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Tindering in the Field: Dating Apps, Ethnography, and Discomfort
Full text linkThis article explores the ethical and safety implications of using dating apps as a method in ethnographic research. Drawing on my experience with this approach whilst conducting fieldwork across social and physical boundaries in the Occupied Palestinian West Bank, I explore the discomforts that arise in the process of using platforms associated with sex and romance. Attending to my own discomforts as well as those of my professional peers and my interlocutors, I make recommendations for an ethical approach to the use of dating apps as a networking tool. In the process I critique the nature of professionalism in anthropology, locating it in patriarchal and orientalist western values. I then unpack the unique affordances of and discourses around safety and dating app use, outlining where anthropologists can benefit from including these in their ethnographic practice
Single Motherhood, Sexuality, and Mediated Intimacies on Dating Apps
Full text linkThe article explores the nuanced and multifaceted experiences of single mothers who use dating apps. Drawing on autoethnographic reflection and participant observation of online community groups, it examines the emotional, psychological, and sociocultural dimensions that influence single mothers’ engagements with dating apps. It unpacks the complicated relationship of motherhood and sexuality, challenging prevailing cultural and social stereotypes such as the myth of mothers being asexual beings. The core questions are: What type of intimacies exist in this context? And how does the tension between single motherhood, single womanhood, and sexuality impact subjectivity and self-representation? By examining how single mothers navigate their roles as parents, women, and individuals seeking intimacy in online dating cultures, the study contributes to a broader understanding of contemporary social dynamics and the interplay between technology and identity. The article discusses self-representation, constructions of sexuality, sexual agency, the negotiation of connection and boundaries, and privacy. It argues that when single mothers engage on dating platforms, they navigate the complex terrain of sexual capital through strategies of visibility. In sum, the article delves into the increasing role of technology in the everyday lives, experiences of intimacy, and formations of connections by a contested yet diverse community of single mothers
Review: Finnegan, Ruth (2022) The Hidden Lives of Taxi Drivers. A Question of Knowledge. Milton Keynes: Callender Press
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Grindr Wars: Race, Caste, and Class Inequalities on Dating Apps in India and South Africa
Full text linkThe rapid digitalisation, neoliberalisation, and globalisation in countries like India and South Africa are profoundly transforming the sexual identities and sexual politics of these Global South contexts. In particular, dating apps like Grindr are changing the ways in which young gay men’s identities and relationships are formed, mediated, and embodied. In this article, I ethnographically explore the ways in which Grindr offers much needed visibility to young middle-class gay men in India and South Africa where powerful heteropatriarchies marginalise their sexualities and masculinities. Yet at the same time, the inequality that marks this digital and neoliberal expansion means that gay dating applications like Grindr also reproduce these very inequalities of race, caste, and class. I reveal in particular the growing commodification of gay identities and sexualities that is mediated through digital platforms, producing a hierarchy between ‘classy gays’ and ‘poor gays’. Desire itself becomes commodified wherein ‘poor gays’ are not desirable bodies or identities and the performance of class and consumption becomes central to claims of sexual desirability. Grindr’s geolocating technology allows middle-class gay men to discriminate against ‘poor gays’ through the spatial and urban inequalities of cities like Delhi and Johannesburg, further amplifying the inequalities of race, caste, and class. In this context, ‘Grindr Wars’ take place, which reveal the social and symbolic tensions, clashes, and violences that shape queer life in India and South Africa today
The Un/Ethical Demand: A Responsive Approach to Sharing and Its Ethics
Full text linkMany anthropological theories address food sharing as an intentional act, asking what motivates people to give. They show how one gives for generosity, reciprocity, or becoming virtuous. In these views, the answer to the ethical question of whether to give is to be found inside the giving self. However, for Damara pastoralists and others, sharing is often initiated by the beneficiaries. To address this, I propose using Bernhard Waldenfels’s responsive phenomenology that locates and theorises the mainsprings of ethical action beyond the subject. According to Waldenfels, Fremdheit (alienness) is a salient dimension of how the world appears to us. This alienness solicits us; it causes a demand to which we must respond. With sharing, the ‘needs’ of others are alien. They include the needs of those giving and demanding, and of others present in the situation. The pre-reflective response to these demands is almost always mās |guisa ra hî, one just gives. Only in select cases is a reflective choice made, where (1) multiple demands compete and (2), importantly, the alien largely withdraws from the attempt, sticking out and exceeding the ethical orders of the everyday. I conclude by showing how sharing and its ethics can be theorised as an interplay between the habitual and creative response to the demands that situations create
