A Crisis Of (Feminist) Faith Through An Encounter In A Clinical Setting

by Sreeparna Chattopadhyay

Introduction

In the last ten years since I graduated with my doctoral degree, I have conducted research in both clinical and conventional anthropological settings. My doctoral work examined domestic violence in Mumbai, India. My work since then has focused on health and sexual violence, with considerable periods of observation in hospital settings. My experiences tell me that while both types of project have the potential to inflict trauma on the anthropologist, their nature is different. In clinical settings, non-clinicians when witnessing clinical ‘acts’, loosely defined as surgeries and other invasive procedures, may be shocked and even traumatized by these, never having had exposure to such interventions. However, not all clinical acts are equally traumatic. Here, I offer examples of a third-trimester abortion contrasting it with a cesarean section of live twins, both of which I witnessed, to argue that whether procedures are viewed as being traumatic are contingent on the meanings that those acts embody, for us as anthropologists and for the individual undergoing these procedures.

Not all surgical incisions are the same

One winter morning in 2015, in a remote part of northeastern India, close to the border with Bangladesh, my research assistant and I were hanging out in a government hospital. I had just begun a study, the second stint of fieldwork after my Ph.D. on maternal health in the region. We had entered the pre-labor room which was comprised of ten beds, only two of which were occupied that day. We were speaking to one of the women, who was being transfused prior to her induction, about how she managed anemia in a region where 90% of women become pregnant with moderate levels of anemia.

Within what seemed like seconds, but must have been longer, there was a flurry of activities and the doctor was instructing all visitors to clear out the room. A curtain was quickly drawn around the bed of the second woman, whose name we later discovered was Anita [1]. She was accompanied by her mother, her fifteen-month-old daughter and a health worker. As we were wondering if we should leave too, the smell of blood hit my nose. A minute later, I saw the doctor walk across the room holding a bloody sac that left bright red spots on the cement floor. Soon after, Anita was wheeled into the Operation Theatre.

In the afternoon when we returned to the recovery room, Anita laid on the bed clutching her knees to her chest, her green skirt bloodied, face twisted with pain. I asked her mother whether she had a boy or a girl. I was wrong – it was a medical termination of pregnancy (MTP) at 7 months. My shock soon gave way to sadness and anger. A medical termination of pregnancy at 7 months is illegal in India. Besides, we now have the technology that ensures that a fetus is viable outside the womb at 7 months.

I discovered that Anita was an indigenous woman who lived forty kilometers from this facility. She had not known that she was pregnant until she was in her fifth month, because she was still breastfeeding her older daughter. It took her another two months to gather the resources to make this trip using three different modes of transport. She did not have enough money to bring up two children and had decided to end this pregnancy. The doctor and the health worker had counselled her on the possible harms, but she insisted on the MTP. She returned home that same evening with antibiotics and analgesics.

About four years later, in the early summer of 2019, in Karnataka in Southern India, I had front row seats to a pair of twins being delivered through an emergency Cesarean section. In a busy state facility, a very competent Ob/Gyn allowed me to accompany her into the OT as she performed the complex procedure. I saw the scalpel draw blood. She used scissors to widen the cut just above the woman’s pubic bone, standing on a stool to reach deep into the woman’s uterus as one of the twins was stuck below her rib cage with a cord tied around his neck. He was extracted first, while his sister was taken out a few minutes later, crying lustily as she tasted her first breath of air.

This was the first C-section or any operative procedure that I had seen. This was a far bloodier encounter than the MTP I had partially borne witness to. Yet the meanings that these acts embodied could not be more different. It was not the blood and gore of the clinical procedure itself that left its long shadow on me, but what it meant for me as a feminist and a woman who cannot bear her own children.

A crisis of (feminist) faith

When I remember that day in the winter of 2015, I remember pacing anxiously in my small cold room at the missionary boarding house, my home for the duration of the fieldwork. I remember having a fitful night, in fact several unsettled nights where sleep was punctuated with nightmares of children shrieking and worms splitting my skin to emerge like alien births.

