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Mustafa Akcinar, Daniele Cantini, Aymon Kreil,Shirin Naef, and Emanuel SchaeublinThis report was first published on the blog AllegraLab. Many thanks to the administrators of the blog who allowed us to reproduce it here. The conference No Country for Anthropologists? Ethnographic Research in the Contemporary Middle East, which we co-organized and hosted at the University of Zurich in November 2018, addressed major concerns of all researchers working nowadays in this region. In many Arab countries the popular uprisings of 2011, with their reverberations across the entire region, were followed by an authoritarian backlash. As a result of this, research activities came under the increased scrutiny of politically repressive governments. Political polarization and military conflicts in numerous countries created new obstacles to conducting ethnographic fieldwork. The tragic case of the Italian PhD-candidate Giulio Regeni, who was brutally murdered in Egypt in 2016, remains in everybody’s thoughts. The issues at stake concern researchers working for universities situated both in the Middle East and elsewhere. Many face strong pressures to avoid sensitive topics and often almost insurmountable obstacles when it comes to obtaining research permits. In spite of these difficulties, the knowledge provided by ethnography, resulting from the immersion of researchers in different social contexts and a dialogic process of producing knowledge with local interlocutors, seems more needed than ever before. Ethnography opens up perspectives on the region that go beyond geopolitical speculations, statistical data, or decontextualized testimonies of the victims of repression and conflict. The difficulties anthropologists face nowadaysare hardly new, as Daniele Cantini recalled at the beginning of the conference,referring to Evans-Pritchard’s reluctance to undertake fieldwork in Arabcountries given the constant risk of being perceived as a spy.[1]After Arab countries gained independence from direct colonial rule, the role ofanthropologists became even more questionable in many places. In 1971, the Algeriangovernment went as far as banishing the discipline, then labeled as a colonialrelic, in favor of sociology as a tool for social engineering.[2]Furthermore, conflicts in the region in which Western powers were heavilyinvolved fueled further defiance towards anthropologists from these countries.Nevertheless, there were also periods of opening. The 1990ies and the 2000swere times in which it was relatively easy to do research in many Arabcountries—most notably in Egypt, which became an important hub for anthropologistsworking on the region. The first two years following the Egyptian revolution,from 2011 to 2013, constituted a climax for many anthropologists in Egypt, offeringunprecedented freedom to conduct research on sensitive issues such as povertyand political structures. Against this background, the backlash after themilitary seized power again in 2013 appears even more brutal. Since then, similarauthoritarian tendencies have gained momentum in other countries of the region,as for instance in Turkey. Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen,civil war has made fieldwork an almost impossible endeavor. As a result, a number of academic discussionsof fieldwork conditions in the Middle East have taken place in recent years.The conference No Country for Anthropologists? followed this trend. Forthree days, it gathered researchers working with ethnography from Switzerland,Belgium, Germany, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Sweden, Canada, the UnitedStates, Iran, Lebanon, Palestine, Pakistan and Turkey, offering a venue forlively discussions about the difficulties met while doing research in volatilecontexts and the possible means to overcome them. A detailed report on thetalks held at the conference has been published in the Bulletin of the Swiss Society for the Middle East and Islamic Cultures. Therefore, we do not intend togive a full account of these three days, but rather wish to share some of the reflectionsthat resulted from our discussions during and after the conference. Thediversity of the speakers—in terms of their institutional affiliations,seniority, objects of interest and theoretical orientations—allows us toarticulate four core dilemmas for ethnographic work in the contemporary MiddleEast: What should we do when access to fieldwork locations becomes impossible?How can we maintain the autonomy of anthropology when facing the frequently stiflingdiscourses on the Middle East dominating official politics and the media? How shouldwe deal with physical threats on fieldwork sites? And lastly, how can weelaborate and cultivate a shared language with our interlocutors in the field? &#160;&#160;Four Dilemmas for Ethnography in theContemporary Middle East A first dilemma we face is writing about countries or regions to which anthropologists