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Dr. Kristina Jonutytė: Ethnographic research of minoritised groups in increasingly remote settings: A roundtable discussion

One of the main strengths of ethnographic methodologies is immersed, long-term research, which enables in-depth learning and a holistic vision of a given issue. Restricted or volatile access to ethnographic field sites thus presents not just practical difficulties but it raises a host of important methodological, epistemological, ethical and other questions.

A roundtable discussion at the Institute for Asian and African Studies at Humboldt University of Berlin brought together scholars working in the fields of anthropology and area studies sharing their experiences of conducting ethnographic research in places that appear increasingly inaccessible due to political conflicts, war and rigid authoritarian regimes. In such contexts, the study of minoritized populations (ethnic, religious) is often particularly unwelcome by the dominating regimes, as they may experience rigid security policies, second-class citizenship, and even persecution. At the same time, the predicament of minoritized groups may thus require greater outside visibility and scrutiny.

Roundtable participants discussed the contexts of contemporary Russia, China, and places in Central Asia such as Tajikistan, which had been relatively accessible for various forms of social scientific research but this has changed in recent years because of shifting domestic and international politics. These places, like many others around the world, can be thought of as “increasingly remote”, referring both to their relative inaccessibility to certain kinds of research as well as to the social and political processes that construct such remoteness (Harms et al 2014). Remoteness here is not an absolute category, but a relative and changing one, related to one’s positionality, perspective, power, and other factors, as well as related to processes of marginalization and minoritization. We are particularly interested in what this “return of remoteness” (Saxer and Andersson 2019) means for ethnographic research. How can scholars continue doing research in/on such settings? How are they being affected (professionally, personally) by the changing circumstances? What are the ethical challenges of such studies, especially with regard to the personal safety of research partners? And what political responsibilities does it entail for anthropologists and area studies scholars who do research in politically sensitive settings?

Image 1: Poster for roundtable discussion on 15 May 2024 (Transregional Central Asian Studies, Humboldt University, Berlin)

Methodologically, too, “increasingly remote” settings pose significant challenges. First-hand in-depth knowledge appears especially important in such contexts, while also being difficult to obtain. We thus asked: Which approaches or strategies do scholars opt for? Can remote ethnography, material culture studies, new area and mobility studies or other approaches provide substantial alternatives when in-person fieldwork is not possible? Roundtable participants reflected on how changing accessibility of their field sites has shaped their research questions and approaches.

Having started her ethnographic research in Buryatia – then part of the Soviet Union – in the late 1960s, Caroline Humphrey recalled selecting the seemingly least problematic topic of study – kinship – knowing many other issues like politics or religion were strictly off limits. However, she soon found that through kinship, she could indeed access many other important issues that could otherwise hardly be discussed, like tragic family histories due to communist policies. Over time, accessibility shifted in her field: from the initial Moscow-supervised official field visit to more informal visits in the 1970s, 1990s and early 2000s, where she found research participants to be more open about a wide range of topics, through to an officially permitted visit in the borderland region in the 2010s. Throughout these changeable circumstances, Caroline highlighted lasting friendships as key to successful fieldwork under uncertain conditions. More recently, since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Buryatia has grown once again grown “remote” for fieldwork but, as Caroline suggested, it might be more accurate to say that it has been distanced from the perspective of the researcher, who chooses not to go there to ensure the safety of interlocutors. She highlighted a range of ethical challenges that have emerged doing research in the region, like choosing not to publish some of the data to protect interlocutors, highlighting a thread of fear and concealment among locals, especially minoritized groups, due to the history of repressions and their often precarious situation today. At the same time, she noted that the researcher’s position also changes over time, and with it access to various field sites, groups and resources shifts, too. Finally, Caroline noted she finds it important to keep in touch with colleagues in “increasingly remote” Russia and exchange with them professionally rather than engage in academic boycott.

Rune Steenberg’s field site in Xinjiang was rather difficult to access from the beginning of his field research in 2009, but still manageable for low-profile visits up to 2016. As China’s policies in the region grew more oppressive, in-person research for him was no longer viable. Since then, he has utilized a variety of approaches from doing Uyghur-related ethnography outside of Xinjiang, remote ethnography, textual and online research to working collaboratively with researchers, diaspora and others who could access the region in one way or another. Arguing that ethnographic research is always already limited as access is restricted by our positionality, cultural norms, and a range of other factors, Rune nonetheless believes that whenever possible, remote research should be supplementary rather than a substitute to in-person research. Currently, he leads a group project “Remote ethnography of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region”, combining a variety of remote methods to study this region inaccessible to most researchers, marked by extreme state violence and human rights violations. Through this multifaceted experience, Rune has found that remote ethnography is best as a group endeavor, multiple perspectives and approaches adding value to the whole.

