The Hall of Mirrors: Spying, Surveillance and Ethnographic Method
Assistant Professor Trine Mygind Korsby and Associate Professor Matthew Carey have co-edited a special issue in The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology entitled ‘The Hall of Mirrors: Spying, Surveillance and Ethnographic Method’.
The special issue deals with the themes of spying, surveillance, secrecy and suspicion. It sheds light on the intricacies of the gathering of data during fieldwork, which lies at the heart of the anthropological enterprise. Anthropologists find informants; they build networks and cultivate rapport. But the fieldworkers are not the only agents in our field. Fieldworker and informant observe, engage with, and interpret one another; their mutual curiosity may occasionally cross the line into practices of surveillance, which in turn cause each to reconsider and call into question the purpose of fieldwork. Anthropologists may find themselves mimicking, voluntarily or not, the cautious silences of their interlocutors, who have their own strategies and domains of secrecy; and, of course, the parallel interests of their respective states (who may sometimes be one and the same) are magnified and distorted in the carnival looking-glasses of fieldwork.
This is the Hall of Mirrors, whose myriad reflections are made up of shadows and suspicion, spying and surveillance, smoke and, on occasion, actual fire.
Access the full special issue, edited by Korsby and Carey.
Read the Introduction to the special issue, co-authored by Carey and Korsby.