Far away, so close: A collective ethnography around remoteness

We are five anthropologists from around the world, and this is our many-handed ethnography. Our topic is remoteness, the context, the global pandemic. We draw on our ethnographic skills to explore what is ‘far away, so close’ in this context. Together, with each other and our correspondents, we created a network of ethnographic relationships by proxy, as well as a polyphonic, sometimes multimodal story. We juxtaposed disparate voices and experiences of feeling far away and close. The gesture started with short ethnographic documentations around remoteness. Later, we distributed them among all contributors and gathered further ideas about different ways of editing it, experimenting with how to incorporate, compose and collate multiple insights into a single yet polyvocal article. Our project sets out to participate in ongoing discussions around what collaboration might be, and open up or extend the doing of ethnography. Collaborative from the start, we are five voices and one anthropological problematique; many hands may make things harder, rather than—as the saying goes—making light work. Each ethnographer, now working ‘remotely’ from what is currently home, here shared their engagements with / dispatches from a correspondent (traditionally called informant) and/or a place. The project thus is an exploration in methodological innovation forced upon us by the pandemic, enabling multilinear forms of analytical experimentation. We wanted to see what could be generated together as anthropologists interested in methodology, and as our fieldwork positions us all as far away yet close in many ways. Last but not least, we have tried to avoid erasing the accents of each story. Each of us had also to give up somewhat on the control we have become accustomed to: over which voices to include, in what order and with what level of contextualization, and in which emotional tone. Indulging by necessity a kind of haphazardness, it has at times felt like an 246 exercise of ethnographic promiscuity. Since it could only advance through generosity and open ways of incorporating each other’s accounts, perhaps a many-hands ethnography must be – or feel – loose; a response to the risk of leaving things as we found them, an extension of trust that may go wrong, but also enrich the anthropological imagination in these times of confinement.