As a feminist who is committed to pro-choice, but simultaneously unable to bear children and has yearned for motherhood for years, this encounter was emotionally traumatic, intellectually disruptive, and morally unsettling for me. While my immediate response was affective – grief, guilt, anger and fear – in subsequent processing of this encounter, I experienced an intellectual crisis which itself was deeply traumatic.

I knew that Anita had all the “risk” factors, for landing in this medically dangerous situation – she was poor, indigenous, lived in a remote, hilly part in a disadvantaged Indian state. Yet I oscillated between feeling that she “chose” what was right for herself and grieving the loss of a potential life. Anita went against medical advice and the advice of two family members in choosing to have a late-term abortion

I felt embittered and puzzled.  Why hadn’t she considered giving birth and then giving up the baby for adoption? I would have willingly adopted this baby and, as a recent adoptive parent, I know that the queue for legal adoption is long in India.

The feminist in me chided myself for thinking of Anita as a mere reproductive vessel. I knew intellectually that only she had autonomy over her body. Yes, the termination was medically risky, but so are many other medical procedures. Yet patients choose them, weighing the benefits and risks of such procedures. What was different here? Perhaps when it comes to late-term abortions, I was flexible with my feminist ethics? Perhaps my inability to bear children was clouding the intellectual apparatus required for feminist praxis? Worst of all, perhaps I was not a feminist at all?

The Return of the Prodigal Feminist

These doubts continued to plague me for a while. A year later, I chose to write a case study on ethics about Anita and the attendant ethical, moral and intellectual conundrums it presented. I also discussed my experience and responses with my friends, family and colleagues. As I unburdened myself through speech and text, the shame chipped away, and the edges of my guilt felt a little less jagged. The existential angst I had experienced, unsure of my identity as a feminist, had settled a bit by then.

With time, I choose to see things differently. My feminist self and the mother in me didn’t have to be like Sophie’s Choice – I could be both, and still grieve this death. Strathern famously said that anthropology and feminism make for strange bedfellows, an “awkward relationship.” But feminism gifted me a lens and a language which was not burdened by ideas of cultural relativism or individual versus collective rights.

Porter, in moving away from a rights-based discourse on abortion in a very divisive Ireland, draws out similarities between pro-life and pro-choice activists and argues that both sides “…advocate responsible sex, good parenting, and caring communities.” Thus, abortion moves away from being a strictly medical procedure or a rights-based claims to a social and moral issue, where nurturance is the bedrock on which women take these decisions, and never lightly.

Although, for Anita, this abortion was not a choice in a real sense.  She had it to give her young daughter a better life. In a country where female fetuses are routinely aborted due to a cultural preference for sons, perhaps Anita should, in fact, be be lauded for her actions?

The affective dissonance that this incident elicited in me, though unsettling, was ultimately productive. Hemmings (2012: 151) writes, “Challenging the status of the expert, considering the shared epistemic claims from below, thinking outside one’s own initial investment in the desire for clearer and more accountable knowledge; these are all the features of an affectively attentive epistemology that allows for the transformation of all participants in the research field as well as knowledge itself.” I may never do what Anita did or had to, but Hemmings argues that empathy is not a prerequisite for building affective solidarity since it requires a departure from an identity-based politics. Ethical concerns demand that we do not judge choices based on similarities between us and the doer.

I don’t know how Anita will process her experience later. For me, while nothing is settled, this experience forced a reckoning of my feminist self. The questions continue.

Like a circle in a spiral

Like a wheel within a wheel

Never ending or beginning on an ever spinning reel

As the images unwind, like the circles that you find

In the windmills of your mind!

Windmills of your mind.

