![\"\"](\"https:\/\/archive2.bakonline.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/volta-redonda-still-2-300x143.png\")
<\/a>Ethnography as<\/strong>\u00a0(Im)possible Realism<\/strong><\/h6>\nFor over twenty years, I have been doing ethnographic fieldwork on extractivism, researching processes of state violence, social exclusion, and urban segregation generated by capitalist forms of living in the shifting relationships between global centers and global peripheries.<\/p>\n
For sixteen months between 1999 and 2000, I lived in a working-class neighborhood of Sheffield, among boarded-up pubs, derelict factories, and Roma campsites. There I worked in two local steel factories: a small engineering workshop with twenty non-unionized and underpaid workers and an integrated steel plant with 200 workers, mostly unionized. I wanted to know what strategies of survival the working class in Sheffield had developed in the face of the radical deindustrialization and privatization of their city, initiated by Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and continued under Tony Blair\u2019s New Labour, and its momentous reconversion under a post-industrial economy. After my research in Sheffield, between 2008 and 2018, I conducted fieldwork in Volta Redonda, a Brazilian town in the state of Rio de Janeiro that lies in the middle of a valley of former coffee plantations. Volta Redonda is where South America\u2019s first steel mill\u2014Companhia Sider\u00fargica Nacional<\/em>\u00a0(CSN)\u2014was installed in 1946 under the dictator Getu\u0301lio Vargas. I lived in a favela for one year and researched in the CSN, which remains the largest mineral and industrial complex in South America and one of the world\u2019s biggest polluters. I saw firsthand how Black and working-class communities from favelas and urban squats deal with daily economic dispossession and environmental degradation produced by the CSN. I wanted to compare how the working-class communities of Sheffield and Volta Redonda\u2014two world peripheries\u2014experienced and struggled against the dehumanizing forces of capitalism and to highlight the universality of the everyday struggles, the common vocabularies, and the enduring solidarities of people who lead precarious lives.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/archive2.bakonline.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/volta-redonda-3-300x225.jpg\")
<\/a>Daria Martin and Massimiliano Mollona, Steel Town<\/em>, 2013, video still featuring the statue of Getu\u0301lio Vargas, Volta Redonda<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nBut what can one\u2019s fieldwork say or do about capitalism, the relationships between core and periphery, or the future of labor struggles? How does one relate the experience of fieldwork to the structural articulation of capitalism in space and time? With what temporal delay do global and national political and economic events (crises, coups, inflation, electoral victories, and radical privatizations) impact on everyday life and, in turn, what is the cumulative effect of local actions on the broader context? Indeed, although my fieldwork is motivated by the attempt to understand the causes of structural inequalities and the impulse to act upon them, the politics of fieldwork consists of unspoken, hardly visible, affective micro-interactions whose consequences are often unpredictable. In its temporal and spatial suspension\u2014between identification and distance, both pregnant with possibilities but also already overdetermined\u2014anthropological fieldwork requires a radical openness and a constant suspension of belief, analytical displacement, and relational attunement. More than a methodology, it is a poetic and relational praxis in the sense discussed by \u00c9douard Glissant in The Poetics of Relations<\/em> (1990).<\/p>\nInstead of considering fieldwork as process of empiricism or \u201chard\u201d knowledge-production, I take it as a political performative process involving juxtapositions of different practice-based and action-oriented \u201cconfabulations,\u201d mediated by and catalyzed through my body; \u201cqueer\u201d in the sense highlighted by Sara Ahmed, that is, materially grounded in the uneven politics of the encounter. My encounters transgress assumptions about what is \u201creal,\u201d itself a decolonial question according to Uruguayan political ecologist Eduardo Gudynas.[1]<\/a> Approached though the elemental and sensuous phenomenology of the body, reality loses its objectivity and fixity and becomes open, molecular, always transforming, and affective. For example, I came to understand ecological injustice\u2014that is, the relationship between toxicity and class inequality as it is experienced by Black and brown bodies\u2014by walking in favelas and working-class neighborhoods\u2014where I could feel the exceptionally high concentration of fumes, coal dust, and industrial noise through all my senses. Fieldwork always involves the irruption of foreign bodies that complicates the politics of inclusion and exclusion, of cultural appropriation and of the right to appear. It is becoming a foreigner (rather than a native)\u2014an exilic and haunted presence that makes each social encounter unique and valuable. It is building social relations and spending time together, developing common vocabularies and support structures, understanding each other, mirroring, exchanging, and acting in common. Fieldwork is an exchange among people who are committed to being together relationally in the long term. To move across toxic landscapes, make sense of unformed and unfolding material, and build trusting bonds out of tense, awkward, and stratified social relations, I had to develop a relational practice, experimental and choreographic, which included the ability to process dream-like fragments of feelings and perceptions into some sort of structured, although impermanent, hypothesis about the world. In my book Art\/Commons<\/em> (2021) I argue that such radical openness in ethnographic fieldwork could potentially constitute a political and cultural commons.