Ethics of Sharing - Gesamtausgabe/Complete Issue
No full textThihs file contains the complete issue "Ethics of Sharing"
Sharing Land, Sharing Faith: Ground Ethics amongst Missionaries and Ik in Uganda
Full text linkWhen do ethics of sharing, or ‘something for something’ logics of exchange, apply? This article explores this question based on fieldwork amongst the Ik community and missionaries in Uganda. It examines interactions of sharing and exchange and how situational communities of belonging and resonance are created, but also pays attention to tensions between groups. A variety of sharing ethics form the basis for everyday interactions within the Ik community, such as the sharing of mountain landscapes and the sharing of land for agriculture. These and other ethics of sharing are part of everyday life yet seldom without friction and contestation. When international missionaries came to the Ik mountains to ‘spread the word of God’, they too were driven by ethics of sharing: their call was to share faith. Yet, moralities of exchange were also crucial for missionaries to convey. Nuances between sharing and exchange, borrowing and stealing became continuous sources of friction and negotiation between locals and foreigners. Three cases describing different kinds of sharing and exchange between the missionaries and the Ik provide material for rethinking ethics of sharing phenomenologically in relation to territories, faith and material items. The article draws on Knud Løgstrup’s ideas about ground ethics and contributes to the literature on sharing and ethics by pointing to how communities of belonging and resonance may arise out of sharing practices, but also how friction builds up when parties do not agree about whether a transaction is a form of sharing or one of exchange and which ethics to apply
Sharing Being: Alterity and Sharing as an Existential Question amongst Kyrgyz Christian Converts
Full text linkIn this article, my concern is the sharing of being, thus the existential question of what a person shares with others by virtue of her very ‘thrownness’, the circumstance of finding herself born as human in a particular place, into a particular family, and in a particular moment in history. Questions about what we share with others by virtue of our very being often confront us with a particular urgency in liminal situations where we are confronted with alterity amidst the familiar, when the world becomes porous and mouldable where we thought it was most solid. I explore how such questions become urgent amongst Kyrgyz people of Muslim background who have become evangelical Christians and who struggle to find a place of belonging that is welcoming to them and the values and virtues they see as central to who they are in a context where conversion to Christianity is seen as deeply controversial. Engaging with insights from the phenomenological tradition in philosophy and anthropology, I explore encounters with alterity as central to the efforts of Kyrgyz Christians to find a place of belonging in the world. I argue that we may experience the sharing of being most intensively when alterity draws us in, emplacing us in shared horizons of possibility whose contours are not yet clear
Ethics of Sharing: A Situational Anthropology
Full text linkThis article introduces the special issue on ethics of sharing by way of a conceptual discussion of four key terms that animate the individual contributions: sharing, ethics, situation, and presence. Turning to situational analysis to hold fast the anthropological empirical commitment, each author takes as their point of departure a detailed description of empirical sharing situations. The aim is to bring this ethnographic attention to specific situations into conversation with recent anthropological debates on ethics that resonate with the growing interest and emerging literature on sharing. In a concluding reflection on the individual contributions, the article grapples with the problem of scale and makes efforts to relate the ethics of sharing to our present human condition as cohabitants of the shared environmental life-support system of one finite planet, Earth. It is this planetary horizon, we find, that adds a new urgency to the perennial ethical question of how one ought to live: what can this shared existential situation be said to demand of us
Shared Finitude: Intergenerational Death Awareness
Full text linkThis article develops the notion of intergenerational death awareness through a relational reading of finitude. I begin by discussing the different ways in which the philosophical canon has understood the relationship between death, subjectivity, and otherness. Drawing on an interview study with bereaved life partners and their experiences of ‘losing part of oneself’ following the death of the other, I seek to deconstruct this divide and illustrate how vital aspects of our experiences of finitude are inherently shared. In the present case, these others are often – apart from the lost partner – first and foremost the children one is responsible for. As a single parent, the primary source of relating to one’s own death is intergenerationally mediated through worrying and the sense of absolute responsibility for staying alive