Songwriters: Marilyn Bergman, Michel Legrand, Alan Bergman

For Further Reading

1. Nordstrom, Carolyn, and Antonius CGM Robben .1995. Fieldwork under Fire: Contemporary Studies of Violence and Survival. Univ of California Press.
2. Leibing, Annette, and Athena McLean. 2007. “Learn to Value Your Shadow!” An Introduction to the Margins of Fieldwork. The Shadow Side of Fieldwork: Exploring the Blurred Borders between Ethnography and Life: 1–28.
3. Hemmings, Clare. “Affective solidarity: Feminist reflexivity and political transformation.” Feminist Theory13, no. 2 (2012): 147-161.
4. Porter, Elisabeth. “Culture, community and responsibilities: abortion in Ireland.” Sociology30, no. 2 (1996): 279-298.
5. Strathern, Marilyn. “An awkward relationship: The case of feminism and anthropology.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society12, no. 2 (1987): 276-292.

[1] All names have been changed to protect identities and the precise location of the hospital has not been shared since what we witnessed was not only dangerous but also an illegal act.

Trauma and Resilience

This is a blog series curated by Beatriz Reyes-Foster and Rebecca Lester in collaboration with the Anthropology of Mental Health Interest Group.

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Our ethnographic data is in the cloud, but our heads are not

More and more anthropologists are conducting, storing and circulating their research in the cloud. Cloud storage – typically in the form of Apple iCloud, Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive – is now the default storage option on the smartphones, netbooks, tablets and other digital devices that have become commonplace tools of fieldwork. Messages are sent to interlocutors through cloud platforms like WhatsApp. Interviews are carried out through Skype and Facetime. Apps for ethnographic research are proliferating. Evernote is replacing the field notebook. Articles are written collaboratively in browser-based cloud environments like Google Docs or Microsoft Office Online. Field reports and article drafts are circulated via Dropbox, WeTransfer, Box and Mozy.

Cloud infrastructure increasingly underpins growing areas of academic research practice. Yet to date there has been little – if any – critical reflection on the ethical, political and legal implications of cloud computing for social science researchers. The aim of this post is to begin moving discussions of digital security beyond the bare essentials of locked filing cabinets, password-protected laptops and hard drive encryption. Having spent a year and half conducting fieldwork in the cloud, becoming progressively more paranoid about data security in the process, I’d like to draw some much-needed attention to cloudy digital research practices that anthropologists increasingly engage in but may not recognise as security issues. In doing so, I hope to prompt discussion on the implications of cloud computing as it becomes increasingly infrastructured into research, teaching and administrative activities across universities. With higher education institutions turning to cloud services to deliver their e-learning and information management systems, and with research funders requiring grant awardees to deposit their field data in cloud databases, anthropologists urgently need to begin getting their heads around the cloud.

The bearable lightness of laptops 

While most anthropologists have long been aware of the ethical and security concerns surrounding the sending of sensitive information through email, the problem with the cloud is that many people don’t know what it is or even realise they are using it. Like most infrastructure, it is designed to disappear. This problematic invisibility means that cloud computing seems to fly under the ethics and security radar.

Despite the image of fluffy ethereality that the cloud metaphor conjures, the cloud is concrete, political and aggressively expanding across the surface of the planet. At its most basic, cloud computing refers to an infrastructural shift from desktop computing – where files and applications were stored on the local hard drives of our computers – to a form of online computing, where these are stored in data centres accessed remotely ‘as a service’ through the Internet. In the context of my fieldwork, ‘the cloud’ was mostly a windowless, subterranean data centre repurposed from the ruins of a Cold War bunker. It was about as far away from the sky you could possibly get, and distinctly un-cloudlike – except for its whiteness:

It’s thanks to data centres that our digital devices are so light, portable, and fieldwork-friendly. Laptops no longer have CD or DVD drives because we download our apps, programs and software online, directly from data centres. As more of our files and applications are stored in and streamed from data centres, the bulky storage drives and connectivity ports that once weighed down our devices, are being stripped away to reduce weight and replaced with minimal capacity internal memory. With most of our computing needs now implemented as web services, the main task left for our devices, as powerful as they are, is more and more just to act as portals to data centres.