have almost no access anymore. Getting barred from places and being forbidden to meet interlocutors is obviously a serious problem for anthropologists. Yet how can we continue documenting the situation of people living in countries to which we have no direct contact to anymore?Marina de Regt recounted how she attempted to keep contact with her interlocutors in the besieged city of Al-Hodeida during the war in Yemen. Relying on networks and background knowledge accrued during previous research projects, she was able to record local testimonies of the ongoing violence and situate them in a wider context. The necessity of describing the Yemeni situation from the point of view of the inhabitants seems beyond question. This is precisely the context-based knowledge that ethnography is particularly good at producing. The problem at stake equally concerns researchers carrying the nationality of the countries they study, as Ratiba Hadj-Moussa explained with reference to Algeria, where the politically agitated regions in the south have become more and more difficult to access. As security apparatuses and surveillance started to constitute a danger both for herself and her interlocutors, Hadj-Moussa resorted to using the telephone, Skype, Youtube, and Facebook in order to keep contact with her interlocutors, obtain insights into the current situation, and keep her observations and reflections going. “Fieldwork in ruins does not imply the ruin of the field”, as she put it. At the same time, the sheer impossibility to conduct fieldwork in such a scenario raises questions touching on the core of our discipline. This led Hadj-Moussa to ask whether—in such cases—we should speak of “ethnographies in the process of disappearing.”Indeed, how can researchers experiencesufficient “implication”[3]if they conduct fieldwork at a distance? Here, we refer to the kind ofimplication that forces us to rethink our research questions and our categoriesof analysis in order to adjust ourselves to the preoccupations of ourinterlocutors and the issues they are concerned with in their lives. Missingimmersion could easily make us disregard the social context of the data wegather and lose perspective on the issues that we are studying. This riskbecomes even more acute the longer we are absent from the place of inquiry. A second dilemma we face, is dealing withtopics that are at the core of intense geopolitical gambles or of heateddebates on the national scene. How can anthropologists address the topics in question in a way that leavesenough autonomy for a distinctive anthropological take on a situation? In thecurrent academic environment, researchers are under pressure to adjust theirinquiry topics to policy objectives and to media debates. This problem isparticularly striking when it comes to the Middle East, a region which easilyelicits inflammatory debates in Europe.Emanuel Schaeublin observed for instance that debates on Islamic charitable institutions in Palestine have come to be dominated by security concerns and allegations that they serve as conduits for “terrorist funding.” An ethnographic perspective on the issue makes it possible to situate the work of these institutions in people’s lived practice of Islamic giving and to show how pious generosity is part of everyday interactions between neighbors and relatives. Conducting research on Turkish mosques in Switzerland, Dominik Müller illustrated how Swiss media debates on the role of mosques in politically mobilizing Turks in the diaspora affected his relation to his interlocutors, and the vision they had of him as a non-Turkish researcher interested in their ways of practicing Islam. In Turkey itself, Leyla Neyzi, Hande Sarikuzu, Erol Saglam, and Mustafa Akcinar faced a variety of problems at different levels of the research process related to the suppressed role of minorities in the country’s narrative and the authoritarian turn of the government. As a result of political shifts, Shirin Zubair was compelled to leave Pakistan for some time and faced important career setbacks after attempting to teach gender theory in Lahore.In such cases, the alternative either entails findingalternative venues for discussing the topic at stake from a different perspectiveor using these debates as a heuristic device to better understand certainsituations and contexts. However, when the situation worsens and leads toviolent confrontations, these ways of proceeding may not be a sufficientguarantee for the safety of researchers and of their interlocutors. A third dilemma we face is how to behave inmoments of intense polarization. When conflicts turn violent, trying to keep oneself apart from thefighting is not always easy during fieldwork. Circulating back and forthbetween adversaries for research purposes often becomes impossible. Furthermore,when words become weapons, there is no place for a neutral stance and refusingto take a side can appear as treachery, cowardice or criminal indifference.