Edited by Lynette J. Chua & Mark Fathi Massoud (Cambridge University Press, 2024)

Review by Deblina Dey, O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat, India

Out of Place presents a rare collection of chapters that brings together anthropologists, lawyers, sociologists, political scientists, and regional experts who dwell on their years of fieldwork and how their positionality shaped and, in turn, was impacted by their observations from the field. While qualitative research ––particularly ethnographies–– reflects the researchers’ experiences in the field, the book presents reflexive accounts of the impact of the authors’ locations or positionality on their subjects, their process of data collection, and within their disciplinary fields. The chapters also offer vignettes of personal predicaments (for example, being accompanied by children in the field or getting tattoos for pleasure) that emerged as vital methodological modes through which the authors navigate their out-of-placeness. The book highlights the psychological and emotional dissonances of conducting fieldwork in the realm of law and society, and challenges the obsession with objectivity in the mainstream social sciences. Readers get the unique opportunity to experience the writers’ emotional entanglements, existential crises, and threats that are concomitant with qualitative research. American fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin once wrote “Years do odd things to identity” (in her poem “Leaves” in the compilation “So Far So Good, Final Poems: 2014-2018”).  In a similar vein, the chapters in the book weave a narrative continuity out of fragments of the authors’ research projects and demonstrate how their relationship with the law, their own identities and that of the subjects evolve, often taking abstruse, circuitous, and “odd” routes.

Each author dismantles the “pretense of neutrality” (p.4) and foregrounds an engaged form of research where the notion of giving back to the people and community being studied is a predominant thought. The book toys with the idea of what positionality does to the process of research and its outcomes. Moreover, each author is uniquely positioned within their research. Being ‘out of place’ arises due to a complex intersection of one’s identity (such as along gender, race, age, and class categories) with contextual factors and can metamorphose over time as well. The work of these out-of-place scholars provides a refreshing perspective on how people relate to law and the politics of knowledge production at and through sites of observation. The book’s relevance in the context of contemporary capitalist surveillance regimes of ever-exacerbating inequalities and the heightened onslaught on academic freedom can hardly be overstated. There are nine chapters in the book, including an introduction by Mark Fathi Massoud, one of the book’s editors.

What does it mean to study a topic, such as oppression, in which one is also implicated as an oppressed? In the book’s second chapter entitled, “Research as Accompaniment: Reflections on Objectivity, Ethics, and Emotions,” Leisy J. Abrego, an immigrant sociologist who migrated to the US from El Salvador as an “undocumented child” (p.41) discusses the legal hardships faced by immigrant communities in the US. Abrego uses “accompaniment” (p.38) ––a form of connection building with subjects and “emotional positioning” (p.40)–– as both an analytical tool to explain the life-worldly experiences of immigrants, and a practical tool that allows Abrego to center the wellbeing of the subjects, offering them financial help along with deliberative and explanatory frameworks for communities to strengthen resistive capacities. Abrego highlights the importance of the on-the-ground learning from field research as the key to meaningful sociolegal work.

In Chapter Three entitled ‘“Pretty and Young” in Places Where People Get Killed in Broad Daylight,” Sindiso Mnisi Weeks examines the role of traditional courts and leaders in rural South Africa. As a privileged, young African woman, Weeks overlooked many of the risks to her life arising in the threatening field of “volatile human conditions” (p.63). The chapter underscores the exhaustion and “vicarious trauma” (p.60) that she underwent while studying violence and the challenges faced by her subjects in Msinga. The author urges readers to consider the stakes when conducting research while simultaneously grappling with a “nervous condition” (p.77) under settler colonialism, especially when one’s research findings have the potential to positively affect the lives of the suffering lot.

In Chapter Four, “Out of Place when Studying China’s Sex Industry,” political scientist and legal scholar Margaret L. Boittin narrates how her out-of-placeness as a foreigner with differential physical characteristics made it easier for her to study the sex industry in an overregulated Chinese society. Different subjects in her field were willing to incur risks related to welcoming Biottin into a place where she did not “fit in” (p.89). In her chapter, Biottin highlights the jarring psychological effects that studying the exploitation of sex workers (a topic of marginal importance within legal and political science), especially in an authoritarian regime, can have for an out-of-place scholar.