But this lightness comes at a significant cost. Removing ports removes possibilities for increasing memory using external storage like USB drives or micro SD cards. And shrinking internal storage capacity means that users increasingly have little choice but to store their data in the cloud. Cloud storage is now infrastructured into smartphones, tablets and other digital devices as the default storage option. Taking these devices off-cloud is often made deliberately unclear by tech manufacturers. It is also becoming increasingly difficult, with cloud-connected devices designed to silently upload files without any fanfare, potentially leading to the inadvertent sharing of ethnographic data.

Data murk

With smartphones being used to record interviews, capture video footage, take photos, send files and write and store fieldnotes, anthropologists can now quickly generate large quantities of born-digital ethnographic data that soon exceed our mobile device’s storage capacity. In this context, the cloud, with its promise of ‘free’ and ‘unlimited’ data storage space is a tempting solution.

However, data stored in the cloud remains legally, ethically and epistemically murky. A severe lack of legislative regulation means online data is typically subject to the service level agreements and terms and conditions of each cloud provider. In cases where data stored in the cloud is unprotected by intellectual rights, you may effectively be transferring ownership of your ethnographic data. You should therefore exercise caution before storing data with any third-party cloud service providers.

Even when an online service is not specifically marketed as a ‘cloud service’, the basic rule of thumb is that any files exchanged or interactions that occur over the Internet will be stored in data centres. That means conversations through Skype, Facetime and WhatsApp. It means the mundane e-learning platforms and management systems (like Moodle), that we regularly encounter but rarely reflect upon. It also means any emails or attachments that you send (even to yourself as a back-up copy). Emails sent outside of your university network are sent in plain text and are therefore never ‘private and confidential’. As I heard many times during my fieldwork, ‘email is about as secure as a postcard’.

Passing private and perhaps sensitive ethnographic data on to unknown others in the form of cloud providers could be considered a serious breach of the fiduciary duty anthropologists have to their research participants. In the post-Snowden securityscape, we must assume that data stored in the cloud will be subject to surveillance. Commonly used cloud file-sharing services, such as Google Drive, Apple’s iCloud, Dropbox, WeTransfer, Mozy and Box will not be appropriate for sensitive or personal data.  If you find yourself having to use the cloud then you need to encrypt your files before uploading them. VeraCrypt  is an easy-to-use free tool for encrypting files in secure way before sending them online. pCloud offers fully encrypted cloud storage. Mega  is also worth mentioning – it runs some basic encryption inside the browser before the file is uploaded to protect data that is being transmitted over an open/public Wi-Fi connection against low-level snooping. Though it is certainly not ‘government-proof’.

Most university networks offer secure files storage on servers located on campus that will meet data security and privacy requirements. This provides a layer of assurance that cloud providers, who could store your data anywhere in the world, cannot.  With increasingly stringent data sovereignty regulations – where data is subject to the laws of the country in which it is stored – it may also be necessary to know the physical location(s) of the data centre(s) you are using. Storing data in local data centres may become a standard condition of future fellowships and confidentially agreements.

Ideally, anthropology departments would provide PhD students and supervisors with a secure online storage space for the transferring of field reports, research materials and other file exchanges (anything sent over the Internet should, of course, be anonymised, unless your informants have specifically requested otherwise or the conditions of consent explicitly state otherwise). Undoubtedly the safest way to share files is to physically exchange a storage device. Data centre professionals call this the ‘sneakernet’. Despite all the cloud hype, in the data centre industry, the most secure and the fastest way of transporting large volumes of data to the so-called cloud is simply to load it in the back of a ‘hardened’ truck and drive it there, giving a whole new meaning to ‘hard drive’.

The Right to Erasure 

The new EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) framework provides ‘data subjects’ (interlocutors) with the right to have any personal data the anthropologist may hold on them permanently erased. My fieldwork experiences highlighted considerable ethical and legal dilemmas surrounding the safe and secure disposal of data stored online.

When you delete an email, file, photo, social media post or even close an online account, you are not necessarily deleting them from the data centre in which they are stored. From the cloud provider’s perspective, deletion often simply means removal from the end-user’s interface, while the information typically remains locatable at the data centre-end. Most of your online activity is simply left on data centre servers in a state of involuntary permanence. This could be considered a serious infringement of research participants’ privacy if they want or expect their data to be deleted – raising problems if researchers have promised to destroy certain data upon completion of their project.