Manja Stephan’s selected research topic of Muslim mobilities led her far outside of her initially selected place of study in Tajikistan. Due to the fear of Islamization, religious students she sought to do fieldwork with were increasingly marginalized and criminalized in the country, as securitization of Islam grew. As a consequence, she found translocality and mobility studies to be more suitable research approaches, rather than place-based ethnographic study. Mobility biographies she collected as part of her research led her not only to Dubai where she did in-person fieldwork with Tajik migrants, but also to places like the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Russia. Remoteness being a matter of power and a politically constructed condition, Manja’s fieldwork was framed by national policies, as her research participants themselves grew “remote” from mainstream Tajik life. This is one example of a situation of “authoritarianism paradox”: the more difficult it is to research a given minoritized group in an authoritarian setting, the more interest there may be in doing so, and the more necessary it is to undertake such research to draw attention to the position and voices of locals. At the same time, as in-person research in such contexts is severely limited, macro-level studies from afar, which have a tendency towards simplification, gain prominence over ethnographic research.

Conducting research in Bashkortostan, Russia, Jesko Schmoller has found his field site physically inaccessible since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Since his research primarily focuses on place, exploring Muslim place-making in Bashkortostan, restricted access appeared as an especially significant obstacle. While Jesko hopes to return to in-person fieldwork when it is once again possible, for now, he found textual studies to be unexpectedly eye-opening, providing insight into important aspects of Bashkir culture and religion previously unknown to him. He found that ethnographers should ideally be working with primary texts more even if they have good field access. Initially skeptical of relying on text too heavily, he now works with original Bashkir texts, such as Ufa-published “Bashkortostan: the land of Awliya [Friends of God]”, with a focus on religion and space. In his current research, he asks: What insight can be gained into sacred space through primary texts? Can they provide insight into a growing spatial marginalization of Muslims in Russia? Can one be in proximity to sacred places via text and gain insights into local ontologies (rather than discourses) without being there in person? From a local Sufi Muslim perspective, for instance, the Bashkir sacred landscape exists on yet another plane than the physical one. May such texts be regarded a medium to gain a sense impression of this kind of concealed geography?

Like Jesko, other speakers try to approach the newfound remoteness as an opportunity rather than a limitation. Rune and Manja both recounted that when they did research with participants outside of their repressive home country, they were much more open and research was more productive. Another opportunity provided by remoteness was various local publications as noted by Jesko Schmoller and Caroline Humphrey, who noticed an increase in local publications across Russia – as perhaps also in other regions – which provide a treasure trove to anthropologists who can rely on them as data, given their preexisting in-depth knowledge of the context. Another remote method that Caroline has made use of together with David Sneath (1999) in “The End of Nomadism? Society, State and the Environment in Inner Asia” was remote sensing, namely using satellite photography to make visible the effects of contrasting land-use systems along the Russian-Mongolian border. While this method provided important insights into local environmental changes, Caroline stressed the difficulties involved in interpreting remote sensory data and the necessity to triangulate it with other kinds of knowledge. Rune Steenberg, too, regularly uses various kinds of remote sensing data in his research, extracting significant information even from tourists’ videos and travel accounts. He stressed that “epistemological care” is of utmost importance in remote research: transparency about the certainty of arguments made in remote ethnographic research provides an important corrective in precarious research contexts.

Moreover, Caroline argued that remote research widens the scope of ethnographic investigation, as it is no longer confined to the researcher’s physical presence. At the same time, it may become more similar to historians’ research techniques. Relatedly, Manja asked: if ethnographers lose access to in-person fieldwork and rely only on remote data, what is it that specifically ethnographic remote research contributes? To Rune, the answer lies in ethnography’s holistic approach and in the thick description that uncovers multiple layers of meaning and perspectives. This is enabled by deep immersion in a local context through ethnographic methods but if need be, one can even undertake artificial immersion away from the research area, through a period of intense engagement with local media, social media, communicating in the local language with people from there and other means. Also, “classical” ethnographic fieldwork outside of the inaccessible region is often part of remote ethnographic methodologies.

Caroline raised another important question: what can ethnographers doing remote research contribute that would differ from and add value to what the diaspora or other critical voices of the studied group are already saying? While this question requires a broader discussion, as preliminary remarks, Rune suggested that while cooperation with members of the diaspora is crucial, it is also important to note that they often have their own visions and agendas, so social scientific methodologies and analyses are a meaningful contribution. Manja added that working solely with members of the diaspora may provide little representation of the social, economic, cultural and other diversity of society in their homeland.

The role of institutions appeared as important to the speakers, all of whom strove towards strong connections on the ground rather than an official veil to their research. Yet this is not always possible, like in Caroline’s initial fieldwork, where Buryat collective farms could only be accessed with official approvals from both Moscow and the Buryat authorities. Manja spoke of a seemingly growing expectation institutions hold towards researchers to engage in “scientific diplomacy” along their research responsibilities, acting as representatives of their institutions and even nation-states in the field. These roles can be difficult to balance and even disadvantageous for some kinds of research, shaping ethnographer’s relationships in the field. Finally, Rune stressed the importance of critically engaging with the institutions we partake in, such as universities. Their growing neoliberalisation is a significant component of the broader, global political processes that reproduce the kinds of conditions for human rights abuses, surveillance, marginalisation and precarity in the places we study. Opposing structures that reproduce inequalities in our home societies is therefore important in beginning to oppose them in places of research.