In Chapter Five, “Feeling at Home Outside: Embracing Out-of-Placeness in the Study of Law and Resistance,” legal scholar Lynette J. Chua, elucidates howchoice of research projects and analysis of sociolegal issues. Navigating both an insider and outsider position as an Asian scholar yet not part of the movement, Chua studied how activists struggled with the repression of gay rights in Singapore and how they practiced human rights in Myanmar by building affective communities for “out-of-place” queer people. Her work puts emotions at the center stage of rights mobilisation scholarship, which is generally an out-of-place stance within social science research because emotions are often deemed subjective and un. Chua also briefly discusses two of her other projects and how her out-of-place early life experiences enabled her to question the unequal power relations so deeply entrenched in sociolegal systems under the façade of morality, love and authority.

In Chapter Seven, “At Odds with Everythingaround Me: Vulnerability Politics and Its (Out of) Place in the Socio-legal Academy,” Swethaa S. Ballakrishnen discusses “vulnerability as a socio-legal method” (p.156) and argues that operating from a “vulnerable positionality” (p.156) allows unearthing structures of power in so-called neutral legal institutions and law. As a scholar from the global south who identifies as queer yet savarna (born in a forward caste family), they ruminate about the consequences of bringing “the whole self to the field” (p.145). “Being vulnerable and making connections that do better justice” (p.157) to marginalised groups requires flexibility on the part of the researcher, where it is vital to remain perceptive to shifting balances of power among different stakeholders during research. To make meaningful interventions possible, Ballakrishnen argues that positionality must be understood as a “process,”rather than a fixed condition or state (p. 157).

In Chapter Eight, “Trigueño International Law: On (Most of ) the World Being (Always, Somehow) Out of Place,” Colombian native and international law scholar, Luis Eslava, astutely uses trigueño/trigueñidad as a metaphor to critique international law’s drive to bring out of place people and things “into place” (p.161) to ensure the kind of development justice and social order that aligns with neoliberal, capitalist, and exploitative regimes.

In Chapter Nine, “Becoming a Familiar Outsider: Multi-sited and Multi-temporal Research in Plural Legal Contexts,” Keebet von Benda Beckmann, a Dutch legal anthropologist, reflects on her status as a “familiar outsider” (p.189) in legally plural contexts in Indonesia (previously under Dutch colonial rule) and among Moluccans in the Netherlands. Through experiences from decades of ethnographic research, Beckmann examines the relationship between her life trajectory ––including being in the field with her spouse and small children–– and the way she was perceived and allowed into the community to study the nuanced adaptive capacity of adat (customary) laws with modernisation and (democratic) decentralisation of governance.

The book is remarkable because of its wide range of reflections on disruptions in fieldwork and the emotional costs of declaring positionality and theory-building. While the hierarchization of accessibility, of being welcomed, suspiciously allowed, tolerated, and rejected varies for most authors, certain aspects of their identities vis-à-vis their privileges and marginalizations are weighed by their research participants. However, each author acknowledges that the jeopardies they experience conducting research are not as grave as the lived experiences of their interlocutors.

The booksuggeststhat “[w]e are never fully in nor out of place, but always moving” (p.117) and that positionality is a fluid, complex process of weighing one’s identity against several factors. Many of the authors consciously put themselves out of place, which is a remarkable skill to produce insightful interdisciplinary scholarship that challenges mainstream, hegemonic (global north, white, upper caste, hetero-patriarchal) perspectives and assumptions about the law. Besides its methodological ruminations, the book also shows how crucial it is to remain connected with one’s humanity while conducting sociolegal research. The book is impactful because of the way its arguments are sensitively presented and promises to appeal to a diverse audience.

*Editors’ note: Because of the reviewer’s relationship with the author, Chapter Six of this edited volume was not reviewed.