Abstract Field research in politically authoritarian contexts poses special problems for the ethnographic project of pursuing intimacy and trust. During my fieldwork in communist Romania, both up to my denial of entry and during my subsequent public activities outside the country until 1989, I was subject to continuing surveillance by the Romanian security organs, who also interrogated and harassed several Romanian informants and friends. Ethnographic fieldwork is supposed to be about becoming involved in the lives of the people we study. But in the context of pervasive state surveillance and intimidation, where secrecy abounds and the rules of engagement are unclear, we may be naive about our position. Our conventional pursuit of intimacy and engagement thus needs to be balanced by the need for distance and detachment.
This article examines social mobility among University of Cambridge students from working-class socially mobile (WCSM) backgrounds. It makes three main arguments: first, top-down, theoretical class categorisations fail to capture these students’ class position. Second, WCSM students undergo an extended and incomplete process of ‘becoming middle-class’, during which time different forms of capital interplay to create contested class identities. Finally, students struggle to achieve a narratively coherent sense of self, due to the ways in which the social mobility narrative leaves them trapped between ‘failing’ and ‘selling out’, and between ‘sincerity’ (fulfilling their social role) and ‘authenticity’ (rejecting their social role). WCSM students therefore internalise the external contradictions of their class position and undertake significant identity work, a potentially isolating process that can be destabilising when undertaken without support. One of the arguments this article sets forth, then, is that class position impacts on such fundamental processes as self-formation.
Abstract At the heart of the anthropological enterprise lies the gathering of data. Anthropologists find informants; we build networks and cultivate rapport. But we are not the only agents in our field. Fieldworker and informant observe, engage with, and interpret one another; their mutual curiosity may occasionally cross the line into practices of surveillance, which in turn cause each to reconsider and call into question the purpose of fieldwork; anthropologists may find themselves mimicking, voluntarily or not, the cautious silences of their interlocutors, who have their own strategies and domains of secrecy; and, of course, the parallel interests of their respective states (who may sometimes be one and the same) are magnified and distorted in the carnival looking-glasses of fieldwork. This is the Hall of Mirrors, whose myriad reflections are made up of shadows and suspicion, spying and surveillance, smoke and, on occasion, actual fire.
Abstract Drawing from fieldwork conducted among people engaged in criminal activity in Romania, this article explores two distinct forms of surveillance. Firstly, it sheds light on the strategies employed by my informants to thwart surveillance, while ostensibly being under scrutiny by law enforcement. Secondly, it examines how, during fieldwork, I, as the anthropologist, became the subject of surveillance—not by law enforcement or the authorities, but by my informants. In the article, I explore ethnographer positionality through an analysis of the relational dynamics and social practices that emerged from this surveillance, contending that surveillance manifests as a form of social interaction, encompassing dualities of vigilance and uneasiness on one hand, and familiarity and safety on the other. To capture this ambiguity in a fieldwork context, I suggest the concept of ‘caring surveillance’ and argue that surveillance can simultaneously exert control and dominate, while also providing reassurance and comfort to its subjects.
Abstract This article explores how surveillance and suspicion shape ethnographic criminology. Drawing on long-term fieldwork with West African cocaine dealers, it examines ‘the social life of criminalisation’ and its impact on ethnographic practices and immersion. Ethnographers commonly strive to become ‘outsiders on the inside’, balancing participation and observation. However, in the context of criminalisation, where social worlds become surveilled and counteracted, this betwixt and between positionality is often misinterpreted as the hallmark of undercover police, snitches, and emissaries (see also Højer, this issue). The article argues that we need, in such situations, to rework our classical ethnographic modus operandi and ideals in order to be able to research and grasp the encountered insecurity and uncertainty. In doing so, we should embrace our ethnographic difficulties and failures as keys to both methodological advances and empirical insights.
