Ambiguities of Belonging: Challenging the Insider/Outsider Divide in Ethnography

• In Event: Positionality and Reflexivity in Political Science I: The Domestic Context

Abstract

Conversations on ethnographic methods assume difference as the basis of the relationship between the researcher and their interlocutors. The researcher is assumed as an out-group member vis-à-vis the community under study, and the very notions upon which fieldwork rests – “immersion,” “observant,” “the field” – reflect a paradigm where difference is naturalized as the basis of ethnographic knowledge. On the one hand, this working assumption follows the common disparities in wealth, social position, and ethno-racial belonging between the parties in the research process (see: Bourgois 2003, De Genova 2005, Goffman 2014). On the other, the naturalization of difference finds its roots in the colonial social scientific principles that provided the basis for ethnography, whereby the (European) outsider is capable of a more accurate scientific gaze than that which Clifford Geertz deemed “the native’s point of view” (Geertz 1979, Malinowski 1922). The reflexive turn of the 1980’s softened this stance by drawing attention to the subjectivity of the researcher as the filter of interpretation (Behar & Gordon 1996, Clifford 1986, Crapanzano 1985, Ruby 1982). Furthermore, the rise of social theoretical schools like Subaltern studies pushed back against this epistemic frame with a forceful antithetical rebuttal: the idea that only those who belonged to oppressed groups could represent marginalized societies without the pretense of domination (Guha 1997, Sandoval 2000, Spivek 2010, Tuhiwai Smith 2012). Post-1980’s work has provided a basis for why the researcher’s similarity to the group under study may provide valid social scientific and humanistic knowledge, but it has brushed over how similarity between the identities of the researcher and their interlocutors, as opposed to difference, may affect the research process.

In this paper, I complicate the insider/outsider division in fieldwork by drawing upon my own experiences as an undocumented immigrant researcher working with grassroots immigrant rights organizations in the city of New Haven, Connecticut for the past two years. I borrow from recent ethnographic and socio-theoretical work to argue that identity is not only multi-dimensional – encompassing dimensions as diverse as gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, educational level, etc. – but also situational, with different identity perceptions gaining more salience in distinct encounters (Haraway 1986, Collins 1990, Pachirat 2017). Furthermore, I argue that these identities may necessitate that the researcher become a participant in the communities under study.

First, the paper looks at the ways my identity as a first-generation, unauthorized immigrant from Mexico and my previous experience as a community organizer granted me a place in the group’s moral economy. My precarious status as a deportable, criminalized individual in the United States made me part of the constituency that these groups sought to protect, and allowed me to look at the private transcripts and at the practices of resistance (Scott 1985, 1992) sustained by the city’s immigrant community. I also describe the expectations that came along with my being part of this moral economy, some of which pushed the boundaries of the “participant” in participant-observation and repeatedly conflicted with orthodox research ethical standards. Finally, I discuss the ways my identity as a white-collar researcher at Yale University– a position granting me a degree of protection from police harassment and deportation within the city – constantly signaled my incomplete belonging to “the community.”

Author

• Ramon Garibaldo Valdez, Yale University