Scaling the Ethnographic: Opening Remarks
Anthropology seems to constitute itself, in part, by constantly calling into question its practices, objects, scenes, subjects, and concepts. We’d like to initiate a conversation today on new questions and challenges posed by and to ethnography.
As graduate students we arrive at these questions in a very practical manner: in designing our own ethnographic projects, in thinking about collaboration and the pedagogic relationships we form, in considering the audiences we would like to speak to, and in imagining the potential for effects and implications of our work.
So these concerns are at once practical and theoretical.
It’s not our goal to offer or to reach a singular definition of scaling. On the contrary, we find that thinking about ethnography through scale and scaling is compelling precisely because of the range of approaches it suggests.
It enables us to re-imagine what might count as an ethnographic object. In one sense, the choice of a scale for inquiry frames research, limiting the range of a question while enabling situatedness in a field. An ethnography of ghosts, for instance, is very different when situated within a village, a colonial encounter, or the political economy of capitalism.
In another sense, we can take up scaling, seeing how phenomena are not only located in, but productive of, scales. Here, scale and scaling themselves become ethnographic objects with scale-making taken up as a project or achievement that is subject to contestation. For instance, we can ask how human rights are productive of a certain kind of globality. We can also ask how ethnography itself is a scale-making practice.
Today’s conversation will proceed across three panels and will be followed by closing remarks.
We start with a panel titled Inner Space: Scales of Subjectivity. We ask how ethnography might account for the formation of intimacies and affects, how the scales of of interiority engage with and co-produce the worlds in which they are located.
After lunch, we’ll talk about Cosmopolitanism, or Scales of Circulation. We will explore the ways that anthropology might grapple with the processes producing global scales. We ask how to ethnographically understand global and mobile phenomena that are at once everywhere and nowhere.
The last discussion, Material Entanglements: Scales of Liveliness, focuses on ways of thinking about scale that are produced by relationships across radical difference. These emerge from ethnographic projects that engage with relations between non-humans and humans in terms that do not proceed from the assumption of human centrality in world-forming.
“Scaling the ethnographic” seems to come in three parts but we imagine it as one open-ended conversation emerging from contributions from everyone present.
In that spirit, we encourage you to help us construct an open dialogue by contributing your questions, comments, and concerns throughout each panel as we haven’t alloted specific time for a Q&A. There is no audience, only participants. Each panel will be introduced by two moderators.