Cloudy Futures 

Cloud technologies offer valuable new tools and virtual spaces for the storage, sharing and writing of ethnographic data. But they also pose challenges to the ethical structures of anthropology that we are only just beginning to articulate and that require us to accordingly reflect on data security in the cloud as a standard part of ethical practice. Anthropology departments, institution review boards and ethics committees need to begin to respond to the changing security requirements of the digital research environment by offering more effective training in this domain.

Confidentiality agreements, ethical obligations or digital import/export restrictions tied to research grants will no doubt soon preclude the use of third-party cloud services as standard practice. At the same time, research councils increasingly require grantees to submit their ethnographic data for indefinite storage and re-use by third parties through online public cloud platforms. These often contradictory codes and requirements at different bureaucratic, legal and ethical levels mean that the cloud is at once being infrastructured into research practice and at the same time regulated out, which will make meaningfully navigating and negotiating this cloudy terrain difficult. The powerful commercial imperatives of connectivity and the energy-intensive environmental destruction that underpin the creeping ubiquity of this computing infrastructure, make interrogating the cloud all the more urgent.

Alexander Taylor is a PhD candidate with the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. His research explores how technologies and infrastructures of data storage intersect with planetary scales of security and dystopian digital futures in the data centre industry. In this post, he explores some of the security implications of cloud computing for social science research practice.

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Three Lies of Digital Ethnography
by Gabriele de Seta

We ethnographers cannot help but lie, but in lying, we reveal truths that escape those who are not so bold. (Fine, 1993, p. 290)

Let’s start with a conclusion: Ethnographers lie.

This might not be a widely shared proposition, but I experience it often in my own work, especially when talking in practical terms about my fieldwork. The more the weeks of traveling between Chinese cities, staying at friends’ houses and transcribing their social media interactions recede back into the past, the more I doubt about the scholarly value of the ethnographic study of digital folklore I say I have conducted. I realize that an assemblage of disciplinary imperatives, epistemological nudges and promises of legitimation I have internalized during my scholarly formation keeps determining how I carefully massage the description of my research project according to the needs of the moment.

As I distort my fieldwork experience into elevator pitches and small talk during conference breaks, I realize that I am enacting the gentle calisthenics of professionalism and persuasion. Like a well-trained marketer, I avoid discussing the challenging aspects of my research or my actual methodological practices, and instead piece together strings of buzzwords and abstracted data points intended to prove my disciplinary belonging – I simplify some things, hide others, and casually lie when convenient.

Despite the unpleasant aftertaste of these performances, the tensions motivating my resort to half-truths, strategic simplifications and circumstantial lies are nothing new: Like many other academic domains, anthropology has its own disciplinary culture, and methodology is perhaps the level at which disciplinary discursivity is at its most evident. Foregrounding the spatial and temporal dimensions of one’s fieldwork remains a reliable marker of authority, and narrowing down one’s interests to a bounded community and a well-defined topic still helps expert validation.

At the same time, the relative novelty of certain research domains (in my case, vernacular creativity on digital media) makes them more prone to generalizations, and requires simplifying the presentation of one’s work when pushing back against insinuations of “having it too easy” with fieldwork done by “simply spending all day on social media” to follow “fashionable topics” such as Internet memes, selfies or online celebrity.

One of the pieces of writing that most helped me come to terms with this feeling of unease is a Gary Alan Fine article titled “Ten lies of ethnography” (1993). In this liberating piece, Fine skirts the fascination for laying bare the uncomfortable truths of the trade, and instead focuses on the unavoidable practices of lying that accompany much ethnographic research. According to Fine, illusions about the underside of ethnography, regularly hidden in its methodological backstage, are necessary for both the production of good work and occupational survival, but become problematic when they take root in the discipline and become taken for real by its practitioners.