<\/p>\nThe anthropologist James Clifford describes such an alignment between artistic and ethnographic practices through his notion of \u201cethnographic surrealism,\u201d[2]<\/a> in reference to the collaboration between Surrealist artists and anthropologists that took place in 1920s Paris. A movement of both self-critique and of \u201cother-oriented\u201d propositions, \u201cethnographic surrealism\u201d defamiliarized the intimate proximity with the other. Anthropologists traveled to distant societies looking for those forms of human organization that maximized social creativity and self-expression. Outside the west they found cooperative work, fluid clan structures, shamanism, co-housing, gift-giving, and intellectual commons, all of which radically challenged the oppressive institutions of states, churches, families, parties, and corporations. Moving in the opposite direction, Surrealist artists created powerful ethnographies of industrial cities, showing the irrational basis of the capitalist economy, the terror of modern states, the repressed sexuality generated by the nuclear family and the human body as dream machine, alienated social technology, and medium of exchange. Surrealist ethnographers such as Michel Leiris experienced fieldwork as a space of defamiliarization and even vulnerability, in which they had lost their position of power vis-\u00e0-vis their \u201csubjects\u201d and developed their knowledge dialogically. They felt like outsiders but also intimately connected and strangely familiar with their foreign context. Of course, the modes of self-discovery and self-critique available to surrealist ethnographers and artists relied on their privilege and power to decide who fell into the category of \u201cthe other\u201d in the first place, and it was only when it reached the colonies that surrealism was able to turn the estranged gaze against European power.<\/p>\nJames Clifford and I have been sustaining a long-term conversation which considers conditions of radical openness as \u201cimpossible realism,\u201d a realism that we imagine accepts the impossibility of telling a singular and unifying historical story by juxtaposing micro and macro scales, local and global. One of our exchanges, \u201c(Im)possible Realism<\/a>,\u201d has been recorded and discussed in the context of the BAK 2021\/2022 Fellowship for Situated Practice<\/a>, and as part of the Spectral Infrastructure<\/em><\/a> research trajectory. In this exchange we argue that\u202f an \u201c(im)possible realist\u201d\u202fethnographic sensibility complicates and multiplies the historical stories\u202fthat\u202furgently need to\u202fbe told in the wake of the now-displaced\u202f\u201cmaster narratives\u201d (of Progress, Civilization, The West, the Capitalist World System, Development, among others). Contrasting historical scales and narratives don\u2019t \u201cadd up,\u201d but rather create tensions we need to inhabit and explore, as opposed to being subsumed into an explanatory structure or directional teleology. We refer to Stuart Hall\u2019s notion of articulation\u2014particularly between class and ethnic identity\u2014to reflect together on the long wave of financial capitalism and cultural globalization from the 1980s onwards, which brought into view some cultural and social formations while overshadowing others. We discuss the return of the indigenous predicament and the disappearance of the working class as part of the same impossible ethnographic space, in which these two different historical trajectories are not just abstract scenarios but personal, political, and intellectual engagements which can coexist without finding a singular or unifying logic or explanation.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
<\/a>But what can one\u2019s fieldwork say or do about capitalism, the relationships between core and periphery, or the future of labor struggles? How does one relate the experience of fieldwork to the structural articulation of capitalism in space and time? With what temporal delay do global and national political and economic events (crises, coups, inflation, electoral victories, and radical privatizations) impact on everyday life and, in turn, what is the cumulative effect of local actions on the broader context? Indeed, although my fieldwork is motivated by the attempt to understand the causes of structural inequalities and the impulse to act upon them, the politics of fieldwork consists of unspoken, hardly visible, affective micro-interactions whose consequences are often unpredictable. In its temporal and spatial suspension\u2014between identification and distance, both pregnant with possibilities but also already overdetermined\u2014anthropological fieldwork requires a radical openness and a constant suspension of belief, analytical displacement, and relational attunement. More than a methodology, it is a poetic and relational praxis in the sense discussed by \u00c9douard Glissant in The Poetics of Relations<\/em> (1990).<\/p>\n Instead of considering fieldwork as process of empiricism or \u201chard\u201d knowledge-production, I take it as a political performative process involving juxtapositions of different practice-based and action-oriented \u201cconfabulations,\u201d mediated by and catalyzed through my body; \u201cqueer\u201d in the sense highlighted by Sara Ahmed, that is, materially grounded in the uneven politics of the encounter. My encounters transgress assumptions about what is \u201creal,\u201d itself a decolonial question according to Uruguayan political ecologist Eduardo Gudynas.