Maribel Casas Cortés (Zaragoza): Ethnographies Otherwise: The Gaze of Displacement and its Analytical / Political Potential  

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Futures in/of Anthropology. Perspectives of a Public and Engaged Anthropology. Intro by Regina Römhild. Recorded 22.06.2021

Taking migratory movements as the point of departure, and against the grain of methodological sedentarism, I propose the “gaze of displacement” as an alternative perspective from which to produce ethnographic analysis and political resonances. This gaze allows for epistemological and ontological displacements of the following boundaries: object/subject, canonized/marginalized knowledges, research/reality. Building on critical traditions such as Feminist Empiricism, Decolonial Theory and STS, I propose an ethnographic endeavor focused on identifying and describing what displacement can generate and how it is coped with. As such, ethnographic work is not intended to provide voice to the voiceless or unveil the invisible. It is not about prescribing solutions to spreading conditions of instability associated with displacement either. Rather, these ethnographies otherwise engage in acts of translation and weaving between experiences of coping with uncertainty, co-producing “archives of the present.” This methodological approach entails detailed registering of the temporary entanglements already addressing shifting needs and nurturing fluctuating collective identities within multiple realities of displacement.