Bibliography

Harms, Erik, Shafqat Hussain, and Sara Shneiderman. 2014. “Remote and edgy: new takes on old anthropological themes.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4(1): 361–381.

Humphrey, Caroline, and David Sneath. 1999. The end of Nomadism?: Society, state, and the environment in Inner Asia. Duke University Press.

Saxer, Martin, and Ruben Andersson. 2019. “The return of remoteness: insecurity, isolation and connectivity in the new world disorder.” Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 27(2): 140-155.

Dr. Kristina Jonutytė is an associate professor at the Institute of Asian and Transcultural Studies, Vilnius University. Her research interests lie in political anthropology and the anthropology of religion, with an ethnographic focus on Buryatia, Russia and Mongolia. The present text was prepared during a visiting fellowship at the Central Asian Seminar, Institute of Asian and African Studies, Humboldt University of Berlin.

Cite as: Jonutytė, Kristina 2025. “Ethnographic research of minoritised groups in increasingly remote settings: A roundtable discussion” Focaalblog 20 February. https://www.focaalblog.com/2025/02/20/dr-kristina-jonutyte-ethnographic-research-of-minoritised-groups-in-increasingly-remote-settings-a-roundtable-discussion/

Blog, Features, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, In Honour of David Graeber: Exploring the Fissures and Cracks

Ayça Çubukçu: On “Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology”

Published in 2004 in the inspirational context of a veritably exploding anarchism around the world, David Graeber’s Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (referred to here on as Fragments)is a tiny and mighty, genre-defying text. Graeber calls it a pamphlet, “a series of thoughts, sketches of potential theories, and tiny manifestos” (Graeber 2004: 1). The pamphlet is impossible to summarize and discuss fully in twenty minutes, especially since in hindsight, it bears the seeds of many of the major arguments Graeber was to develop later in life. I will therefore limit myself to sketching some basic elements of the kind of social theory that Graeber is proposing in this spirited text. Broadly, Fragments seeks to outline a body of radical theory that would, in Graeber’s words, “actually be of interest to those who are trying to help bring about a world in which people are free to govern their own affairs” (Ibid: 9). This is characteristic of Graeber: the desire to render social theory—particularly anthropology—usefully interesting to radical movements, and radical movements—particularly anarchism—useful and interesting to social theory.

In Fragments, Graeber explores what he names the “strange affinity” between anarchism and anthropology (Ibid: 12). He observes “there was something about anthropological thought in particular—its keen awareness of the very range of human possibilities—that gave it an affinity to anarchism from the very beginning” (Ibid: 13). Graeber himself was fascinated by this, the range of human possibilities in the past and the present, which could unravel the seeming inevitability of our current social and political institutions, while grounding hope for living collectively with greater freedom in more egalitarian arrangements.

Graeber is able to observe the strange affinity between anthropology and anarchism in Fragments because in his version, anarchism is not about a body of theory bequeathed in the 19th century by “founding figures” such as Bakunin, Kropotkin and Proudhon that one would have to adopt wholesale. Instead, it is more about a particular attitude, even a faith that is shared among anarchists (Ibid: 4). Anarchism can be thought of as a faith, Graeber asserts, which involves “the rejection of certain types of social relations, the confidence that certain others would be much better ones on which to build a livable society, [and] the belief that such a society could actually exist” (Ibid: 4). Likewise, the “founding figures” of anarchism did not think they invented anything new—they simply made a faithful assumption that, in Graeber’s words, “the basic principles of anarchism—self-organization, voluntary association, mutual aid—referred to forms of human behavior they assumed to have been around about as long as humanity. The same goes for the rejection of the state and of all forms of structural violence, inequality, or domination.” (Ibid: 3) Arguably, it is this assumption about human history that Graeber sets out to prove valid in his latest book, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, which he co-authored with the archeologist David Wengrow: Humanity has always practiced anarchistic forms of human behavior and social organization—since the Ice Age.

Black and white photo of a man and woman sitting together at a table, smiling, with a skull on the table between them.
Image 1: David and Ayça in Harringay, London, 2017 © Elif Sarican

In Graeber’s vision, in any case, anthropology as a discipline could strengthen faith in the possibility of another world by offering an archive of alternative ways of organizing social relations, of reconstituting them consciously, or of abandoning them altogether. But to be able to strengthen this faith in the possibility of another world free from “the state, capitalism, racism and male dominance” (Ibid: 10), social theory itself would have to assume another world is possible. In fact, Graeber asserts this as the first assumption that any radical social theory has to make. “To commit oneself to such a principle is almost an act of faith,” he finds, “since how can one have certain knowledge of such matters? It might possibly turn out that such a world is not possible” (Ibid: 10). In a move that resembles a sophisticated theological argument about the existence of God, he then declares, “it’s this very unavailability of absolute knowledge which makes a commitment to optimism a moral imperative” (Ibid: 10). I wonder, however, if anthropologists or others can be drawn into such faithful optimism by argumentation. Perhaps one could be inspired to have faith in the possibility of another world and inspire David Graeber did along with the radical movements he dearly treasured.

