Storytelling with/of 'repugnant others'

How do we study and write about social actors that trouble – even repel – us? In this talk I take up this question in two related ways. One, what are anthropology’s ‘repugnant others’, the term Susan Harding (1991) used to reflect on academic and political discourses that create cultural others, establishing whose worthy of ethnographic empathy and delegitimizing some others, implicitly? And what are its implications for ethnographic objects, positionalities, and the search for a cause? Second, in as much as the doing of the ethnography is also its writing, I reflect on the space for “ugly feelings” (Ngai 2005) in ethnographic storytelling alongside the practiced ethics of empathy, trust, and ambivalence. These are foundational questions pertaining to distance, intimacy, and perspective in ethnographic writing and its related, arguably fetishized, centrality of participant observation. I engage these questions by reflecting on my ongoing research with soldiers, officers, and families in the Indian Border Security Force, that pose ethical and methodological challenges, calling into question many of the central assumptions of a liberal anthropological practice. I draw on many paths and inspirations in feminist praxis that are committed to knowledge production through prickly, embodied relations, to presence these questions without the burden of resolving them within comforting binaries of power and inequality.

Sahana Ghosh is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the National University of Singapore. She uses ethnography and feminist approaches to study militarized bordering, the national security state, agrarian change, and the political economy of gendered labor in India and Bangladesh. Her first book A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security Across the Bangladesh-India Borderlands (University of California Press 2023 / Yoda Press 2024) and a range of academic and public writing center on borders and borderlands, gender and migration, and politics of citizenship and neighborliness in South Asia. She is currently researching the work and worth of soldiering in postcolonial India, through the prism of the Indian Border Security Force.