Intimate Suspects: Politics of fieldwork and intimacy under state surveillance

Schild, Pascale (2024). Intimate Suspects: Politics of fieldwork and intimacy under state surveillance. In: Burger, Tim; Mahar, Usman; Schild, Pascale; Walter, Anna-Maria (eds.) The Multi-Sided Ethnographer: Living the field beyond research (pp. 235-257). Bielefeld: transcript

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Uncertain and intimidating encounters with state surveillance are not merely scary interruptions or, at best, annoying sideshows to anthropological research. Rather, as anthropologists we need to think through such encounters to deepen our understanding of political power relations and how they shape not only our interlocutors’ lives, but also our own positionality and practices as researchers. Using my own example as a woman researcher in the ‘disputed territory’ of Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, this chapter traces the ambivalent and intimate workings of mistrust and suspicion in the everyday relationships and interactions between the anthropologist and her ‘shadows’. It shows how they become intimate suspects, related through not only political intimacies of everyday life, but also the intimate politics of mistrust and enmity entrenched in Pakistan’s military nationalism.

Item Type:

Book Section (Book Chapter)

Division/Institute:

06 Faculty of Humanities > Department of Art and Cultural Studies > Institute of Social Anthropology

UniBE Contributor:

Schild, Pascale

Subjects:

300 Social sciences, sociology & anthropology

ISBN:

978-3-8394-6677-3

Publisher:

transcript

Language:

English

Submitter:

Pascale Schild

Date Deposited:

19 Feb 2024 10:04

Last Modified:

23 Aug 2024 10:36

BORIS DOI:

10.48350/192982

URI:

https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/192982

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