Abstract The power of state surveillance derives, in large part, from the pervasive and paralysing fear it generates in those subjected to its panoptic gaze. In this article, I explore how Turkish dissidents try to fend off such fear of surveillance through the performance of what I call ‘apotropaic belittlement’. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Turkey and its diaspora in Euro-America, I show how critics of the Turkish regime cultivate fearlessness by casting undercover agents and informers as trivial and inferior, and by degrading the surveillance state through unfavourable comparison with an all-knowing, omnipresent God. I ask if such performances hold the critical potential to diminish, or even demystify, the experienced presence of the Turkish state within the everyday lives of political dissidents and exiles.
Sandra Ott, The Circle of Mountains: A Basque Shepherding Community , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 240pp., 1981
This article examines how a Taiwanese immigrant family in Singapore engages in caregiving practices that enable kin or family members to move through life. I contend that silence, in the form of half-truths and partial knowledge, fosters imaginative avenues for others. To illustrate this, I scrutinise the interplay between speech and silence within a community of Taiwanese immigrants in Singapore, whose lives intersected with the era of ‘The White Terror’ in Taiwan. Specifically, I trace the enduring impact of a traumatic event across two generations of immigrants, revealing how the resonance of past experiences continues to shape their lives and politics. In doing so, I argue that the rearranging and re-narrativisation of the past shapes and contours the imaginative possibilities of those who inherit these silences.
Abstract Can we speak of experiencing political pleasure in participating and enacting public policy? In this article I examine the enactment of an innovative framework for local public policy-making in the Basque Country. Aimed at producing alternative social development, ‘Sovereign Hernani’ is based upon public-cooperative-community collaboration of the local government, a citizens’ assembly, and organised social sectors such as energy, care, food, telecommunications, commerce, currency, biodiversity, labour, and housing. Drawing from my ethnography with the promoters and government officials who foster this project, the article suggests it is possible to complement the anthropological study of sovereignty and policy-making with an ethnographic exploration of political pleasure. I conclude that political pleasure is experienced both collectively and in a personal manner, and that in certain socio-political settings it may offer some answers regarding what a contemporary Left could offer to reimagine public well-being.
Abstract The method of participant observation often generates mistrust and suspicion; sometimes participation and observation also result in complicity between fieldworkers and interlocutors. Such ethnographic complicity, however, takes different forms and is expressed differently according to the co-ordinates of local knowledge and social institutions. This article compares ethnographic complicities in central China and in the Wa State of Burma. Accusations of spying, interactions with gatekeepers, and mutual surveillance run their course, according to the respective roles and rules of interaction. What emerges in this ethnographic comparison are two radically different forms of complicity: whereas in central China, complicity tends to be understood as concealment of the illicit, in the Wa State complicity is seen as positive co-responsibility. These differences are explained in relation to the nation-state apparatuses of both settings.
This afterword considers how care and creativity, alongside coercion and destruction, materialise in different ways within the plant–human intimacies and place-making practices examined in this Special Issue. It reflects on the openings that care and coercion afford for making and nurturing roots and relations otherwise, at a time when the perniciously pervasive yet always selective myth of anthropocentrism continues to undermine the grounds of existence for humans and non-humans alike. In doing so, it aims to highlight some of the many ways in which this collection offers alternative imaginaries and practices for enacting multispecies relatings that are ultimately as much about love and beauty as they are about violence and exclusion.
The region of Afrin, Syria, has long been famous for its olive trees. In 2018, violent conflict displaced a large part of the Kurdish population, thus disrupting the intimate bonds that connected people and trees. Through a focus on refugees from Afrin who now live in Germany, the article traces how humans strive to reconnect with the trees they left behind through three distinct modalities, namely remembering, consuming their produce, and continuing to care through ‘remote farming’. Time impacts these shifting interspecies relations, changing the rhythms that intertwine human and arboreal biographies. As the physical separation between people and their trees continues, practices of remote care and cultivation gradually lose their significance, while consumption becomes more prominent. This may, in turn, shape potential multispecies futures.