[4]Appeals within anthropology for “engagement” do not necessarily solve the issueeither. Which side should one choose, and on which basis? Further, what consequencesdoes this decision have for the analysis?While conducting research on the independencemovement in South Yemen during 2014 and 2015, Anne-Linda Amira Augustinwitnessed the political turmoil of a country on the verge of war. In thissituation, she felt compelled to go “to those [she] could trust” and to jointhe political movement she was studying as an activist.[5]This example is significative in our eyes, as it shows how violent eventscompel us to rely on existing networks to insure our safety and how thisinfluences our take on the conflict. As for Younes Saramifar, his researchfocuses on Shia militias fighting in different parts of the Middle East. Heconducted research on them as an ethnographer embedded in their militarystructures, occasionally observing open fighting. However, as Aymon Kreil askedwhen discussing his paper, in face of the sheer brutality and confusion of war,trying to infuse the violence and chaos of combats with meaning can appear as aspecific kind of misrepresentation, especially if taking side signifies grantinga sense of value to war. Such choices are not self-evident and shouldnot be seen as such. Even cases in which deciding what side to take may seemeasy at first sight due to the shared set of values between “liberal-minded”researchers and their interlocutors, can be intricate. With regard to Egypt forinstance, both the Egyptian political scientist Rabab El-Mahdi and Egyptianpolitical activist Philip Rizk denounced the misappraisals provoked byidentifying the liberal youth as the main actor of politics following the 2011uprising, a tendency to which many researches were prone due to the masternarrative of liberal democracy expanding to the world in different waves and topersonal affinities alike.[6]Further, as Nida Kirmani noted during her presentation at the conference Pillars of Rule: The Writ of Nation-States and Dynastiesin South Asia and the Middle East, also held in Zurich a few monthslater, the meaning of political causes can differ according to nationalcontexts: denunciations of Islamophobia, for instance, which belong to theprogressive agenda in Trump’s United States, are part of the ethnonationalistdiscourse in Pakistan, pushing for Indian Muslims to join the country.[7]Thus, the question remains open of how to position ourselves politically andanalytically with a view to narratives and themes that take on very differentkinds of political significance in different contexts. This situation appearsto erode the common ground needed for an ethical and realistic kind of engagedanthropology. A fourth dilemma we face is the possibility toelaborate a common language with our interlocutors.Thereare strong trends pushing for the development of collaborative anthropology, away of doing inquiries in which our interlocutors, including local academicscholars and faculties, participate in all steps of the research process.[8]In her keynote address to the conference, Jessica Winegar emphasized thenecessity of transcending the borders of the discipline by including a largerplurality of voices within it. In a similar vein, Shirin Naef argued for an anthropology dialoguingwith debates going on within the Islamic tradition when studying bioethics inIran, in line with recent arguments by Johan Rasanayagam.[9] These dialogues, whichwere mostly carried out with scholars of law, jurisprudence, theology and medicine,have largely shaped her sociological and anthropological enquiries andperspectives. However,as Naef reminded us, this endeavor also presents difficulties and challenges,such as misunderstandings and misrecognition, which are important toacknowledge in order to overcome them.&#160;&#160;&#160;Emilie Lund Mortensen argues for instance thather encounter with the Jordanian secret police, and the fear this encounterinduced in her, increased her ability to enter into dialogue with herinterlocutors. Working with Syrian refugees who feel that they are under constantsurveillance and move through the city as invisibly as possible, Lund Mortensen’sdirect experience of the secret police created a space of shared knowledge withher interlocutors. Lamia Moghnieh explained that the vocabulary of trauma,which came to define the experience of war in Lebanon in the eyes of externalobservers and NGO personnel, obscures moments of resistance or practicalassessments of situations which are at the core of what she terms as“living-in-violence.”[10]Her insight compels us to reconsider the meaning of empathy, which tends tofocus solely on suffering.