Emergent Conversation 28

This essay is part of the series “Solidarity for Anthropologists”
PoLAR Online Emergent Conversation 28

By Sana Malik

I am a turtle, wherever I go I carry “home” on my back.

—Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987)

How can and should anthropologists register their solidarity with research interlocutors and their political causes during (and after) fieldwork? Anthropologists have been grappling with this question for decades, wrestling with the ethical imperatives of conducting research in violent landscapes (Scheper-Hughes 1995), when theorizing refusal (McGranahan 2016; Simpson 2007), and more recently, on the possibilities of co-theorizing with interlocutors (Bonilla 2015; Cox 2018), collaborating with epistemic partners (Holmes & Marcus 2020) and negotiating the boundaries between anthropology and activism (Hale 2006).

Since 2022, my friend and fellow anthropologist Katy Lindquist (2024) and I have been exploring questions about the temporalities, limits, and possibilities of friendship and solidarity with our interlocutors in the field, across multiple American Anthropological Association (AAA) meeting roundtables and conference panels. These discussions have been centered around the politics and limits of friendship as a theoretical framework and research praxis, and the ethics of proximity with, or distance from, our research interlocutors.

These concerns were eminently present in my own fieldwork that I conducted in my hometown of Lahore, Pakistan. My research situates the annual Women’s March—or Aurat March—in Pakistan as a critical site to explore deep-rooted contestations among urban women across generations, social classes, and political affiliations. By analyzing the discourses and practices of feminist activists alongside the political subjectivities of conservative, urban women engaged in populist movements, my research investigates the diverse political trajectories of older, younger, and non-feminist activists participating in emerging public spheres in urban Pakistan and their competing visions of womanhood, citizenship, and political possibility (Malik 2025).

As a feminist scholar who was raised in Pakistan, my proximity to my research questions on urban women’s agency raised important questions such as: how close should one get to one’s research community? How does the ethnographer’s positionality shift through friendships with interlocutors, working together, collaboration, mutual aid, co-theorizing, or producing knowledge together? What types of critical distances and proximities are possible, favorable, or ethical in the field, and to what degree? These questions become more nuanced— and somewhat contentious—when one is working at home as a “native ethnographer” (Bunzl 2004, 435; Narayan 1993).

Field/Home

Working at home has a degree of instant familiarity; the ability to refer to interlocutors as dost in Urdu (used by my interlocutors as a gender-neutral term for friend) over WhatsApp messages, knowing where to show up for Aurat March meetings (bring a cushion!), and understanding the nuances of language, non-verbal cues, and the ability to code-switch when interacting with young feminists, older generation activists, and urban women who oppose the Aurat March.[1] However, this familiarity does not mitigate the structural distinctions between the field site and home or the awkward positionality of the anthropologist who does not fit the category of the archetypical outsider. While many women were excited to share their visions of “feminist her-stories” (Fieldnotes 2022) over a cup of coffee or cigarette, others were skeptical of “another student from abroad who wants to study us.”

Of course, these experiences are relatable to anyone who has conducted ethnographic fieldwork, anywhere. Akin to the experiences of previous generations of ethnographers my positionality also shifted depending on the setting and group of interlocutors I was interacting with. However, working in the intimate spaces of my hometown often resulted in an awkward (Strathern 1987) subject position: as someone who left, had the privilege to study abroad, and then returned with a newfound set of frameworks and questions to explore.

Queer and feminist scholars have theorized home as a “potentially repressive fiction” (Biddy & Mohanty 1986, 99) and explored the in-between subjectivity of scholars returning home using the theoretical framework of “third space” (see Anzaldua 1987; Mohamed & Sheikh 2020). Navigating her migration across the US-Mexico border, feminist literary theorist Gloria Anzaldua proposes that home constitutes a third space where “it is possible to both understand and reject, love and detest, to be loyal and question, and above all to continue to seek enlightenment out of the ambiguity and contradiction of all social existence” (1987, 5). Ethnographers working at home experience the field/home as a borderland, traversing its terrain by altering their strategies and tactics of engagement along the way.[2] More recently, in the context of COVID-19, anthropologists have grappled with growing barriers to access and mobility during the global pandemic, highlighting how the distinction between field and home poses an ongoing challenge for ethnographers working at home (see Docot 2026; Watanabe & Günel 2020).

