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Exploring ethnographic encounters that challenge anthropology’s deepest commitments, this book develops a diagnostic framework for situations in which collaboration becomes ethically impossible, solidarity risks complicity, and reflexivity intensifies rather than resolves the tensions of fieldwork. Drawing on research with far-right communities in London and on HPV and COVID vaccination in Dublin, it examines the limits of empathy, dialogue, and taking participants seriously when the familiar becomes strange within the anthropologist’s own society. Rather than offering prescriptions or straightforward resolutions, the book opens new pathways for researchers studying difficult subjects.
I greatly enjoyed reading the book, it is a timely volume that sheds an important new light on the relation between anthropology and the people we study in times of increasingly complex ethical entanglements. Rik Adriaans, University College London
I very much enjoyed reading this book. It is ambitious, well-informed, engaging and pushing anthropology to address an increasingly obvious blind spot in both its self-apprehension and the work it does. This will be essential reading both for those seeking to do work on difficult subjects, as well as those trying to understand where anthropology should go from here. Daniel Souleles, Copenhagen Business School
Amir Massoumian is Senior Teaching Fellow in Anthropology at SOAS University of London. He has also worked as a Research Fellow on the Archives of Solidarity project which combined ethnographic research and creative practice to explore asylum, migration and local histories of support around Napier Barracks.
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Difficulty and Difference
Chapter 1. Difficult Subjects
Chapter 2. Genealogies of Difficulty: The Liberal Problem in Anthropology
Chapter 3. Interview: Outsider Epistemologies in London, England
Chapter 4. Interview: Vaccines in Dublin, Republic of Ireland
Chapter 5. Methodology: Transformation, Solidarity and Instrumentalisation
Chapter 6. Ethics: The Myth of Neutrality
Chapter 7. Epistemology: Inner Margins and Writing the ‘Less-than-Human’
Conclusion Difference and Difficulty
Bibliography