Graeber’s second proposition is that any radical, particularly anarchist, social theory would have to self-consciously reject vanguardism (Ibid: 11). To his mind, ethnography as an anthropological method provides a particularly relevant, if a rough and incipient model of how “nonvanguardist revolutionary intellectual practice may work” (Ibid: 12). The goal of such a practice would not be to “arrive at the correct strategic analyses and then lead the masses to follow” (Ibid: 11), but to tease out the implicit logics—symbolic, moral or pragmatic—that already underlie people’s actions, even if they are themselves not completely aware of them (Ibid: 12). “One obvious role for a radical intellectual is to do precisely that,” Graeber writes in Fragments, “to look at those who are creating viable alternatives, try to figure out what might be the larger implications of what they are (already) doing, and then offer those ideas back, not as prescriptions, but as contributions, possibilities—as gifts” (Ibid: 12). Not prescriptions, but contributions, possibilities, gifts. That is what Graeber offered in his work—particularly in Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, Direct Action: An Ethnography (2008) and The Democracy Project (2013)—whether his gifts were accepted or not by everyone he wrote about, thought and acted with, or, for that matter, was read by. After all, gifts too can be rejected, and as Graeber recognized, not much of what he proposed or practiced as an anthropologist had “much to do with what anthropology, even radical anthropology, has actually been like over the last hundred years or so” (Graeber 2004: 13).

Nevertheless, in Fragments, Graeber turns to anthropologists, most notably Marcel Mauss, to reflect on his influence on anarchists, despite the fact that Mauss had nothing good to say about them. “In the end, though,” Graeber writes as if speaking about himself as well, “Marcel Mauss has probably had more influence on anarchists than all the other [anthropologists] combined. This is because he was interested in alternative moralities, which opened the way to thinking that societies without states and markets were the way they were because they actively wished to live that way. Which in our terms means, because they were anarchists. Insofar as fragments of an anarchist anthropology do, already, exist, they largely derive from him” (Ibid: 21). In my interpretation, Graeber’s own interest in developing an anarchist anthropology too was driven by an appreciation of and fascination with “alternative moralities” that underpin people’s self-conscious determination to live otherwise—in the anarchist case, free from capitalism and patriarchy, free from the state, structural violence, inequality, and domination.

“This is what I mean by alternative ethics” Graeber explains in a critical section of Fragments where he theorizes revolutionary counterpower and foreshadows a core argument he co-authors in The Dawn of Everything (2021): “Anarchistic societies are no more unaware of human capacities for greed or vainglory than modern Americans are unaware of human capacities for envy, gluttony, or sloth; they would just find them equally unappealing as the basis for their civilization. In fact, they see these phenomena as moral dangers so dire they end up organizing much of their social life around containing them” (Graeber 2004: 24). This is a remarkable proposition. First, it is determined to cast ethics and morality as the constitutive, self-conscious grounds of social organization. Second, it intimates this to be the case across human history, “modern” or “pre-modern.”

In fact, Graeber argues that “any really politically engaged anthropology will have to start by seriously confronting the question of what, if anything, really divides what we like to call the ‘modern’ world from the rest of human history” (Ibid: 36). In Fragments, as well as in the Dawn of Everything, he passionately rejects familiar historical periodizations and evolutionary stages such that the entirety of human history—along with every society, people, and civilization across time and space—becomes populated by examples of human possibility enacted by decidedly imaginative, intelligent, playful, experimental, thoughtful, creative, and politically self-conscious creatures.

For Graeber, human history does not consist of a series of revolutions (Ibid: 44)—be it the Neolithic Revolution, the Agricultural Revolution, the French Revolution, or the Industrial Revolution—that introduce clear social, moral, or political breaks in the nature of social reality, or “the human condition” as he prefers to think of it. If this is the case, and if anarchism is above all an ethics of practice (Ibid: 95), as he asserts, such an ethics becomes available for anthropological study and political inspiration across human history. It is important to note however that Graeber passionately disagrees with primitivist anarchists inspired by his anthropologist mentor Marshall Sahlins’ (1972) influential essay “The Original Affluent Society,” anarchists who propose that “there was a time when alienation and inequality did not exist, when everyone was a hunter gathering anarchist, and that therefore real liberation can only come if we abandon ‘civilization’” (Graeber 2004: 55). In Fragments, and the Dawn of Everything, he instead draws a more complex history of endless variety where, for instance, “there were hunter gatherer societies with nobles and slaves,” and “agrarian societies that are fiercely egalitarian” (Ibid: 54). Graeber insists, in other words, that “humans never lived in the garden of Eden” (Ibid: 55). The significance of this finding is manifold. Among other things, it means that history can become “a resource for us in much more interesting ways,” and that “radical theorists no longer have to pore endlessly over the same scant two hundred years of revolutionary history” (Ibid: 54).

Writing of revolution in Fragments, Graeber rejects its commonplace definition which “has always implied something in the nature of a paradigm shift: a clear break, a fundamental rupture in the nature of social reality after which everything works differently, and previous categories no longer apply” (Ibid: 42). Instead, he urges us “to stop thinking about revolution as a thing—‘the’ revolution, the great cataclysmic break—and instead ask ‘what is revolutionary action?’” (Ibid: 45). He stresses that “revolutionary action is any collective action which rejects, and therefore confronts, some form of power or domination and in doing so, reconstitutes social relations—even within the collectivity—in that light” (Ibid: 45), without necessarily aiming to topple a government, or for that matter, the head of an anthropology department.

