Papers by Jenny García Ruales
Zeitschrift für Ethnologie/Journal of Social and Cultural Anthropology, 2022
The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has led to crises worldwide, affecting how anthropologists do research. T... more The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has led to crises worldwide, affecting how anthropologists do research. The physical absence of ethnographers from their field-sites has made it impossible to conduct participant observation as historically practised. As a result, anthropologists have had to become methodologically creative, often turning to digital methods to mediate access to the field. These methods have modified ethnographic research, simultaneously opening up and limiting possibilities for engagement. This article explores the challenges of engaging with non-humans, namely spirit and forest beings, material things and ‘data’, by drawing comparatively on the authors’ respective ethnographic fieldwork in Ecuador, Myanmar, Peru and Germany. Starting by discussing their respective engagements with their changing fields, they reflect on the possibilities and impossibilities of engaging with non-human interlocutors and the transformations they experienced in their relationships with human research partners. The crises related to SARS-CoV-2 and the authors’ respective ways of dealing with them have transformed their field-sites and how they access them, making them more reliant on their research partners. The authors conclude that, while engaging with non-humans living in distant places is, in some cases, possible through human mediation, this mediation changes the forms of engagement.
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Papers by Jenny García Ruales