Associate Professor of Sociology and International and Public Affairs at Brown University, her book, Capable Women, Incapable States: Negotiating Violence and Rights in India, was published with Oxford University Press in 2021. Her writing has won awards from the American Sociological Association, the Eastern Sociological Society, the Law and Society Association, and the Society for the Study of Social Problems. She serves on the editorial board of American Journal of Sociology, Law & Social Inquiry, and Sociological Theory. Her research analyzes how political movements influence the evolution, implementation, and enforcement of human rights, with special attention to rights concerning gender-based violence. Currently, she is conducting research on the legal and social implications of the fetal personhood movement in the United States.
A View from Nearby: Ethnography as Sociable People Writing.
Les Back is Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow. He is also a journalist, broadcaster and musician. His published work is mainly in the areas race and racism, ethnicity, multiculturalism, urban culture, music and sport. His book Migrant City (Routledge, 2018) (co-authored with Shamser Sinha, Charlynne Bryan, Vlad Baraka & Mardoche Yembi) develops an experimental mode of co-creation in which research participants are also credited as authors. Most recently he has published The Unfinished Politics of Race (University of Cambridge Press, 2022) with colleagues Michael Keith, John Solomos & Kalbir Shukra.
Why is anthropology valuable in today’s world? Claude Lévi-Strauss captured his own answer to this question in his third volume of Structural Anthropology entitled The View from Afar1. The value of anthropology is to undermine the parochialism of Western thinking and to emphasise the cultural diversity to be found within the hinterlands of the human condition. The task of ethnography – derived from the greek ethnos meaning “race, folk, people, nation” and grapho “I write” – was to document and compare the portraits of these different human cultures and cosmologies. However, as Lévi-Strauss noted, an ambiguity remained at the heart of this version of anthropology’s vocation between a desire to record the variety of humankind and the sense that there are also shared resemblances and structures.
I want to use Lévi-Strauss’s reflection as a starting point for re-thinking the value of ethnography in our time and the narrow-minded political culture that has taken hold in large parts of the world. As Zygmunt Bauman commented, our politics is populated by strongmen and women like Donald Trump to Marine La Pen whose answer to a world of divided connectedness is to build walls and retreat behind them. Rather than searching for far-off differences to compare, I want to argue that ethnography – as the art of listening, learning and telling and showing – is well-placed to make sense of how cultures combine, move and are situated in contexts while remaining linked across place and time. The nearby always contains the view from afar but not in quite the same way that Lévi-Strauss meant it. I want to make this argument for sociable people writing by reflecting on my own experiments with doing ethnographies of racism and multiculture in London differently and sociably while also reflecting on the promise of co-produced knowledge and its limits.
1Claude Lévi-Strauss, The View from Afar, London: Penguin Books, 1985.