Inspired by how Fine identifies ten lies of ethnography behind the classical virtues and technical skills of figures such as the “friendly ethnographer,” the “unobtrusive ethnographer” and the “chaste ethnographer”, I want to put forward three more lies peculiar to digital ethnography, which I briefly describe below, accompanied by their respective authorial archetypes.

The networked field-weaver

The first lie of digital ethnography is related to one of the most widely debated ethnographic constructions – the ‘field’. Questioned, fragmented and deconstructed in the wake of the writing culture debates, the field remains an important anchor for ethnographic practice. When I embarked into my (by then overly-theorized) fieldwork, the most convincing metaphor I had come across was the one offered by Jenna Burrell in her proposition of the “field site as network” (2009). Building upon previous theorizations of multi-sited ethnography, Burrell emphasizes how it is the ethnographer herself, through the everyday tracing of different actors, that pulls together the field as a network.

I found myself adopting Burrell’s insight as an effective soundbite: My own “field as network” included a bunch of friend and acquaintances, longer and shorter stays in eight Chinese cities, a number of online platforms, an inventory of mobile devices, a sample of linguistic repertoires, certain genres of online content, mass media discourses about the internet, and a variety of media practices.

As many solutions that seem to work all too well, I started realizing that my idealized reliance on weaving my field as a network was built on hiding and lying about something. Rather than experiencing the expansive movement of branching out promised by this metaphor, I often found myself building my “field as network” by grasping at straws, and immediately cutting away most of what came along with them. Weaving networks into an ethnographic field can bring the most disparate things together, and particularly when one’s research topic isn’t extremely narrow, each node of the network can result in dizzying vertigos over a wealth of potential interlocutors, unexplored communities, or entirely new categories of data.

In order to decide what does or doesn’t belong in one’s research project (and, ultimately, to produce a viable written report) the ethnographer continuously prunes down networks as they proliferate, carving out a skeletal “field as network” that eventually feels more like a crooked bonsai tree than an expanse of thick experiential wilderness. The lie of the ethnographer as networked field-weaver should be kept in mind as it hides the cutting as much it glorifies the pulling together.

The eager participant-lurker

The second lie of digital ethnography relates to the central practice of this research approach: Participant observation. Participation in digital media bleeds over a linear spectrum going from non-use to intensive and active presence, and extends in different dimensions according to the platforms used, the devices at hand, software availability, access to connectivity in time and space, as well as the social circles and practices one participates in.

In the earliest pioneering ethnographies of online settings, researchers found in the figure of the ‘lurker’ a productive archetype embodying the contradictory status of participation on the internet. Reflecting on this figure of participation, Leander & McKim (2003) conclude that, in choosing between being an active participant or a lurker, a digital ethnographer makes important epistemological decisions. Given the increasing variety of modes of participation offered by digital media platforms, more recent debates have tried to move beyond a clear-cut choice between active participation and lurking, and to instead explore the creation of intersubjectivity as a fluid outcome of a sustained ethnographic engagement (Beaulieau, 2004).

While cognizant of this fluid spectrum of modes of participation, I still feel the need to condense my engagement into simplified vignettes highlighting my presence in various digitally-mediated contexts, flattening my involvement into easily understandable nuggets of interaction that prove my active participation in the field. Confronted by the injunctions of participant observation, I often write myself into an eager participant-lurker: A professionally naive explorer of local online contexts, master of all modes of participation, surveying digital media use from a vantage point of carefully crafted presence.

The false choice between naturalist lurking and active involvement is something I still struggle with whenever I inscribe myself onto the field. As digital ethnographers, we participate (just like our ‘research participants’) through a wide range of modes of participation tightly linked to social dynamics and technological affordances that go from the choice of shutting off one’s smartphone to the visceral need to sustain one’s presence in a tense online discussion. Embracing the fluidity, uncertainty and ambivalence resulting from these situated choices should be preferred over flattening one’s own persona into the stereotyped figure of the eager participant-lurker.

