Thomas, “Strangers, Friends, and Kin: Negotiated Recognition in Ethnographic Relationships”

Thomas, Todne. 2016. Strangers, Friends, and Kin: Negotiated Recognition in Ethnographic Relationships. Anthropology and Humanism 41(1):66-85.

Abstract: Anthropologists have framed ethnographers as participant-observers, strangers, and friends and have written about ethnographic research encounters in terms of the productive spaces between researchers and research collaborators. Informed by my review of research literature on ethnographic relationships, my application of de-colonial, feminist, and postmodern research methodologies, and my experience of being reconstituted as a “[church] sister” by the members of an Afro-West Indian and African American evangelical church association, I argue that characterizations of research encounters by research collaborators hold important implications for ethnographic research and writing.