[11]Understanding different sources of strength and resilience that ourinterlocutors tap into should equally be part of the endeavor. Moreover,the kind of intimacy necessary forcollaboration can sometimes be difficult to bear psychologically, as ErolSaglam argued for the case of his fieldwork among Rumeyka-speakers in NorthernAnatolia. Their language is a dialect of Greek but many of its speakers arestrong supporters of chauvinistic trends of Turkish nationalism. Suspicionprevailed first towards him, as the practice of the local Greek dialect isstigmatized by its speakers themselves. Saglam’s problems during fieldworkremind of issues of “cultural intimacy” which anthropologists often face whentrying to address topics about which their interlocutors reluctantly discusswith strangers.[12] InSaglam’s case, ethnography on the topic he chose meant to become intimate withpeople whose prospects about society were often diametrically opposite to hisown. Eventually, leading back to the issue of polarization, Erol Saglam, HandeSarikuzu and Anne-Linda Amira Augustin all raised the question of how toanalytically deal with rumors relying on a violent othering of politicaladversaries which was shared by all their interlocutors and which made thesestories credible in their eyes. Indeed, rumors help to learn about people inconflict and their “social imagination of violence,” as Sarikuzu phrased it, evenif they are not a reliable source for corroborating factual evidence. These difficulties highlight a core dimensionof ethnographic research, the need to answer sometimes contradicting demands fromuniversity and from one’s own interlocutors. On one hand, we have to contributethrough fieldwork to academic debates addressing questions in a jargon that is oftenfar from the preoccupation and language of our interlocutors. On the otherhand, once on site, we get entangled into networks of personal relations, whichhave other requisites, such as friendship or hospitality. This situationinevitably leads to “embarrassment,”[13]an uncomfortable position where researchers are torn between conflictingselves.[14]It is worth recalling that most of the time unethical or dangerous behavior byresearchers arises from embarrassment. There is no plan B for failed fieldwork,as its success is one of the main elements on which anthropologists build theircareers and by which they assess each other’s work. However, on a more positivenote, embarrassment is also productive, as it is precisely what allows us totranslate contexts and convey knowledge. How to maintain this tensionthroughout the dialogical process of ethnographic research in a way that doesnot do harm to any of the participants is perhaps the most important challenge.Prospects for Anthropology in the Middle EastBricolage is always part of ethnography and theneat research protocols in textbooks and research projects by definition neverwork as we are dealing with non-reproducible historical situations and not withlaboratory experiments. This supposes a great deal of incertitude and thenecessity of adapting methods to places and encounters. The conference’s aim was not to provide ready-made solutions for ethnography in the Middle East. In any case, Jeffrey Sluka reminds us that“danger is not a purely ‘technical’ problem and is never totally manageable.”[15] Thus, David Shankland offered a rather grim portrayal of research prospects in the region. It seems that the willingness of British universities to deal with risky situations is diminishing, particularly when research involves undergraduate and graduate students working under the responsibility of their universities and their research supervisors. In response to pressures, Mehrdad Arabestani, who is based in Iran,emphasizes the possibility of “disidentification” from official discourses as a skill to conduct research, by which he means the strategical use of the ambivalence of official slogans and of the—occasionally contradictory—objectives set to researchers by state agencies. Nafay Choudhury explained how he tried to manage the deteriorating security conditions in Kabul by never announcing the times of his visits to the money exchangers who he was studying and by avoiding a regular and predictable rhythm of moving through the city in order to evade abduction attempts. Noah Arjomand on the other hand recounted how he was mixing profiles of different interlocutors when writing about Turkish and Syrian media workers, in order to avoid endangering them by making them too easy to identify. Despite all these issues,ethnographic implication in the field remains indispensable for our work.Indeed, we never met someone who learned a language with audio methods. At acertain moment, you need to be compelled to practice the language, you need tobe unsettled in your speaking habits, you have to experience yourself assomeone else, be it pleasant or not, as another person, who is also part of thefieldwork. The good thing about ethnography is that it is flexible. Theproblems it raises are often indicative of wider political shifts in the world.Researchers unfortunately need to adapt to the violence accompanying thesetransformations, while striving to create the best possible conditions forethnography in spite of the odds. [16]Reflecting on the conditions of doing fieldwork enables researchers to gobeyond their individual cases, and to make historical and geographicalcontinuities (and discontinuities, of course) visible in the work ofanthropology more generally. Particularly when we need to make unsettlingchoices, being able to articulate them among peers seems to be far fromanecdotical, and rather close to how anthropological knowledge is made.