“You shouldn’t be seen talking to them !” : Accidental frontlines, building trust and coping with danger

Abstract

Close to Durban, South Africa, a group of township residents protested against the allocation of houses in a local development project and the alleged scale of corruption therein. The group soon faced severe threats and intimidations by the governing elite and as these tensions intensified, my research was transformed into a form of “accidental frontline anthropology”. While unravelling the tensions between the different local actors involved promised invaluable insights into local political culture, the dilemmas of maintaining pre-existing social relationships on both sides of the conflict were also evident : I needed to counter critical suspicions about my past and present work in the township, engaging in conscious impression management. The paper explores the question of how we are compelled to adjust our practices in the field, when grappling with situations of doubt, vexing uncertainty and disorientation. It explores the development of a series of pragmatic, improvised field strategies, addressing in particular the (re-) establishment of neutrality and trust, the changing power dynamics that underlie researcher-participant relationships, the predominance of rumours in contexts of conflict and the complex dialectic of empathy and detachment. The argument is made that reflexive attention to the dynamics of ethnographic discomforts renders visible their practical and heuristic worth.