[1]<\/a> Approached though the elemental and sensuous phenomenology of the body, reality loses its objectivity and fixity and becomes open, molecular, always transforming, and affective. For example, I came to understand ecological injustice\u2014that is, the relationship between toxicity and class inequality as it is experienced by Black and brown bodies\u2014by walking in favelas and working-class neighborhoods\u2014where I could feel the exceptionally high concentration of fumes, coal dust, and industrial noise through all my senses. Fieldwork always involves the irruption of foreign bodies that complicates the politics of inclusion and exclusion, of cultural appropriation and of the right to appear. It is becoming a foreigner (rather than a native)\u2014an exilic and haunted presence that makes each social encounter unique and valuable. It is building social relations and spending time together, developing common vocabularies and support structures, understanding each other, mirroring, exchanging, and acting in common. Fieldwork is an exchange among people who are committed to being together relationally in the long term. To move across toxic landscapes, make sense of unformed and unfolding material, and build trusting bonds out of tense, awkward, and stratified social relations, I had to develop a relational practice, experimental and choreographic, which included the ability to process dream-like fragments of feelings and perceptions into some sort of structured, although impermanent, hypothesis about the world. In my book Art\/Commons<\/em> (2021) I argue that such radical openness in ethnographic fieldwork could potentially constitute a political and cultural commons.<\/p>\n The anthropologist James Clifford describes such an alignment between artistic and ethnographic practices through his notion of \u201cethnographic surrealism,\u201d[2]<\/a> in reference to the collaboration between Surrealist artists and anthropologists that took place in 1920s Paris. A movement of both self-critique and of \u201cother-oriented\u201d propositions, \u201cethnographic surrealism\u201d defamiliarized the intimate proximity with the other. Anthropologists traveled to distant societies looking for those forms of human organization that maximized social creativity and self-expression. Outside the west they found cooperative work, fluid clan structures, shamanism, co-housing, gift-giving, and intellectual commons, all of which radically challenged the oppressive institutions of states, churches, families, parties, and corporations. Moving in the opposite direction, Surrealist artists created powerful ethnographies of industrial cities, showing the irrational basis of the capitalist economy, the terror of modern states, the repressed sexuality generated by the nuclear family and the human body as dream machine, alienated social technology, and medium of exchange. Surrealist ethnographers such as Michel Leiris experienced fieldwork as a space of defamiliarization and even vulnerability, in which they had lost their position of power vis-\u00e0-vis their \u201csubjects\u201d and developed their knowledge dialogically. They felt like outsiders but also intimately connected and strangely familiar with their foreign context. Of course, the modes of self-discovery and self-critique available to surrealist ethnographers and artists relied on their privilege and power to decide who fell into the category of \u201cthe other\u201d in the first place, and it was only when it reached the colonies that surrealism was able to turn the estranged gaze against European power.<\/p>\n James Clifford and I have been sustaining a long-term conversation which considers conditions of radical openness as \u201cimpossible realism,\u201d a realism that we imagine accepts the impossibility of telling a singular and unifying historical story by juxtaposing micro and macro scales, local and global. One of our exchanges, \u201c(Im)possible Realism<\/a>,\u201d has been recorded and discussed in the context of the BAK 2021\/2022 Fellowship for Situated Practice<\/a>, and as part of the Spectral Infrastructure<\/em><\/a> research trajectory. In this exchange we argue that\u202f an \u201c(im)possible realist\u201d\u202fethnographic sensibility complicates and multiplies the historical stories\u202fthat\u202furgently need to\u202fbe told in the wake of the now-displaced\u202f\u201cmaster narratives\u201d (of Progress, Civilization, The West, the Capitalist World System, Development, among others). Contrasting historical scales and narratives don\u2019t \u201cadd up,\u201d but rather create tensions we need to inhabit and explore, as opposed to being subsumed into an explanatory structure or directional teleology. We refer to Stuart Hall\u2019s notion of articulation\u2014particularly between class and ethnic identity\u2014to reflect together on the long wave of financial capitalism and cultural globalization from the 1980s onwards, which brought into view some cultural and social formations while overshadowing others. We discuss the return of the indigenous predicament and the disappearance of the working class as part of the same impossible ethnographic space, in which these two different historical trajectories are not just abstract scenarios but personal, political, and intellectual engagements which can coexist without finding a singular or unifying logic or explanation.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n