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In this piece, I explore both the intimacy and estrangement of ethnographic engagements, especially those that have unfolded during the pandemic, as ethnographic fieldwork and research have blurred even more than usual into accompaniment, friendship, advocacy, and mutual support. During this time, I have struggled with more traditional academic writing; for “D” and others, I have found myself unable to muster case studies or to extract quotations from interviews, conversations, and other exchanges to illustrate broader theoretical and empirical points. What emerges instead is a kind of letter to D, a fragmented reflection on her stories, struggles, and points of resistance, interwoven with my own experiences of the same periods of time and of the ways our relationship has evolved over the past few years. The piece considers how the pandemic has transformed ethnographic being-with, or convivencia: over the phone; via WhatsApp messages; through objects, foods, stories, and memories that we exchange in brief masked meetings . . . COVID precautions have flattened dimensionality in some senses but have also opened new space for forms of ethnographic accompaniment, intimacy, imagination, and advocacy. In this sense, the pandemic has illuminated the tendrilled connections between my interlocutors and me in unanticipated ways. Especially given that I now conduct research and advocacy in the region where I live, I explore and convey the seemingly intractable and violent nature of inequality that shapes our different life experiences and puts D, her family, and the other families with whom I work at elevated risk—for disease, for drowning, for violence, for economic calamity, for invisibility, for grief—all the time, pandemic or not.
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On Pandemic Privilege: Reflections on a “Home‐Bound Pandemic Ethnography”
Abstract This essay examines the experience of conducting a “home‐bound pandemic ethnography”—one that toggles back and forth between the ethnographer’s own experience of the pandemic while in quarantine and the very different pandemic experiences of her Latina immigrant essential worker interviewees. Maintaining a split gaze between one’s own experience and those of one’s interviewees, a home‐bound pandemic ethnography lends itself to a kind of reflexivity and comparison that traditional ethnographic “immersion” does not. Involving the disjunctive knowledge of “being here” while listening to the very different experience of “being there,” it throws into stark relief asymmetries built deep into the ethnographic relationship. While ethnographic immersion rests on the illusion of ethnographers’ acculturation so they become a kind of insider–outsider, a “home‐bound” ethnography refuses the claims of traditional ethnography to “truly understand” the plight of the marginalized populations with whom we work. Just as critiques have emerged of anthropologists’ silence regarding our relative immunity from climate catastrophes (Jobson,Am Anthropol,122, 2020, 259) and from state violence (Gomberg‐Muñoz,J Anthropol N Am,21, 2018, 36) in comparison to those whom we research, the pandemic also demands an honest reckoning with the chasm that has widened anew between the lived realities of ethnographers and those of our research “subjects.” Highlighting the discomfort of disjunctive lived realities, a home‐bound pandemic ethnography creates a careful ledger of the ethnographer’s comparative privilege, and questions the very premises of ethnographic immersion.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1827339
- PAR ID:
- 10361988
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley Blackwell (John Wiley & Sons)
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal for the Anthropology of North America
- Volume:
- 24
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 2475-5389
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- p. 98-107
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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