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.
