Cues for Ethnographers in a Pandemic-Altered World
June 8, 2020
The COVID-19 pandemic has permanently altered many aspects of everyday life for people and cultures around the world. This fact presents some particularly unique challenges for those in the field of Ethnography. Assistant professor of Anthropology and Center affiliate within the Building Sustainable Communities Signature Research Area Jennifer Lee Johnson along with Alder Keleman Saxena, Assistant Research Professor of Anthropology at Northern Arizona University, have developed a series of “cues” to be considered by ethnographers in a world undergoing numerous significant transformations.
The first cue urges ethnographers and anthropologists to look closely at the movement of relationships to online platforms. Johnson and Keleman Saxema note that the “digital divide” between is more nuanced than it is often portrayed, and those contours must be examined through an ethnographic lens, especially now. The pandemic is obviously global in scale, meaning that it both directly provides and impacts collective experiences shared by many, particularly via social media. The second cue prompts ethnographers to notice and document such shared experiences within the context of a global pandemic. Third, as stay-at-home orders continue to be gradually lifted around the world, Johnson and Keleman Saxema contend that ethnographers should take particular note of how the quantification of tracing numbers direct attention, obscure inequalities, and justify tradeoffs, as well as the role played by the use of digital technologies as a determining factor.
Lastly, the article urges that ethnographers and environmental anthropologists become and remain aware of the continual intersection between collective actions on global and local scales, particularly through lenses such as climate change and the digital landscape. The pandemic is, to an extent, a shared global experience requiring global action. However, the locality of government leadership or lack thereof, as well as the physical nature of virus spread cannot be left out of consideration. These “cues” serve as ways to help define how ethnographers shift their approach to a world currently changing in a momentous way.
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Author: Robby Teas