Feminist scholars have adopted the critical lens of in-betweenness to describe the experiences of native researchers who reside between cultures and inhabit a multiplicity of selves (Abu-Lughod 2008). Sharing her example of being a “halfie” —or between cultures— Abu-Lughod (2008, 26) notes that feminist anthropology can contribute to the unsettling of boundaries that anthropology has centered its identity on, such as “studying the other” (Ibid). She notes that indigenous anthropologists and halfies break down the boundaries between self and other in productive ways, by moving back and forth between complex, and historically and politically determined worlds (2008, 26). Abu-Lughod recognizes that the agony of the indigenous anthropologist is not how to communicate across a divide, but how to theorize the experience of constant movement between cultures (Ibid).

Anthropologists’ field diaries and accounts suggest that all ethnographers exhibit a “multiplex subjectivity” (Narayan 1993, 675) with crosscutting identifications during fieldwork. I similarly found myself navigating a complex web of shifting relations as neither an insider, nor outsider in the field. This often manifested in performing different avatars of femininity, womanhood, motherhood, or other gendered roles that were expected of me. Often, I did not have the tools to navigate my in-betweenness and non-belonging. I reflected on these experiences in my field diary:

On a spring afternoon in Lahore, I participated in a sharing circle organized by my interlocutors —a group of young women activists. The sharing circle was an intimate gathering for activists to share their reflections on the theme for the upcoming women’s march: Reimagining Justice. The gathering was held in a public park and meant to foster an open dialogue for members to share their interpretations of what it would mean to reimagine justice in Pakistan. After a few volunteers shared their thoughts with the group, I decided to share conversations my peers in graduate school in Atlanta were having about abolition as a lens of reimagining justice in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement (BLM). Earlier that year, I had witnessed the BLM protests firsthand in Atlanta and shared my experience with the group.

While most of the group members responded positively to my reflection on the interconnectedness of struggles for social justice, one activist in the group looked perturbed. Addressing my point indirectly, they alluded that scholars studying abroad are unaware of the oppressive systems of justice in Pakistan, and that abstract ideas or theories are not relevant to Pakistan’s cultural context of justice. While the activist’s point was significant to the discussion, in that moment I was stripped of my authority to speak as a Pakistani woman. Although there was a wide range of people in the group, including foreign researchers from Europe, my subjectivity as a Pakistani scholar studying in the U.S. became pointedly contentious in that moment. Despite living in Pakistan and participating in protests for many years prior to my research, my identity immediately became assigned to that of an outsider who was disconnected from the local context, and a stranger in my own hometown.

—Field Diary Entry, 2022

As someone who left the country to return as a researcher, I was marked by the activist as a particular type of outsider who was perhaps undeserving of the welcome that foreign researchers in the group received, and the easy possibility of inclusion was deferred. Despite our shared political goals, the ease of friendship or intimacy that I had experienced growing up in Pakistan was replaced with an awkwardness as I shifted uneasily between my insider/outsider status—while traversing the field, home, and the field as home. My longstanding solidarity with feminist causes was complicated by my new subjectivity as a graduate student in the U.S. studying women’s activism in my hometown. Although being misunderstood, excluded, or alienated from one’s research communities are common—and almost obligatory rites of passage since the advent of participant observation as a field research method—these experiences are heightened at home and in familiar places.

This experience also speaks to the critical issue of how social and kinship-based relationships in the field transform for anthropologists working at home. “Native ethnographers” are privy to the fabric of social relations in our hometowns, be it through age and class-based hierarchies, friend groups and cliques, or the internal politics within organizations. Outside of our roles as researchers, we occupy specific social positions within, alongside, and sometimes in opposition to these groups. While these relationships can be resourceful and allow a level of familiarity not available to foreigners, they may produce exclusion and alienation even when one is included in these seemingly familiar spaces.

