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Reflexivity, Engagement, Decoloniality: Shifting Emergences of Ethnography and Collaboration

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In Tandem – Pathways towards a Postcolonial Anthropology | Im Tandem – Wege zu einer postkolonialen Ethnologie

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Abstract

A few years ago, I started devoting my research time and focus to the role of affect and emotion in ethnographic knowledge construction, a continuous attempt to understand how to balance fieldwork immersion with stepping back, seeing the bigger picture—and how to teach this essential ethnographic practice to students and early-career anthropologists. This article contributes to this bigger methodological picture and zeroes in on ethnographic trajectories of research collaboration, long-term immersion, and shifting formats of knowledge construction. I will start with a historicized introduction on reflexive and engaged ethnography before I draw on some lessons learned from fieldwork in Yogyakarta. The second part of the chapter attends to emerging ethnographic methods and reflects on contemporary shifts in collaborative research designs and methodologies referred to as multimodal, digital, artistic, and decolonial.

Passages of this article have previously been published in Stodulka, T. 2021. Methods and the construction of knowledge. Fieldwork and ethnography. In The SAGE handbook for cultural anthropology, Eds. L. Pedersen and L. Cligett, 85–104. Thousand Oaks: Sage.

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  1. Institut für Sozial- und Kulturanthropologie, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Deutschland

    Thomas Stodulka

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  1. Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel

    Mirjam Lücking

  2. Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, München, Deutschland

    Anna Meiser

  3. Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Freiburg, Deutschland

    Ingo Rohrer

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Stodulka, T. (2023). Reflexivity, Engagement, Decoloniality: Shifting Emergences of Ethnography and Collaboration. In: Lücking, M., Meiser, A., Rohrer, I. (eds) In Tandem – Pathways towards a Postcolonial Anthropology | Im Tandem – Wege zu einer postkolonialen Ethnologie . Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-38673-3_6

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