Im/material and intimate relations: Considering ethnographic methodologies for already-surveilled communities
Im/material and intimate relations: Considering ethnographic methodologies for already-surveilled communities
Ethnography, Ahead of Print.
In this autoethnography of ethnographic training and methodologies, I reflect upon unaddressed tensions in a Los Angeles County gurdwara ethnography, pursued as an intellectualized response to the 2012 Oak Creek gurdwara shooting. I theorize the gurdwara (and other similarly sociopolitically located spaces) as “already-surveilled,” where intimacy in a US white supremacist context must also be seen as a forced relation with the state surveillance apparatus. Analyzing field notes from the classroom and gurdwara, I offer three possible approaches to ethnographic inquiry: participant observation, bearing witness, and embodied conviction. I argue that, without an embodied approach, ethnographic approaches fail to incorporate analyses of power and precarity (the material), particularly for communities of belief (the immaterial). Finally, I offer a model for generating theoretical and methodological frameworks from embodied practices of belief or conviction—in this case, Sikh praxes of relation, knowing, and belief that are witnessed across various gurdwaras.
In this autoethnography of ethnographic training and methodologies, I reflect upon unaddressed tensions in a Los Angeles County gurdwara ethnography, pursued as an intellectualized response to the 2012 Oak Creek gurdwara shooting. I theorize the gurdwara (and other similarly sociopolitically located spaces) as “already-surveilled,” where intimacy in a US white supremacist context must also be seen as a forced relation with the state surveillance apparatus. Analyzing field notes from the classroom and gurdwara, I offer three possible approaches to ethnographic inquiry: participant observation, bearing witness, and embodied conviction. I argue that, without an embodied approach, ethnographic approaches fail to incorporate analyses of power and precarity (the material), particularly for communities of belief (the immaterial). Finally, I offer a model for generating theoretical and methodological frameworks from embodied practices of belief or conviction—in this case, Sikh praxes of relation, knowing, and belief that are witnessed across various gurdwaras.