[csaa-forum] Conference on Ethnography at UTS

[Stephen Muecke]

For Ethnography: Anthropology and the Politics of the Present
We are inviting contributions to a one day conference to be held at UTS 
University on 20th April, 2007 on the subject of ethnography and its 
significance in the social sciences. Please send title and abstract to 
one or both of the conveners by March 9, 2007.

We have a number of themes in mind:
The discipline of history has come to dominate post-colonial studies in 
India, in Australia, and elsewhere, and consequently there is a 
tendency to render the present as almost a direct and unmediated 
consequence of the past. One effect of this is to shift attention from 
the present as a source of social insight. The present, it seems, is 
not interesting enough. A critical anthropological voice that combines 
a variety of perspectives including the historical and the 
ethnographic will go some way towards exploring the complexity of the 
present and avoiding simplistic representations of the post-colonial 
condition. We also want to explore the significance of 'presentism', in 
which our actions can be historicised, but also conceived as 
engagements with the here and now.

In anthropology, empirical investigation into contemporary cultural 
intricacies draws its interpretive insights from philosophy, sociology, 
cultural studies, history and film studies. But ethnographic work 
stubbornly continues to foreground the messiness of the quotidian. This 
conference will explore the ways in which ethnographic practice can 
forestall intellectual purity, whereby the analyst is implicitly 
positioned as the good subject, always on the side of the subaltern. 
What are the fault-lines in contemporary projects which 
unproblematically side with the oppressed?

Further, what are the conditions of work in the sites beyond villages 
and houses of  'our informants': in boardrooms, bars, offices, 
hospitals, advertising agencies and urban neighbourhoods, for example? 
And, does this new kind of fieldwork have something important to say 
about the significance of the physical encounter, and the accounting of 
multiple utterances that resist easy theorization?

We also want to reclaim ethnography as an in-depth practice which 
entails immersion and intimacy among those whose social worlds are 
being analysed, and which is no more a problematic knowledge regime 
than say cultural studies, history, or media studies. Because such 
thorough ethnography is under threat from a number of quarters — eg. 
current climate of ‘fast’ degrees — it seems important to establish its 
value and to explore its significance. On the other hand, ethnography 
is fashionable, but in a form that could undermine its established 
foundation in sustained work with particular people.

It is ironic that, just as anthropologists became self-critical about 
their own disciplinary habits, ethnography began to be claimed in oral 
history, geography, sociology and cultural and media studies. It also 
appears to be finding favour as a significant ‘job skill’ in the 
corporate sector. What contribution does the ethnographic method – now 
practiced over so many diverse terrains – make to complicating the 
relationships between the past and the present, the victim and the 
oppressor, the ‘theory’ and the ‘practice’?

Sanjay Srivastava, Deakin University.  sanjays at deakin.edu.au
Gillian Cowlishaw, UTS.  gillian.cowlishaw at uts.edu.auS
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