The expert fabricator

The third lie of digital ethnography has to do with representation, an unavoidable component of producing any sort of research output. Digital ethnographers have the advantage of working with already thoroughly-mediated settings, and are able to include in their reports samples of online resources, snippets of mediated interactions, creative data visualizations, as well as images, videos and sounds. Yet, the increasing availability of multimedia traces does not mean that ethnographic texts become less representational. Even when grounded on extensive datasets, hundreds of fieldnotes and collections of user traces, the accounts produced by digital ethnographers end up including an extremely narrow selection of inscriptions, often thoroughly edited, translated, scrambled, rephrased, anonymized, cropped, selectively blurred and collated according to a bundle of ethical, rhetorical and aesthetic decisions.

Responding to the recurring dilemmas faced by researchers dealing with new and heterogeneous concretions of data, Annette Markham provocatively argues that digital ethnographers should embrace the suspicious practice of fabrication in order to overcome paralyzing tendencies in qualitative research, and to embed ethics inductively into research practice (2012, p. 341). Fabrication, though, is inextricably linked to the idea of expertise. In claiming and embracing one’s role as editor, translator and fabricator of multimedia composites of events, identities and inscriptions, the digital ethnographer implicitly establishes competence and knowledgeability over a certain sociotechnical context.

While I enjoy the flattering attributions of expertise over my research topic that these fabrications occasionally grant me, I often feel troubled by the way they blur my authorial role into the figure of the social media savvy or the computer geek, hiding how most of my ethnographic knowledge is actually grounded on a patchy process of discovery, a messy interaction between my puzzled inquiries and the kind help of patient friends who bear with my often clueless questions about the latest Internet meme or slang term.

Digital ethnographers are often closer to practical brokers, curious newcomers relying on the knowledgeability and interpretive guidance of what Holmes & Marcus call “paraethnographers” (2008). It is important to remember how the figure of the expert fabricator can become an enticing professional illusion that easily overrides the messy, processual and thickly social construction of local expertise.

How to lie with digital ethnography

The goal of this post is decidedly not to “tell the truth” in the (ideally) public space of an academic blog, nor to reveal an ugly or cynical reality behind my practice of digital ethnography, nor to accuse colleagues of engaging in dishonesty and deception; rather, the three illusive figures described above embody discursive strategies, performative misdirections and illusory identities that I regularly confront in my thinking, speaking and writing about my own research work.

My hope is that both colleagues approaching the disciplinary domain of digital ethnography, as well as fellow researchers already familiar with this methodological assemblage, will recognize their own doubts and concerns in some of these sketched portraits. As Gary Alan Fine reminds us, it is important to constantly ask ourselves: Which professional illusions are current in our research field? Which issues do we pressure each other to devise half-truths about? Which circumstantial lies do we use to cover the tracks leading to our decisions?

Rather than telling readers how to ‘do’ digital ethnography, I’d rather suggest that we familiarize ourselves with the lies hidden by the contemporary archetypes of the networked field-weaver, the eager participant-lurker and the expert fabricator, before they become professional illusions hiding more than they reveal.

Image credits: This essay is illustrated by @deathnography

Dr Gabriele de Seta is a media anthropologist. He holds a PhD in Sociology from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and has recently completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan. His research work, grounded on ethnographic engagement across multiple sites, focuses on digital media practices and vernacular creativity in contemporary China. He is also interested in experimental music scenes, Internet art, and collaborative intersections between anthropology and art practice. More information is available on his website.

Crystal Abidin

Dr Crystal Abidin is a socio-cultural anthropologist of vernacular internet cultures, particularly young people’s relationships with internet celebrity, self-curation, and vulnerability. She is Postdoctoral Fellow with the Media Management and Transformation Centre (MMTC) at Jönköping University, and Adjunct Researcher with the Centre for Culture and Technology (CCAT) at Curtin University. Crystal’s forthcoming book, Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame Online (Emerald Publishing, 2018) critically analyzes the contemporary histories and impacts of internet-native celebrity today. Reach her at wishcrys.com or @wishcrys.

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