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Meeting the “Godfather”: Fieldwork and Ethnographic Seduction in a Chinese Nightclub
Author(s) -
Osburg John
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
polar: political and legal anthropology review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.529
H-Index - 27
eISSN - 1555-2934
pISSN - 1081-6976
DOI - 10.1111/plar.12029
Subject(s) - ethnography , sociology , china , criminology , power (physics) , state (computer science) , set (abstract data type) , epistemology , political science , law , anthropology , physics , algorithm , quantum mechanics , computer science , programming language , philosophy
Based on ethnographic research conducted with criminal underworld figures in urban China in the early 2000s, this article examines the particular set of ethical, emotional, and epistemological issues that arise when studying “illegal” actors. These actors’ positions as simultaneously marginal and powerful confound readymade ethical guidelines based on studying either “up” or “down.” Although studying “illegal” actors presents a complex power dynamic and renders anthropologists particularly vulnerable to “ethnographic seduction,” their practices and perspectives often reveal the complex interconnections and mutually constitutive relationships between “legal” and “criminal” as well as “licit” and “illicit” domains. Studying illegal or illicit worlds thus requires that we suspend the conceptual and moral binaries through which both state actors and social scientists typically perceive them.