishing him “a pleasant time in Bristol!” This led him to further reflect on the situatedness of his body: while having full rights as an EU citizen, his status could be either out of place or in place, as accorded by invested onlookers. In this instance, as he shares, the official was ready to consider instantaneously whether his body could be unmarked from being dangerous to being familiar.
Further Notes
The above accounts necessarily limited to a small selection of the research being indicated cannot be definitive. The discussions have indicated some of the issues in terms of insider and outsider positionalities. At an earlier stage, such issues were far less visible, rather than being wholly absent. Thus, Alan Barnard (2021) points to the work of Jomo Kenyatta, (Malinowski’s student, who would go on to be Kenya’s first President) who “included reflexive comment in his ethnography of his own people (Kenyatta 1938)” (165). Barnard notes an earlier example in Persian Letters by Baron de Montesquieu (first published in 1721) on fictional travellers being critical of French society. “That book foreshadows not only the genre of ethnography, but also reflexivity (see chapter 10)” (22). Roger Sanjek (1993) points to how Franz Boas initiated a model of “intimate informant-anthropologist partnerships,” one taken up by his students and others to give credit to their assistants. Sanjek notes: “These would include prefaces and introductions, fieldwork reminiscences, and most tellingly in my opinion, life histories. Beginning with Radin’s Autobiography of a Winnebago Indian (1920), this genre took on a life of its own by the 1930s” (14).
The commonplaceness that is now embedded in latter day accounts does not turn simply on timeliness. This must be considered, also, in terms of how paradigms had to be constantly assessed and critiqued, unavoidably so. As Edmund Leach notes in the Preface to Rethinking Anthropology (1961): “Among social anthropologists the game of building new theories on the ruins of old ones is almost an occupational disease” (v). This then marks the accessibility of constantly honed knowledge approaches as shown in the use of ethnography across disciplines (see Schlecker and Hirsch 2001). Here, the forms of conveying lived experiences might in effect always be of value for specifically delineated audiences in sub-fields or for more general audiences, not least with regard to the significant ongoing changes vis-à-vis unprecedented access and voicing on social media. Highlighting and examining an out of placeness as a knowledge category can be mired in other kinds of voicing, including instances where intentionally public persons extend the self-confessional, to further complicate what it means to be present among others.
Narmala Halstead is an anthropologist exploring co-creations of knowledge and contemporary changes in several cities. Her current research - Guyana and diasporic locations - incorporates hate speech, violence and privacy issues on social media. She has held faculty positions at Cardiff University and University of East London, UK. Narmala is an Hon. Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Anthropology, UCL and a member of the UCL Centre for Digital Anthropology. Her publications include: Competing Power: Landscapes of Migration, Violence and the State (Berghahn 2018) and 'Interlocutors and Anthropologist In and Out of Cosmopolitanism' in Nigel Rapport and Huon Wardle (eds) Cosmopolitan Moment, Cosmopolitan Method (Routledge 2023).
Feature Image: Durba Sen, Confetti.
This is part of a book round-table on Out of Place: Fieldwork and Positionality in Law and Society (CUP 2024). Read the other posts here.
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