Elite ethnography in an insecure place

Abstract

Based on ethnographic research conducted with the wealthiest and most powerful business owners and politicians in urban Pakistan from 2013 to 2015, this article examines the particular set of epistemological and interpersonal issues that arise when studying elite actors. In politically unstable contexts like Pakistan, the relationship between the researcher and the elite reveals shifting power dynamics of class, gender, and national background, which are further complicated by the prevalence of rumor and the exceptional ability of elite informants to obscure that which they would prefer remain hidden. Specifically, this article argues that the researcher’s positionality, and the inversion of traditional power dynamics between the researcher and the researched, can ameliorate, as well as exacerbate, the challenges of undertaking participant observation with society’s most powerful.

European social anthropology in 2018: an increasingly recursive public

“…Here, there are clear reasons for concern to the degree that collaboration cannot be an end in itself -nor can recursivity be an end in itself. Often times, anthropologists may need to make a conscious decision to avoid collaborationespecially as they become increasingly 'entangled' (Leenders 2018) with various 'elites' (Armytage 2018). Anthropology has been here before, of course, back in the days when anthropologists were more open about collaborating with the military-industrial complex (Kao 2018).…”

The enclaved body: Crises of personhood and the embodied geographies of urban gating

“…In contextualizing these categories, we draw on a non-dualist ontology of the body and its environment, which tracks the self as an emergent category continuously remade through its interactive environment (Simonsen and Koefoed, 2020). Given the well-documented challenges of participant observation in elite spaces (Armytage, 2018), our focus on enclaved body types shifts the focus from a more phenomenologically individual self to the collective forms of personhood, or normative selves, designed into the operational landscape of the enclave (see Searle, 2013). The aim is to reveal how particular built environments are constructed and metadiscursively defined as valuable and habitable for particular types of classed, gendered, raced, and caste-marked subjects.…”

Conjugated Universalism

“…In line with Mao Tse‐tung's (1990) stress on “social and economic investigation,” the MKP believed that conducting empirical research, or tabqati jaghrafiya (class geographies) (Alam 1975, 7), was necessary for revolutionary theory and strategy, and often published investigative ( tahqiqati ) reports. On the other hand, my urban, Western background enabled me, much like other researchers of Pakistan (Armytage 2018), to “study up” (Nader 1972), including by accessing police surveillance files 3 . Thus, my positionality, a simultaneous “sameness and otherness” that especially afflicts left intellectuals studying progressive movements (Portelli 1991, 39), shaped the sort of empirical materials I was able to collect for this essay.…”