This article explores a case study from ethnographic research with seed-savers and seed activists in London. It discusses the experiences and reflections of Babu Roy, a working-class man of Indian and Kenyan heritage and veteran anti-racist activist, on the intimate relations between people and plants and how these relations can grow community amongst marginalised and racialised people in the UK's ‘hostile environment’ towards immigrants (see El-Enany 2020; Goodfellow 2019; Griffiths and Yeo 2021). The hostile environment reproduces racialised categorisations of ‘migrants’ and ‘citizens’ and represents an intensified incursion into social reproduction and kinship in which ‘problems’ of migration are located, and policed, within the racialised migrant family (Erel 2018). Babu's gardening practice, which includes teaching working-class and racialised children how to grow food and save seeds, is an act of resistance, a defiant attempt at care, intimacy, growth and flourishing in the face of the hostile environment.
Pablo Wright, Ser-en-el-sueño: crónicas de historia y vida toba , Buenos Aires: Biblos, 270 pp., 16 pp. colour booklet, 2008
This commentary engages with the theoretical implications of human–plant intimacies for migration and mobility studies. Departing from anthropocentric paradigms, it draws on the special issue's ethnographic accounts to foreground the relational, affective, and political dimensions of human–plant entanglements in contexts of displacement. Plants emerge here not as passive background elements but as co-constitutive agents in processes of emplacement, memory production, and resistance. Drawing on concepts from multispecies ethnography, feminist political ecology, and affect theory, the commentary reflects on how plant care, cultivation, and loss reconfigure dominant understandings of home, movement, and belonging. In centering more-than-human agencies, it argues for a reorientation of migration studies that accounts for the material and affective infrastructures of life forged across human and vegetal worlds.
Georgian oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili's Park of Giant Trees, on Georgia's Black Sea coast, has received more media attention for the process of its construction rather than the product. The intimate plant spectacle is mostly for Bidzina himself, the personal ‘hobby’ of a billionaire oligarch who can afford to uproot and transport the giant trees at great expense. This park appears as a spectacle of plant violence to citizens and environmental activists. The bewildered and outraged reaction to this violent process is captured in Salome Jashi's documentary film Taming the Garden (2021), which features those who sold their giant trees to Bidzina, realising afterwards how their intimacy with their trees has been destroyed, along with their shade, leaving only ambivalence and sadness. This article explores how plant intimacies can evoke ‘structures of feeling’ that can be intimate in complicated ways, some of them negative.
This article draws upon my research with Turkish and Kurdish migrants on their relationships with the plants they grow in Germany. Relationships with plants have two affordances in this context. Firstly, intimate care relationships with plants facilitate the emplacement of both the plants and the humans. Secondly, plants lend people metaphors to reflect upon their migrant conditions. Under the circumstances of climactic and societal differences, xenophobia, and precarity, plants and people grow closer and survive together, while the human participants of these relationships draw reciprocal parallels between themselves and their plant companions. These parallels—anthropomorphisms and phytomorphisms—unfold as modalities of intimacy within the lives of the migrants.
This special issue brings plant studies into conversation with anthropological discussions of place-making and emplacement, drawing particular attention to the analytical ambit of human–plant intimacies. Plant intimacies—ways of carefully attending to, affecting, and being affected by plants—are ubiquitous and central to many human lives but remain underexamined in anthropological conversations on home and place-making. Closely inquiring into these relationships allows for theorising on how people, plants, homes, and places become entangled in efforts to claim places and create liveable worlds. Articles in this issue draw attention to the queer, affective, embodied potentials of making homes and places with plants in the face of drastic displacements that affect contemporary human and plant life-worlds.
This article discusses the roles of houseplants in making home and building worlds. It draws on empirical data gathered by Care for Plants; a project started during the first Covid-19 lockdown in the UK to research why people embraced (or intensified) their care-work with plants. Starting from the observation that houseplants had taken a pivotal role in re-making everyday life under conditions of restricted mobility, reduced sociality, and increased fear for the future, this article traces the disruptive potentials of plant–people homemaking practices at a time of intensified crisis. As such, it explores the meanings of multispecies intimacy, the role of vulnerability to enable transformative plant–people relationships, and the political potentials for these domestic partnerships to shape more-than-human encounters.
