Doing Interventions

Experiments and Collaborations in Contemporary Ethnography

Abstract

In this introduction to the 83rd issue of Kulturanthropologie Notizen we focus on the concept of intervention and highlight the impact of researchers’ relatedness to their fields of study. While acknowledging that ethnographic studies have always had the capacity to be interventionist per se, we consider ‘doing interventions’ as a specific ethnographic methodological approach and, congruently, we reflect on experiments and collaborations and their epistemic effects. In this vein, interventions with/in ethnography hint at ethnographic knowledge that ‘does’ something in the field while the practice of intervening also alters ethnographic knowledge production. The authors who contributed to this issue of Kulturanthropologie Notizen provide a variety of examples to discuss how interventions with and in ethnography play out in practice and illustrate thereby how these modes are intertwined. Case studies range from ethnographic work in the global food sector to extractive industries; from field-work in and with social psychiatry to new forms of collaboration during the COVID-19 pan-demic; and last but not least, anthropology is discussed as a science in/of transformation. What unites all texts is the supposition that interventions with/in ethnography question what is established and taken for granted, transform normative and dominant perceptions of knowledge production, irritate discourse, and promote the re-imagination and re-conceptualization of the ethnographic practice at the same time.