I mention this possibility in the playful spirit of David to bring us back to the here and now, and to the final section of Fragments titled “Anthropology,” in which he “somewhat reluctantly bites the hand that feeds him” (Ibid: 95). Graeber observes how, instead of adopting any kind of radical politics, anthropologists have risked becoming “yet another clog in a global ‘identity machine,’ a planet-wide apparatus of institutions and assumptions,” whereby all debates about the nature of political or economic possibilities are seen to be over, and “the only way one can now make a political claim is by asserting some group identity, with all the assumptions about what identity is” (Ibid: 101), he laments. And bitingly, he declares, “the perspective of the anthropologist and the global marketing executive have become almost indistinguishable” (Ibid: 100).

But what does Graeber propose for anthropology instead? Observing that “anthropologists are, effectively, sitting on a vast archive of human experience, of social and political experiments no one else really knows about,” he regrets that this archive of human experience is treated by anthropologists as “our dirty little secret” (Ibid: 94). Of course, it was colonial violence that made such an archive possible in the first place as Graeber recognizes without reluctance: “the discipline we know today was made possible by horrific schemes of conquest, colonization, and mass murder—much like most modern academic disciplines,” he writes (Ibid: 96). Nevertheless, he makes the daring proposition that “the fruits of ethnography—and the techniques of ethnography—could be enormously helpful” for radical movements around the world if anthropologists could “get past their—however understandable—hesitancy, owing to their own often squalid colonial history, and come to see what they are sitting on not as some guilty secret (which is nonetheless their guilty secret, and no one else’s) but as the common property of humankind” (Ibid: 94).  

Towards a conclusion, I would like to submit that anarchism, and the anthropological knowledge of anarchist ethics, practices, and imaginaries across human history are part of “the common property of humankind,” which now includes Graeber’s own contributions to anarchist theory and practice along with his astounding imagination of their possible pasts and futures. Allow me to end then with a strikingly imaginative passage from Fragments, which we could receive as an invitation to think and act towards an anarchist future:

“[A]narchist forms of organization would not look anything like a state. … [T]hey would involve an endless variety of communities, associations, networks, projects, on every conceivable scale, overlapping and intersecting in any way we could imagine, and possibly many that we can’t. Some would be quite local, others global. Perhaps all they would have in common is that none would involve anyone showing up with weapons and telling everyone else to shut up and do what they were told. And that, since anarchists are not actually trying to seize power within any national territory, the process of one system replacing the other will not take the form of some sudden revolutionary cataclysm—the storming of a Bastille, the seizing of a Winter Palace—but will necessarily be gradual, the creation of alternative forms of organization on a world scale, new forms of communication, new, less alienated ways of organizing life, which will, eventually, make currently existing forms of power seem stupid and beside the point. That in turn would mean that there are endless examples of viable anarchism: pretty much any form of organization would count as one, so long as it was not imposed by some higher authority.” (Ibid: 40)

In Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, writing of Madagascar, Graeber observes how “it often seems that no one really takes on their full authority until they are dead.” To my mind, we now have to deal with David’s “full authority” in an anarchist spirit. The task at hand cannot be petrification through idolization or canonization, but the extension of an invitation to think, play, and experiment with his contributions to anthropology and anarchism alike.

Ayça Çubukçu is Associate Professor in Human Rights and Co-Director of LSE Human Rights at the London School of Economics. She is the author of For the Love of Humanity: the World Tribunal on Iraq (2018, University of Pennsylvania Press). Her writing has appeared in the Law Angeles Review of Books, Jadaliyya, The Guardian, Al Jazeera English, Thesis 11, Public Seminar and other venues. Ayça is a member of the editorial collectives of the Humanity Journal, Jadaliyya’s Turkey page, and of the LSE International Studies Series at Cambridge University Press.

This text was presented at David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar on ‘Anarchist Anthropology’.

References

Graeber, D. 2004. Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

Graeber, D. 2008. Direct Action: An Ethnography. California: AK Press.

Graeber, D. 2013. The Democracy Project: A History, A Crisis, A Movement. New York City: Spiegel & Grau, a publishing imprint of Penguin Random House.

Graeber, D., & Wengrow, D. 2021. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. London, UK: Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books.

Sahlins, M. 1968. “Notes on the Original Affluent Society.” In Man the Hunter: The First Intensive Survey of a Single, Crucial Stage of Human Development—Man’s Once Universal Hunting Way of Life, Lee and DeVore (eds), pp. 85-9. Chicago: Aldine.

