Social Anthropology

Anthropological definitions and demarcations of ‘the field’ remain fundamentally anchored in tropes of location and spatiality, and the association between field and fieldworker is still primarily characterised as being maintained by distance in space. This article argues that ‘the field’ must be regarded as much as temporally constituted as it is normally seen as spatial. By exploring and unfolding the temporal properties of the field (e.g. different tempos, paces, extensions and projections of past, future etc.), it is suggested that the spatially anchored notion of multi‐sited fieldwork can be complemented and extended with one of multi‐temporal ethnography.

This article explores juxtapositions of serendipity and discomfort in methodological and ethical issues raised by my research with a First Nation in Canada, in light of the changing conditions of fieldwork in indigenous contexts. It also offers reflections on the liminal condition of the PhD candidate. Personal narratives on the processes of both entering ‘the field’ and the academy, focused on experiences of discomfort, lead to larger anthropological debates, especially regarding the tensions between applied, activist and academic anthropology. Ultimately, I argue for the use of ‘reflexivities of discomfort’ as a critical tool to produce relevant anthropological knowledge.

In order to do my PhD fieldwork among undocumented migrants in a detention centre, I had to become a volunteer for an NGO providing legal assistance. In this paper I examine the effect of this double commitment through the study of two figures: a ‘liar’ and a ‘madman’. I question the grounds upon which field anthropological practice is based, namely, the ideas of long‐term fieldwork and serendipity. I hypothesise that anthropological knowledge is constructed in the successive oscillations between various positions and points of view on the field and not in the quest for the right distance from the subject under scrutiny.

Political action is frequently conceptualised as starting from the ground up. Plausible as this point may be, it pays insufficient attention to well‐established arguments that we inhabit administrative society, implicitly contrasted against political society, with technocrats operating the requisite power/knowledge grid away from the street. Like Foucault's ‘specific intellectuals’, technocrats work in pivotal positions in apparatuses of population regulation, but nevertheless can potentially recognise the plight of the marginalised ‘masses’ as they themselves are also alienated subject‐objects of population regulation. This article draws on a range of ethnographic encounters with technocrats working in diverse areas of migration management in the European Union to prompt an examination of the historical and social conditions that impede, and often render unthinkable, direct engagement between technocrats and the migrants whom they are paid to regulate. The article draws explicitly on Hannah Arendt's work on the , compassion, thinking, judging and revolution (1) to explain how the apparatus's systemic isolation of both its policy experts and policy targets impedes political action and (2) to identify a form of ethnographic engagement that might help to overcome it.