Our symposium focuses on field relations, a classic and often discussed topic of ethnographic methodology. We explore the relationships we build as ethnographers in the field: concrete, tangible relationships with practitioners and other people in local sites. How do we initiate and form them, how do we nurture them, which meanings do we attribute to them – and which meanings do vice versa people in the field attribute to us and our projects? We also take a closer look at the notion of ‘relations’ and expand the subject beyond a narrow focus on human interaction. Ethnographers of all shades have continually stressed the importance of considering material relations, discursive relations, and power relations for producing rich and insightful ethnographies (Appadurai 1990, Marcus 1998, Desmond 2014). The ethnographic construction of scientific objects and research questions commonly relates to processes and practices, contacts and conflicts, doings and sayings (Schatzki 1996), entanglements (Haraway 2008, 20) and boundary-making, all of which occur in shifting configurations of relations. 

Ethnography recognizes these shifting configurations in its field work strategies, and requests researchers to articulate the ways in which a social relation between ethnographer and participants is established. These social relations are massively formed by circulating ideologies and discourses, by materialities, technical opportunities, bodies and by non-human life present in the field. We ask: how are these processes of relationing interwoven with our research interests and the theoretical and methodological frameworks of our research? We also want to illuminate how the relationships in the field enable our insights and findings. We draw on a substantial body of work on ethnographic field work about relations and roles, and the challenges and opportunities they present. One prominent position is that of the ethnographer as a "professional stranger" (Agar 1996) whose analytical distance from the field makes the familiar strange (Delamont and Atkinson 1996), which also affects field relations and how they are shaped (Sieber Egger, Unterweger & Maeder 2019; Dennis 2010). Another position is rather represented in cultural and social anthropological ethnography, where ‘making the familiar strange’ is less an issue than truly understanding  “other” forms of being in the world in their own terms (i.e. Strathern 2020).

Based on this exploration, we will discuss a series of questions that revolve around our multiple relationships in and with the field: How do we conceptualize field relationships with different field actors in terms of research interests and theoretical frameworks? How do the research interests affect our relationships with people in the field?

How pervasive and constitutive is the culture of the field – its set of possible roles, social positions, and social orders, but also its materiality, ideologies, discourses, practices – when trying to establish field relations, and how do we reflect this? What relationships could we establish and maintain in our projects, and what was their significance for the projects, but also within the diversity of other field relations? Asking questions like these we try to shed light on the complexity of the current thinking about establishing and maintaining field relations.

Agar, Michael H. 1996. The Professional Stranger. An Informal Introduction to Ethnography. London, New York: Academic Press. Appadurai, Arjun, Hrsg. 2013. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. 11. print. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Delamont, Sara, und Paul Atkinson. 1996. Fighting Familiarity. Essays on Education and Ethnography. Cresskill: Hampton Press. Dennis, Barbara. 2010. «Ethical Dilemmas in the Field: The Complex Nature of Doing Education Ethnography». Ethnography and Education 5 (2): 123–27. Desmond, Matthew. 2014. «Relational Ethnography». Theory and Society 43 (5): 547–79. Schatzki, Theodore. 1996. Social Practices. A Wittgensteinian Approach to Human Activity and the Social. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marcus, George E. 1995. «Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography». Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 95–117. Sieber Egger, Anja, Gisela Unterweger, und Christoph Maeder. 2019. «Producing and Sharing Knowledge with a Research Field. In Doing Educational Research: Overcoming Challenges in Practice, 72–88. London: Sage. Strathern, Marilyn. 2020. Relations: an anthropological account. Durham: Duke University Press.