Cite as: Ayça Çubukçu. 2022. “On Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology.” FocaalBlog, 18 January. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/01/18/ayca-cubukcu-on-fragments-of-an-anarchist-anthropology/

Blog, Features, In Honour of David Graeber: Exploring the Fissures and Cracks, Lost People

David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar: Lost People

Chair: Alpa Shah

Discussants: Jonathan Parry & Maurice Bloch

Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar is not David’s first published book, but it is based on his doctoral thesis and, in this sense, his first, major scholarly work. We are led in this discussion by Prof. Maurice Bloch and Prof. Jonathan Parry—two of David’s colleagues at the LSE and engaged readers of David’s work. They carry us through the complexity of David’s arguments about history and narrative and raise important questions about whether he engages deeply enough with the socio-economic realities that Malagasy people faced at the time of his research.

These conversations first took place at the LSE Research Seminar on Anthropological Theory, and are published as a FocaalBlog feature in tribute to the life and work of David Graeber.

Alpa Shah is Professor of Anthropology at LSE, convenes a research theme at the LSE International Inequalities Institute and is author of the award-winning Nightmarch: Among India’s Revolutionary Guerrillas.

Jonathan Parry is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology at the LSE. He is the author of Classes of Labour: Work and Life in a Central Indian Steel Town and co-editor with Chris Hann of Industrial Labor on the Margins of Capitalism. Parry writes more broadly on the classic anthropological themes of caste, kinship, marriage, and exchange. Alongside Maurice Bloch, he has also co-edited two classic works in anthropology, Death and the Regeneration of Life and Money and the Morality of Exchange.

Maurice Bloch is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology at the LSE. He has carried out long-term ethnographic research in Madagascar, is the author of In and Out of Each Other’s Bodies: Theories of Mind, Evolution, Truth, and the Nature of the Social, and writes more broadly on power, history, kinship, ritual, and cognition.

Art and Visual Anthropology, Blog, Fieldworks

Sanderien Verstappen: Hidden behind toilet rolls: visual landscapes of COVID-19

During the lockdowns of spring 2020, short videos became a popular means of reflecting on new experiences of quarantine and social distancing. Passed around on social media platforms, downloaded in microseconds, and stored on smartphones where they became nested amidst other videos and photos, Corona videos brought about smiles amidst anxious circumstances and reflected meaningful forms of expert and folk knowledges about the pandemic. In this blogpost, the genre of the Corona video is approached from the perspective of anthropological filmmaking. Can anthropologists create their own cinematographic interventions into the pandemic, by joining these visual conversations while commenting on them at the same time?

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Features, Urban Struggles

Ezgi Güler: Trans Sex Workers’ Collective Struggle in Urban Turkey

This post is part of a feature on “Urban Struggles,” moderated and edited by Raúl Acosta (LMU Munich), Flávio Eiró (Radboud University Nijmegen), Insa Koch (LSE) and Martijn Koster (Radboud University Nijmegen).

Facing family rejection and domestic violence, many transgender (trans) people leave their hometowns especially for large cities in search for greater acceptance and opportunities (Engin 2018). Due to a lack of viable financial means to support themselves and a lack of social acceptance by society, these individuals typically take shelter with urban trans communities (Zengin 2014). In the recent decades, trans communities working in the sex economy have become particularly visible in urban spaces (Çokar and Kayar 2011). However, stigma and hostility towards their gender identity, criminalization and the precarious nature of street-based sex work, punitive institutional practices, and neoliberal urban restructuring have exacerbated their marginalization. In response, trans sex workers have developed various coping and resistance strategies. However, their care networks and practices of resistance are often precarious. Although solidarity persists, violent structural forces produce tensions in their relationships, and hinder the emergence of their collective resistance. This post communicates an ethnographic research that investigates the processes through which the wider forces undermine sex workers’ collective struggles in urban Turkey.

The case study presented here is based on participant-observation and 30 in-depth interviews in an urban neighborhood of a major Turkish city. I collected data from August 2017 to August 2019, during which time I spent an average of six hours a day for six months with sex workers in the streets as they solicited clients and engaged in other everyday activities. In this context, a wide range of identities coexist under the category of “trans.” As used here, the term broadly signifies a person whose assigned sex at birth is male, and who cross-dresses or self-identifies as a woman or with a local or transnational gender-variant term. Most of my research participants self-identify either as a woman or as travesti, lubunya, trans, transseksüel, gacı, or cross-dresser.

Structural violence: Transgender lives in urban Turkey

Sevda, who self-identifies as a travesti, experienced estrangement and ostracism when she first revealed her gender identity to her family. She left her parental home and cut ties with her family members for many years. Struggling with poverty and homelessness, she moved to a larger city that offered her anonymity and enabled her to earn a living in the underground sex economy. Unable to find other employment, she had engaged in street-based sex work for 15 years when I first spoke with her. However, her labor has always been criminalized. The fines she has received for seeking clients in the street have accumulated. And since she has not had funds to pay these fines, her debt has gradually multiplied, reaching the equivalent of two-years rent. On occasion, when Sevda has been unable to earn a sufficient income in inner-city neighborhoods, where she is policed and punished, she has worked in peripheral areas, either along the highway, at bus terminals, or in industrial zones. Without peer support networks in these unsafe and isolated locations, she has faced violence, street harassment, and extortion. On several times, she has been targeted with bottles, stones, lit cigarettes, or water thrown out of car windows. When I first met Sevda, though strong and persistent, she seemed emotionally exhausted from the everyday hassles of her life.

