The hip-hop box, the stranger, and the Indian shopkeeper

Nearness-distance in ethnographic fieldwork

Datos Bibliográficos

ID4501571
AutoresKartikeya Saboo (0000-0002-8665-2637, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, autor de correspondencia)
Año2025
Fecha de publicación2025-09-25
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaQualitative Research (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1468-7941 • E-ISSN: 1741-3109
EditorialSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/14687941251377280
OpenAlexW4414532183
IdiomaEN
Referencias citadas33

Working through encounters between streetcorner men and a South Asian anthropologist in Newark, NJ, this paper examines the methodological implications and productive possibilities of the failure of rapport. This failure crystallized in antagonism over consumption of rap music, and the experience of being essentialized and othered by local streetcorner men. This essentialization functioned in a register that went beyond race and ethnicity, going towards forming specific roles in the field that both anthropologist and interlocutors eventually strived to maintain. This pointed to another, latent but already available position-The Stranger-for the anthropologist in the field. The process also revealed the leveling effect of exchange. This paper argues that to recognize and maintain difference and distance-contra an idealized communion and erasure of difference-is productive of specific forms of knowledge in ethnographic praxis

Consumption (sociology · Erasure · Ethnography · Field (mathematics · Knowledge production · Race (biology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies