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...
| Published in: | Fieldwork in religion |
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| Subtitles: | "Special Issue: Critical Terms for the Ethnography of Religion" |
| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
|
| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Equinox
2022
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| In: |
Fieldwork in religion
|
| Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains: | B
Ethnology
/ Participative observation
/ Interview
/ Befragter
/ Eccentricity (Sociology)
/ Postcolonialism
/ Science ethics
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| RelBib 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 |
| Online Access: |
Presumably Free Access Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | 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. |
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| ISSN: | 1743-0623 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Fieldwork in religion
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1558/firn.22603 |