The rights group Transgender Europe notes that “there is no safe country for transgender people.” The statistics from Turkey are particularly worrisome. According to their 2019 report, between October 2018 and October 2019, 331 trans and gender-diverse people were murdered around the world. In Europe, 33 per cent of all murders of trans people occurred in Turkey, with nearly all victims being sex workers. Trans sex workers are especially vulnerable due to the criminalization of sex work and societal transphobia. The violence they experience in Turkey is therefore a manifestation of structural violence (see Galtung 1990).

As in the case of Sevda, the overwhelming majority of trans women in Turkey pursue a livelihood in the sex economy. This is most often due to gender discrimination in the labor market—a fact that distinguishes this group from most other sex workers. In addition, although sex work is legal in Turkey, most trans individuals are excluded from selling sex legally. This is primarily due to their gender identity, but also their citizenship status and age in some cases. While Turkish law does not define prostitution as a crime, all actions required to conduct sex work outside of registered brothels are criminalized, and subject to administrative punishments (Çokar and Kayar 2011). In recent years, there have been rigorous efforts to restrict prostitution by closing down legal brothels, and pushing unregistered prostitutes out into urban peripheries, thereby reducing their visibility. These prohibitive and restrictive measures not only deprive them of safe working environments and economic and social security, but also compromise their access to formal protection channels. For example, the majority of unregistered sex workers do not hold any social security. The most vulnerable trans sex workers are those who work on the streets, or who struggle with poverty, homelessness, or health problems. These are the individuals most likely to get harmed by institutional practices, such as the criminal and administrative sanctions and policing, since many of them engage in “survival sex” (selling sex to meet subsistence needs).

Over the decades, trans communities in large cities have been targeted in collective assaults—often in the form of forced evictions—which have been supported by multiple actors, including extremist nationalist groups, the police, non-trans residents, neighborhood associations, the media, and various state institutions (Bayramoğlu 2013). On the one hand, such evictions have aimed to “cleanse” an area of nonconforming gender and sexual identities (Zengin 2014). On the other hand, they have served to remove marginalized populations, such as trans individuals, sex workers, and migrants, in order to transform low-income areas into profitable neighborhoods through the renewal and gentrification projects (Bayramoğlu 2013). For trans individuals who sell sex and live in these neighborhoods, such evictions have been a process of dispossession (Bayramoğlu 2013) and have devastated their livelihoods, social relationships, and spatial belongingness (Unsal 2015).

From structural violence to interpersonal violence

According to Masse (2014), what brings individuals together in present-day urban social movements is the struggle against precariousness, at work and in the life.  Participants in such struggles not only mobilize against economic exploitation, unemployment, and poverty, but also stigmatization, marginalization, criminalization, and exclusion. At the same time, however, the very conditions of precarity, around which people at times collectively mobilize, also generate interpersonal conflicts that undermine their collective struggles. Such is the case with trans sex workers.


Picture 1. Protests were organized over the murder of a trans woman and activist, Hande Kader in 2016 (Illustrated by ttillustrations, 11.06.2020)

Anthropologists have long documented how structural violence translates into interpersonal violence in the lives of socially and economically vulnerable populations (see Auyero 2000; Bourgois 2001). According to their accounts, wider forces, such as political oppression, economic marginalization, and social inequality, produce interpersonal conflicts within marginalized populations (see Bourdieu 1998). During my fieldwork, I often witnessed sex workers quarrelling, criticizing their peers’ appearances, spreading rumors, and on rare occasions, physically assaulting each other. The reproduction of violence in one’s intimate life against oneself or one’s kin, friends, neighbors, and community may follow several paths. For instance, interpersonal violence may be a practical necessity in volatile and illegal street economies that cannot rely on law enforcement for regulation (Karandinos, Hart, Castrillo, and Bourgois 2014). Such is the case in this underground sex economy, where physical and verbal violence in part serves as a mean for social control.

A great deal of the quarrels, ingrained in the language and the culture of the larger queer population in Turkey, are taken as interactional codes among trans people. The contentious nature of these social interactions help them to bond, release tensions, and form alliances. In some cases, however, hostile comments and practices turn self-destructive, harm relationships, and undermine solidarity. A considerable number of ethnographic studies have documented the integration of violence into the moral logics of people’s everyday lives (see Anderson 1999; Bourgois 1995). Accordingly, daily practices and expressions of violence on a micro-interactional level can become normalized in public and private spheres and accepted as a commonsense way to address everyday anxieties (see Bourgois 2001). Interpersonal violence may also arise from a sense of inferiority and powerlessness, intensely experienced during daily struggles for sustenance and self-respect in a hostile world, which may in turn exert a demobilizing effect on vulnerable populations (Bourgois 2001).

