Abstract
This chapter documents a problematic ethnographic encounter that I experienced while conducting fieldwork in the neo-colonized space of the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Through autoethnography and reflexivity, I describe how the encounter begins to illuminate the surfacing of prejudices that were originally enacted by oppressive neo-colonial structures, but which I had come to discursively accept against the communities and the peoples that were to become the subjects of my ethnographic study. As I explain, these prejudices are sourced to the perception of the denigrated embodiment of the Other—in this case, the Palestinian masculine subject. Finally, in this chapter, I consider how I originally understood these latent prejudices and how I ultimately came to negate them through a prudent engagement with, and deconstruction of, a reified socio-political discourse that ideologically endeavors to maintain the subjugation of a disenfranchised and unrecognized nation.
This chapter was originally published as: Prasad, A. (2014). Corporeal ethics in an ethnographic encounter: A tale of embodiment from the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Scandinavian Journal of Management, 30(4), 525–531.
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Notes
- 1.
As a caveat, I will note that my personal history—as having been a colonized subject and a political refugee and as currently living as a racialized minority living in a White-settler country (see Chapter 2)—likely informed my sympathies and solidarity with the Palestinian people. Indeed, my own history allowed me to have a perspicacious understanding into what it means to be displaced and exiled (Prasad, 2014). While this is not to say that others who do not share my personal background would not be moved by the people of the Occupied Palestinian Territories in the ways that I was, it is to suggest that my sense of viewing the plight and oppression of the local population became even more sensitive as a consequence of my past experiences.
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Prasad, A. (2019). Autoethnography in an Ethnographic Encounter. In: Autoethnography and Organization Research. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05099-3_3
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