Ethnographic Hearing’. From the method to the issue of mental welfare in the conditions of migrant detention in Poland

Guarded Centres for Foreigners (SOdC) in Poland are both multicultural environments and totalitarian detention institutions in which people may suffer from deterioration of their mental welfare (salutogenesis, Antonovsky 1979). My article discusses the situation of the guards, who, when supervising the migrants detained in the SOdCs, mask the negative effects of permanent control of people, using the discourse of ‘competent power’, which justifies the necessity to provide ‘safety and order’, and thus may contribute to the deterioration of not only their own, but mainly the migrants’ mental welfare. In this context, my anthropological research carried out in the SOdC was connected with many cognitive-ethical aporias, mainly concerning the relevance of the use of the classical ethnographic interview. The case I am analysing concerns a discontinuation of this technique for the benefit of the attitude of ‘hearing and accompanying’ the interlocutor (the guard). Apart from the question of the mental welfare of people in detention (the supervisors and the supervised), this situation arouses significant questions about the construction of ethnographic knowledge: 1/ if the ethnographer resigns from the interview for the benefit of the intuitively understood ‘attitude of care’ towards the interlocutor’s mental welfare, what content will she manage to acquire (and under what conditions)?; 2/ what is the ethnographic significance of this content?; 3/ what competences should the anthropologist have to be able to responsibly adopt this attitude? In answer to the above, I will define ‘ethnographic hearing’ and – not without a doubt – reflect on the possible advantages which it may bring to anthropological research both in the area of psychiatric anthropology and migrant detention

Ethnography · Mental health · Mental illness · Multiculturalism · Relevance (law · Welfare