ethnography

This note reflects on the methodological challenges I faced as an ethnographer navigating organizational secrecy, the conscious suppression of knowledge through practices related to keeping oneself or keeping others ignorant, during my dissertation fieldwork on the French yellow vest movement. In the course of this ethnographic study, I got involved with highly committed people willing to engage in radical actions and high risk activism (McAdam, 1986), ranging from civil disobedience and illicit occupations to collective action based on black bloc tactics (Dupuis-Déri, 2003; Juris, 2005).

Introduction

Introduction

In her intriguing study of anonymous ova donors and their recipients in England, anthropologist Monica Konrad examines how it is possible that new social relations emerge from such donations although those involved in egg donation practices have no possibility of getting to know each other. Nameless relations (Konrad, 2005) is a detailed ethnographic analysis of a situation marked by non-knowledge, and of the relations that those involved in it form under the conditions of anonymity and non-reciprocity.

This is by far not the first review of Gabriella Coleman’s book to begin with. But it is one that is written in the context of a concentrated effort to explore the various dimensions of anonymity within anthropology and further afield. Although Coleman’s book is not exactly about anonymity as a concept, it is a worthwhile addition to the overall discussion in its very own way.

This article aims to show how global ethnography is a useful approach to the investigation of global social movements. In this kind of an approach the researcher’s own grounded knowledge from the field is combined with digital information on the transnational social movement: its actors and its actions. The focus of this paper is on methodology.