Mutual Subject-Discovery in Syrian Encounters

Abstract For anthropologists who engage in encounter-based fieldwork, contact zones have a peculiar phenomenal quality that is often neglected by scholars from other disciplines who have taken up the fieldwork paradigm initially developed by ethnographers. In this paper, I want to elaborate how, in my most recent fieldwork in Syria, I experienced such zones, and I want to reflect on this experience and its relation to concepts and writing as it becomes knowledge. I define fieldwork as “the registering of sensory impressions in a (temporal) process of mutual subject-discovery and critique,” and anthropology as a “mode of engagement in generating knowledge and social and political action that enables ongoing relationships” (Borneman/Hammoudi 2009: 19). This picture of fieldwork and ethnography, in its stress on the author being in “a zone of contact with the world he is depicting” (Bakhtin 1981: 30), is at odds with understandings that focus on anthropology as a “cultural critique” of the West (Marcus/Fischer 1986), “creative and usable mappings” (Gupta/Ferguson 1997: 56), “comparison of embedded concepts” between societies (Asad 2003: 17), or interpretation of another culture (Geertz 1973).