Interestingly, friendships with many of my interlocutors were forged after fieldwork. The politics of distance took on a different meaning in this context, as many significant relationships with my interlocutors became deeper when I was back in the U.S. after fieldwork. This often took the form of commenting on each other’s Instagram stories casually or reaching out for academic advice via email.[iii] After leaving the field, I was able to offer my interlocutors a form of reciprocity that seemed limited while I was in the field.[iv] These relationships have endured after fieldwork and become more meaningful over time. The deferral of friendship, although awkward initially, allowed me to reimagine my interlocutors’ acts of refusal as a form of agency.

Critical Distance: The Deferral of Friendship

At a recent AAA panel on friendship, my colleagues shared their difficulties of staying in touch with their interlocutors after fieldwork due to a variety of factors such as time zone differences, work commitments, and physical distance. In comparison, I was operating under the realization that there was no opportunity to retreat from the field during, or even after, fieldwork. While foreign scholars may spend a limited amount of time and forge relationships with their interlocutors, they are able to maintain a parallel life outside of the field. For native researchers, the possibility of this parallel life does not necessarily exist. Despite physically leaving the field site, our homes travel back with us back to the academy, and through our enduring long-distance relationships with home. These relationships with home and our interlocutors predate our roles as researchers and continue to bear upon our future relationships. As Berry et al. recount, even when native ethnographers leave the field, “it continues to travel with and within our bodies” (2017, 540).

So, I wonder: must we always seek friendship and proximity with our interlocutors during fieldwork in order to be co-theorists, collaborators, or co-producers of knowledge? How can intimacy, or the deferral of it, help us understand the various “rituals of displacement” (Behar 1997, 21) that we experience as anthropologists? And how can these critical distances and forms of displacement become productive after fieldwork, when we write ethnography?

In my research experience, the deferral of friendship did not signify a failure of connection. Rather, it reaffirmed solidarity with my collaborators beyond the temporal and geographical boundaries of fieldwork. The critical distance between us served as a productive register to analyze the awkwardness of fieldwork and the nuances of women’s agency in urban Pakistan.

Sana Malik received her PhD in Anthropology from Emory University and currently has an adjunct position in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Denver. Her research explores the diverse political trajectories of feminist and non-feminist activists participating in emerging public and digital spheres in urban Pakistan. Sana’s research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and the American Association of University Women.

Notes

[1] The annual Aurat [Women’s] March in Pakistan was initiated in 2018 by young, social media savvy women and girls in urban Pakistan and is attended by women’s rights activists, lawyers, young professionals, students, gender minorities, and ordinary women. Modelled, in part, on the U.S. women’s march of 2017, the Aurat March has become the embodiment of young women’s rage and frustration in urban Pakistan. Now in its eighth year, the Aurat March takes place in all major urban centers of Pakistan and is documented on mainstream television channels and in print and digital media.

[2] Feminist critical theorists have promoted the unique standpoints and experiences of women and marginalized communities, championing the cause of reflexive, experimental, autobiographical, and vulnerable texts (Anzaldua 1987; Behar 1997). Writing reflexively or from personal experiences is not new to anthropology, as feminist and other scholars over the years have proposed narrative ethnography (Abu-Lughod 1993), doing anthropology that breaks your heart (Behar 1997), native ethnography (Narayan 1993), writing memoirs , ethnographic fiction, or confessional tales that have autobiographical elements embedded in them.

[3] The role of digital communities was significant in my interlocutors’ lives (see Malik 2025) and my own relationships with them pre- and post-field.

[4] The delayed experience of intimacy and friendship with interlocutors after fieldwork was shared by some of my colleagues on a roundtable at the 2024 American Anthropological Association (AAA) meeting in Tampa that I co-organized with SJ Dillon and Katy Lindquist, titled “Friendship as Praxis in Anthropology and Beyond.”

Works Cited

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