Ethnographies of Activism: A Critical Introduction

Ethnography and Activism: Oxymoron or Opportunity?Ethnography is like much else in the social sciences … It is a multi-dimensional exercise, a coproduction of social fact and sociological imagining, a delicate engagement of the inductive with the deductive, of the real with the virtual, of the already-known with the surprising, of verbs with nouns, processes with products, of the phenomenological with the political.(Comaroff and Comaroff, 2003: 172) Forgotten places … have experienced the abandonment characteristic of contemporary capitalist and neoliberal state reorganization … [H]ow can people who inhabit forgotten places scale up their activism from intensely localized struggles to something less atomized and therefore possessed of a significant capacity for self-determination?How do they set and fulfill agendas for life-affirming social change-whether by seizing control of the social wage or by other means?(Gilmore, 2008: 31) In what ways might the work of ethnography, conceived of in this inclusive and multidimensional way by Jean and John Comaroff, prove useful for reimagining the multi-scalar work of building activist solidarity, pace Ruth Wilson Gilmore?Our comments emerge from a sequence of workshops on 'Ethnographies of Activism' organized by us at the London School of Economics in 2007 and 2008, the second of which was focused on revising papers for this double special issue of Cultural Dynamics.The two of us-Donner, an anthropologist of South Asia, and Chari, a geographer of India and South Africa-came together through the question of whether it might be possible to think through the problems of ethnographic research on activism with a specifically left or 'progressive' focus.In the process of engaging this problem, we recognized disciplinary constraints and possibilities in our attempts to harness ethnography as a transdisciplinary and transformative practice.We found that thinking across ethnography and progressive activism involves transgressing disciplinary boundaries to address complexity and universality (Gibbons et al., 1994;Hallward, 2001).We realized that one response could be that the 'left' is rife with tensions and that our call for papers was too restrictive.However, we persisted in making the case for thinking