Weakening of solidarities and collective resistance

Informal support networks of trans sex workers are not always available to help cope with and counter risks. Even though some sex workers are in deep financial difficulties, money and other material assistance is usually shared only within small and intimate social circles. Social fragmentation, by contrast, is visible even to an outsider. For example, having suffered from severe economic hardship and financial distress for several months, Gamze once voiced her disappointment about her considerably wealthier peers, who worked next-door, “They see my situation. Why don’t they offer any support?” On the contrary, workers commonly express distrust toward their peers. Don Kulick (1998) documented similar patterns of conflicts and distrust among travestis in Brazil. Furthermore, individuals struggling financially are sometimes blamed for their circumstances by their peers—a practice that works to legitimize the social order. In other words, members of marginalized groups may hold themselves and each other responsible for the material effects of structural violence (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992), thereby hindering solidarity and collective resistance in their communities.

Among the structural elements engendering conflicts and undermining solidarity are the material pressures and tensions arising from precarious labor. In the absence of social security net and other employment, a decline in the number of clients immediately creates financial distress in the lives of many sex workers. In addition, along with a shared residential space, and the friendship and community relations that this entails, trans sex workers also share a work space in the informal sex market that they depend on for their livelihoods. However, the organization of sex labor induces competition in concentrated urban spaces, where everyone must find their own clients. At times, competition may lead to fights over “stealing” others’ clients or working spots. Especially when business is slow, the workers often take note of others’ earnings, which can give rise to heated arguments. There are also vast economic disparities among trans sex workers (Zengin 2014). For this reason, financial struggles are not typically identified as a common challenge that needs to be dealt with collectively.

The divisive and hindering effects of material pressures and competition on workers’ collective struggles have been observed in many labor settings. Significantly, in the lives of trans sex workers, financial pressures are coupled with social and political marginalization.  A sense of insecurity resulting from precarious living conditions constrains community mobilization. For instance, trans communities in several neighborhoods in Turkey experienced evictions and attempts at lynching. Furthermore, due to criminalization, the threat and reality of police harassment may disrupt their lives. Given these threats, most sex workers in this neighborhood have restricted their participation especially in visible, confrontational or organized forms of resistance, including political demonstrations and physical resistance to repel the police in the neighborhood. In some cases, sex workers may even disapprove of their colleagues who are involved in contentious collective action, such as protesting a hate crime targeting their peers. Such individuals fear that organizing community mobilization could result in a decline in the number of clients or an increase in policing, thereby negatively impacting their livelihood and placing their lives at risk.

Support networks and community mobilization

In spite of being strained and ridden with contradictions, the informal networks of trans sex workers still provide support, care, and assistance, given that legal protection is limited for many of these workers (Güler 2020). As with working-class women and mothers in marginalized neighborhoods (see Edin and Lein 1997; Koch 2015; Stack 1974), relying on fictive kin for mutual aid and reciprocal exchange remains a central coping mechanism for trans people ostracized from their families of origin for reasons of gender and sexuality (see Weston 1997). In particular, those who have shared housing for many years develop intimate relationships through which they assist each other in difficult times (see Bourdieu 1996; Mauss 1954; Stack 1974).

Likewise, community-based mobilization has been an effective form of resistance against physical violence. In other words, trans sex workers heavily rely on their community for safety. For example, they stay in close contact and stand in the street in groups, warn each other about dangerous clients, coach inexperienced peers, fight back in violent attacks, and at times protest at police stations to save friends (Güler 2020). Safety is thus a pressing concern for many workers and treated as a collective responsibility.

Concluding thoughts

Transgender sex workers in Turkey live and work under difficult circumstances, including pervasive violence, punitive institutional practices, coercive policing, societal stigma and exclusion, and material pressures. On the other hand, powerful organizations promoting trans rights have emerged in recent years at a local and an international level. And trans individuals and sex workers are now more visible and vocal than ever in the streets, at universities, in formal political arenas, and in social and traditional media. In fact, this research was inspired by my admiration for their tenacious resistance to their conditions of marginality, their sense of community, and their willingness to support one another.

However, during my fieldwork, I was repeatedly made aware of rivalries and distrust, failing solidarities, and harm received from fellow peers. Although informal support systems remain crucial resources for coping with and providing a bulwark against risks, the marginalization of trans sex workers continues to constrain their collective efforts while weakening the integrity and solidarity of their communities. Moreover, despite a strong sense of shared identity, dense interpersonal networks, and close attachments among these workers, violent structural forces continue to engender interpersonal conflicts.

Similar challenges have been observed among other stigmatized populations, such as migrants, underground traders, and homeless people, whose lives often depend on the informal economy at the margins of society (see Koch 2018; Menjívar 2000). Ethnographic methods offer opportunities to explore the ways in which precarious, violent, and exclusionary structural forces condition the circumstances of socially and economically marginalized subjects while also rendering their informal networks and collective efforts precarious. To intervene and contest these economic, political, and social forces, we first need to understand the lived experiences of affected individuals.

Ezgi Güler is a PhD researcher in Social Sciences at the European University Institute. She is an urban sociologist who works on social support networks, mobilization, and resistance of sex workers.

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Cite as: Güler, Ezgi. 2020. “Trans Sex Workers’Collective Struggle in Urban Turkey.” FocaalBlog, 27 July. www.focaalblog.com/2020/07/27/ezgi-guler-trans-sex-workers-collective-struggle-in-urban-turkey/

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