[1] EdwardEvans-Pritchard, "Some Reminiscences and Reflections on Fieldwork," Journal of the Anthropological Society ofOxford 4, no. 1 (1973). Suspicions thatethnographers could be spies are recurrent in research in Middle Easterncountries. This is only partly explained by political tensions. For a moredetailed discussion of Evans-Pritchard’s reluctance to do ethnography in Arabcountries, see Paul Dresch, "Wilderness ofMirrors: Truth and Vulnerability in Middle Eastern Fieldwork," in Anthropologists in a Wider World: Essays onField Research, ed. Paul Dresch, Wendy James, and David Parkin (Oxford; NewYork: Berghahn, 2000), 113-14.[2]Mohamed Madoui, "Les sciences sociales enAlgérie: Regards sur les usages de la sociologie," Sociologies pratiques, no. 15 (2007); Kamel Chachoua, "Lasociologie en Algérie: Histoire d'une discipline sans histoire," in Les Sciences sociales en voyage: L'Afriquedu Nord et le Moyen-Orient vus d’Europe, d’Amérique et de l'intérieur, ed.Eberhard Kienle (Paris: Karthala, 2010), 141-42.[3]Michel Agier, "Ce qui rend les terrainssensibles... et l'anthropologie inquiète," in Terrains sensibles: Expériences actuelles de l'anthropologie, ed.Florence Bouillon, Marion Fresia, and Virginie Tallio (Paris: EHESS, 2005),178-80.[4]Abderrahmane Moussaoui, "Du danger et duterrain en Algérie," Ethnologiefrançaise 31, no. 1 (2001); Kimberly Theidon, "Terror's Talk:Fieldwork and War," DialecticalAnthropology 26, no. 1 (2001).[5] See also Anne-Linda Amira Augustin, "Rumours, Fears and Solidarityin Fieldwork in Times of Political Turmoil on the Verge of War in SouthernYemen," Contemporary Social Science13, no. 3-4 (2018): 7-8.[6] RababEl-Mahdi, "Orientalising theEgyptian Uprising,"&#160; Jadaliyya (2011),; Philip Rizk, "2011 Is Not 1968:An Open Letter to an Onlooker on the Day of Rage,"&#160; MadaMasr (2014).[7] On the same topic, see also Rochelle Terman, "Islamophobia, Feminism and thePolitics of Critique," Theory,Culture &#38; Society 33, no. 2 (2015).[8] For a possible framework thatwill help collaborative research between anthropologists in Iran, see forexample Shahnaz R. Nadjmabadi, "ConceptualizingIranian Anthropology: Past and Present Perspectives" (London: BerghahnBooks, 2009). Nadjmabadi also provides us with a history of Iraniananthropology and its development to date. [9] Drawing his inspiration from the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas on the ethics ofthe Other, Rasanayagam argues for an anthropological knowledge founded on anongoing conversation in a non-objectifying way with an Islamic tradition thatobservers should not endeavour to grasp as a whole. See, JohanRasanayagam, "Anthropology in Conversation with an Islamic Tradition:Emmanuel Levinas and the Practice of Critique," Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 24, no. 1 (2018).[10] LamiaMoghnieh, "‘The Violence We Live In’: Reading and Experiencing Violence inthe Field," Contemporary Levant2, no. 1 (2017).[11] The concern with suffering arguablyoccupies a crucial position in recent anthropology and Westernhumanitarianism—on which, see Joel Robbins, “Beyond the Suffering Subject:Toward an Anthropology of the Good,”&#160;Journal of the RoyalAnthropological Institute&#160;19, no. 3 (2013), and Didier Fassin, HumanitarianReason: A Moral History of the Present (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 2011). At the same time, recent ethnography on practices of giving inEgypt document how Islamic discourse is able to sustain an ethics of giving andmutuality that ascribes more importance to justice and duty than to empathywith those who suffer—see Amira Mittermaier, Giving to God: Islamic Charityin Revolutionary Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019).[12] MichaelHerzfeld, Cultural Intimacy: SocialPoetics in the Nation-State (New York etc.: Routledge, 1997).[13] ErvingGoffman, "Embarrassment and Social Organization," American Journal of Sociology 62, no. 3(1956): 269-71.[14]On the same topic, see also Christian Ghasarian,"Les désarrois de l'ethnographe," L'Homme37, no. 143 (1997): 192-93; Dionigi Albera, "Terrains minés," Ethnologie française 31, no. 1 (2001). For an excellentethnographic example of this tension, see Emilio Spadola, “Forgive Me Friend:Mohammed and Ibrahim,” Anthropological Quarterly 84, no. 3 (2011):737–756.[15] JeffreySluka, "Participant Observation in Violent Contexts," Human Organisation 49, no. 2 (1990):124.[16] MeganSteffen, "Doing Fieldworkafter Henrietta Schmerler: On Sexual Violence and Blame in Anthropology,"&#160; AmericanAnthropologist Website (2017).