ABSTRACT
As in so much of our collective lives, the pandemic has framed the issues raised in this book. In 2020, as lockdowns spread across the globe, anthropologists – and particularly student anthropologists – came face-to-face with a new reality: anthropology without in-person fieldwork. Thousands of trips were canceled, dissertation proposals re-tooled, and grants either lost or deferred. Colleagues who had just begun their work were forced to pack up and leave – erasing months of preparation in the process. Could there be an anthropology without fieldwork? Perhaps, many people asked, digital fieldwork could substitute (Collins and Durington 2020)? The problem, here, is this word “substitute”; digital anthropology is a form of ethnographic inquiry in its own right, and attempts to simply map face-to-face fieldwork onto a digital environment are doomed in the same way that efforts to teach face-to-face classes online are doomed: both are made of up affordances and practices that cannot be reproduced in the other. Moving your interviews to Zoom is, of course, possible, but that is not the digitization of face-to-face interviews; the two are very different and, unsurprisingly, the experience of interviews via Zoom differs in many ways from face-to-face encounters (Laughlin et al. 2022). And yet – even if they wanted to replace one with the other – many other people have not been able to engage in digital fieldwork. Or, to put it another way, the turn to digital fieldwork has enabled some anthropologies while rendering others nearly impossible. With many still not able to access digital tools in their everyday life, many of the populations traditionally researched in anthropology are effectively invisible in digital anthropology. Of course, none of this is new; as Rivera-González et al. (2022: 291) remind us:
COVID-19 as a revelatory crisis is a misleading dialogue, as the problems highlighted by the pandemic did not reveal anything novel to those who previously experienced disenfranchisement. Instead, the pandemic offered continuations or transformations of existing issues, leaving those affected to turn to existing pre-pandemic self- and community-constructed solutions to navigate long-standing problems.
The “novelty” here, such as it is, is the inability of anthropologists to engage communities in any other modality than the digital – a method that throws the deep inequalities of anthropology into bold relief. And paradoxically, by facilitating some forms of fieldwork, the move to digital fieldwork since the pandemic has resulted in even more marginalization and invisibility for people in many communities where anthropologists have worked.