In terms of characterizing ethnographic places, “Ethnographies of Encounter,” pushes us to think about the contradictions, complications, and complexities of places/spaces. Spaces are produced and reproduced. These productions happen in multiples and due to multiple encounters and engagements with various groups. This text also thinks about the intimacy of certain encounters, as well as spatial knowledge. Using Mei Zhan’s work, in particular, the authors talk about worlding and the “awkward resonances that produce translocal encounters” (370). I think awkwardness in general is a great way to think about space/place. How is a space awkwardly produced? What are the tensions in a place? What fits? What’s juxtaposed?
Encounters prompt unexpected responses and improvised ac- tions, as well as long-term negotiations with unforeseen outcomes, including both violence and love. Ethnographies of encounter focus on the cross-cultural and relational dynamics of these processes. They highlight how meanings, identities, objects, and subjectivities emerge through unequal relationships involving people and things that may at first glance be understood as distinct.
For the sake of clear examples, we have selected from this body of work studies that (a) explicitly and consistently move between the voices and perspectives of members of different groups of people or things and (b) demonstrate how new cultural meanings and worlds emerge through their encounter. Rather than taking capitalism, space and place, and humanness as the frameworks that contextualize relations of encounter, the ethnographies discussed below demonstrate how encounter is the means by which these categories emerge.
If encounter ethnographies of capitalism theorize the systematicity of capitalist relations by fo- cusing on the cross-cultural relationships through which they emerge, other ethnographies of encounter denaturalize space and place by examining the engagements across difference that constitute these categories. Such ethnographies build on historical studies that explore how rela- tionships between colonizers and those colonized created new geographies, such as contact zones (Pratt1992),borderlands(Anzaldu a1987),spacesofdeath(Taussig1987),thenationalgeobody (Winichakul 1994), diasporic routes (Brown 2005; Gilroy 1987, 1993), and oceanic worlds (Ho 2006). Rejecting the notion that colonial powers single-handedly dictated spatial relationships, ear- lier studies demonstrated the intimate and tense negotiations through which colonial worlds took shape. Ethnographies of encounter build on these studies to focus on place as “meeting place”: “ar- ticulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings”
Because this is an annual review article, the authors trace the trajectory of how encounter and intimacy have been shaped throughout the trajectory of the discipline. Different terms have been used to think about this particular space, some have included “contact zone,” which theorized the space of colonial encounters in particular. Moving from one type of encounter to another, the authors then think through the term in the context of transnational capitalism. This type of encounter has been based in frictions and processes and unevenness. Ultimately, the authors theorize the space/place of encounter as complicated, complex, etc.
Centering encounter as the main focus of the article, the authors examine how encounter is the very means by which categories such as transnational capitalism, space/place, and human-nonhuman relations emerge and exist. In this article, the term encounter refers to “everyday engagements across difference.” Ethnographies of encounter, then, focus on the cross-cultural, relational, and uneven dynamics of these processes and exchanges. Encounter is a way of thinking about the ways the “cultural” is made and remade everyday, moving away from earlier conceptualizations of culture as static and bounded. Ultimately, encounters highlight “how meanings, identities, objects, and subjectivities emerge through unequal relationships involving people and things that may at first glance be understood as distinct” (364). Similar to the work PECE does, and to what we’re doing in our VtP collaboration, the authors in this text argue encounter is a way of thinking through a shared set of questions that across different fields and even subdisciplines (365). This is similar to how we are attempting to theorize space/place, toxicity, etc.
This piece was published in Annual Review of Anthropology which has been active since 1972. This piece, specifically, was published in 2014 in response to conversations about decolonizing the discipline.
Lisa Rofel is a professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz. Rofel has consistently brought feminist, postcolonial and Marxist poststructuralist approaches to bear on questions of modernity, postsocialism, capitalism, desire, queer identities, and transnational encounters. She has written extensively about China.
Lieba Faier is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her first book, Intimate Encounters: Filipina Women and the Remaking of Rural Japan (University of California Press, 2009) is an ethnography of cultural encounters among Filipina migrants and their Japanese families and communities in rural Nagano.
Faier, Lieba, and Lisa Rofel. 2014. “Ethnographies of Encounter.” Annual Review of Anthropology 43 (1): 363–77. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102313-030210.