Disciplinary Futures and Reorienting Research: A Reply to Jobson and Rosenzweig on Doing Anthropology in the Age of COVID

Olson, Kyle

doi:10.1111/aman.13526

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 13 publications

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“…Currently, as archives are no substitute for participant observation ( Olson, 2020 , p. 172), scrutinising human-nonhuman relationships in a given ecosystem like the Amazon Basin implies a profound corporeal immersion that canalises nature’s subtleties and intricacies. Let me illustrate this point in the following manner .…”

Section: Obfuscated Multispecies Assemblagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Ethnographic Quest in the Midst of COVID-19

Espinoza

2022

International Journal of Qualitative Methods

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The outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 has threatened ethnographic inquiry, undermining its quintessential characteristic. Participant observation, then, has been thoroughly dismembered by the radical measures implemented to prevent the spread of the virus. This phenomenon, in short, has dragged anthropologists to a liminal state within which ethnography is paradoxically caught in an onto-epistemological unstable vortex. The question of being here and not there, during the pandemic, is epitomised in the instability of different spatio-temporal contexts that overlap through technological mediations. Reflecting on previous fieldwork experiences and current virtual inquiries with the Shuar of the Ecuadorian Amazon unfolds how COVID-19 has thoroughly reshaped how the author approaches subjects' socio-ecological settings. Against this background, the article argues that corporeal immersion remains a necessary condition for the anthropological scrutiny of multispecies relationalities amidst the challenging times of the Anthropocene. The article nevertheless demonstrates that the intellectual efforts to grasp the different material temporalities of virtual spaces embrace the ethical principles concerning the renunciation of fieldwork with vulnerable communities. Furthermore, a reflective and speculative stance is proposed to actualise the snapshots of faraway physicalities linking them to past embodied and multi-sensory experiences. It is ultimately theorised how these mnemonic devices operate as creative forms of inquiry that overcome the pandemic consequences, extra-stimulating our cognitive capabilities to reflect on prior and possible socio-material interactions.

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Section: Obfuscated Multispecies Assemblagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Ethnographic Quest in the Midst of COVID-19

Espinoza

2022

International Journal of Qualitative Methods

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How to Record Current Events like an Archaeologist

Magnani

Venovcevs

Farstadvoll

et al. 2021

Adv. archaeol. pract.

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This article shows how to record current events from an archaeological perspective. With a case study from the COVID-19 pandemic in Norway, we provide accessible tools to document broad spatial and behavioral patterns through material culture as they emerge. Stressing the importance of ethical engagement with contemporary subjects, we adapt archaeological field methods—including geolocation, photography, and three-dimensional modeling—to analyze the changing relationships between materiality and human sociality through the crisis. Integrating data from four contributors, we suggest that this workflow may engage broader publics as anthropological data collectors to describe unexpected social phenomena. Contemporary archaeological perspectives, deployed in rapid response, provide alternative readings on the development of current events. In the presented case, we suggest that local ways of coping with the pandemic may be overshadowed by the materiality of large-scale corporate and state response.

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In Mourning: Sociocultural Anthropology in 2020

Berry

2021

American Anthropologist

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This year-in-review article places 2020 sociocultural works within the portal formed by pandemic loss.Moving in the mode of Black feminist praxis, the article stays with wake work (Sharpe) as an analytic to consider articles and born digital media for how they were moved by the situated practices and affects produced through dying from normality and the horizons they summon and grieve. Specifically, Sharpe's formulation of wake work as a labor of vigilant attendance is upheld as a method for how anthropology might mourn the dead while reckoning with Black being in modernity. Prevalent keywords from popular discourse in 2020 organize the article conceptually, putting the force of public debates around "preexisting conditions," "law and order," "staying at home," and being "all in this together" to bear on anthropological analyses of patriarchy, settler colonialism, and racial capitalism.

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Disciplinary Futures and Reorienting Research: A Reply to Jobson and Rosenzweig on Doing Anthropology in the Age of COVID

Cited by 3 publications

References 13 publications

The Ethnographic Quest in the Midst of COVID-19

The Ethnographic Quest in the Midst of COVID-19

How to Record Current Events like an Archaeologist

In Mourning: Sociocultural Anthropology in 2020

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