An Anthropologist in Communist Romania, 1973-1988
Secret-police surveillance redirected one scholar's research projects in ways that ultimately yielded a changed understanding of cold war Romania and its past.
A Political Ethnography of Rural Communities under an Authoritarian Regime: The Case of Belarus
This article firstly explains the conditions for a political ethnography survey conducted in rural Belarus between 2006 and 2013. Three difficulties became apparent: conducting a survey primarily among the lower classes; carrying out this ethnographic study in an environment – the rural world – in which the State, via its economic and administrative structures, is omnipresent, and in which there is particularly strong control over the people; and studying politics in an authoritarian regime inherited from the Soviet Union, which does not tolerate challenges to its authority or critical debate. The article then characterizes the implementation procedures for a “discrete ethnography”, which proved to be a fruitful approach for the collection of material, based primarily on three techniques: the “deceremonialization” of the survey situation, familiarization with the subjects of the survey and the symmetrization of relationships by self-exposition. It is worth noting that this article is the translated version of an article called “Enquêter en Biélorussie. Une ethnographie politique des mondes ruraux en régime autoritaire”. The original version is openly available on the BMS website as a complementary document to this article.
The politics of becoming bodies: Sex, gender and intersubjectivity in motion
Abstract This paper presents readers with one (research) story about (sexed and gendered) bodies not as objects with inherent boundaries and properties but as material-discursive phenomena. In telling such a story I examine the role that the screendance, Becoming Bodies , has played in knowledge production and argue for a less ontologically ‘old fashioned’ view of what counts as ‘evidence’. Throughout the paper I draw from a range of feminisms: biological, phenomenological, poststructural, psychoanalytical, and post humanist and performative scholarship of sex and gender. These discourses contest nature/nurture, male/female, body/mind dualisms, and take the political and ethical view that bodies are not neutral; that sex and gender, being a woman or a man are both socially and biologically constructed forms of identity (similar to class and race) that are acquired and learned through socio-cultural regimes of discipline and intersubjective bodily practices. Building on this dynamic and developmental bio-psycho-social view I discuss selected aspects of interview data: (1) the material-discursive tensions and contradictions of sexing and gendering bodies and (2) troubling the intersubjective implications of this for clinical practices.