Interlocutors: Language, Power and Relationality in Decolonial Ethnographic Practice

A significant challenge for ethnographers since the 1980s has been how to name their relationships to the people with whom and about whom they produce knowledge. Following critiques of how the term "informant" encodes and reproduces colonial power dynamics, ethnographers have sought altern...

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Subtitles:"Special Issue: Critical Terms for the Ethnography of Religion"
主要作者: Leve, Lauren G. 1968- (Author)
格式: 電子 Article
語言:English
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出版: Equinox 2022
In: Fieldwork in religion
Year: 2022, 卷: 17, 發布: 1, Pages: 47-61
Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains:B 民族學 / 參與觀察 / 面談 / Befragter / 離心率 (社會學) / 後殖民主義 / 科學倫理
IxTheo Classification:AA Study of religion
NCJ Ethics of science
ZA Social sciences
Further subjects:B Fieldwork
B Ethics
B decolonial methods
B Materiality
B interlocutor
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總結:A significant challenge for ethnographers since the 1980s has been how to name their relationships to the people with whom and about whom they produce knowledge. Following critiques of how the term "informant" encodes and reproduces colonial power dynamics, ethnographers have sought alternative language to describe fieldwork-based relations. This article examines one of the most commonly used terms - "interlocutor" - and considers the implications of adopting a word that emphasizes voice and speech over embodied participation. "Interlocutor" is appealing to contemporary scholars because it signals respect for the people we work with using a vocabulary that reflects modern secular ideologies. Yet, research that advances decolonial goals may depend less on transforming styles of ethnographic representation than on opening the ethnographer and ethnographic inquiry to other ways of knowing and being, via embodied experience and relational practices. When ethnographers of religion engage the people we work with primarily as voices we set ourselves up for misunderstanding and miss opportunities to trouble imperial structures of knowledge.
ISSN:1743-0623
Contains:Enthalten in: Fieldwork in religion
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1558/firn.22603