Writing opacity

Going beyond pseudonyms with spirit portraiture

Bibliographic Data

ID2290957
AuthorsVita Peacock (0000-0001-5645-3242, Department of Digital Humanities King's College London London UK)
Year2024
Volume47
Issue1
Pages90-97
Publication date2024-05-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenuePoLAR Political and Legal Anthropology Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1081-6976 • E-ISSN: 1555-2934
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/plar.12560
OpenAlexW4396659376
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited15

What does it mean to go beyond pseudonyms? Building on fieldwork with privacy and data protection advocates in Germany, this article incorporates ethical imperatives coming from within and beyond the field, to develop a different mode of writing it calls spirit portraiture. This entails characterizing natural persons, without including any personal data through which they could be re-identified, with or without the use of computing. Drawing on three ethnographies that already go beyond pseudonyms, it repositions the axis of representation away from revelation and concealment-that pivots around a monist notion of empirical truth-towards opacity and legibility-that pivots instead around its own point of intervention

Anthropological Studies and Insights · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Sex work and related issues

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