Urbanities,
Vol. 4
·
No 2
·
November 2014
© 2014
Urbanities
100
Amitai Touval, PhD
The Zicklin School of Business, Baruch College, CUNY)
Peripheral Observations as a Source of Innovation
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Each fieldwork project has its own soundtrack of background noise. Anthropologists record
some of this soundtrack in their field notes, and integrate a few snippets into their articles and
books, but many interesting observations remain unpublished.
Here I would like to make the case for dedicating precious space in a peer-reviewed
journal such as
Urbanities
to peripheral observations. While the idea of a periphery is
associated with the expansion of knowledge, here I would like to make the more ambitious
argument that the proposed section has the potential of being a source of innovation.
Tentatively titled ‘Choice Notes’, I envision this section to be a source of innovation at three
levels: the discipline, individual practitioners, and their tools. Firstly, at the level of the
discipline, sharing peripheral observations imply a new ethic of transparency with regards to
field notes. Secondly, scholars might encounter in the proposed section descriptions of
marginalized categories of people or experiences that they would like to explore further.
Thirdly, some contributions to ‘Choice Notes’ might introduce new concepts for organizing
our observations in the field.
For these innovations to manifest themselves, it is not enough for a peer-reviewed
journal to feature a section dedicated to peripheral observations. The mechanisms of including
(and excluding) potential contributions, the reach and professional status of their authors and
the structure of the discipline are all important factors (Silverstein 2012). However, this
broader context is outside the scope of this essay. Instead, I would like to address potential
reservations to the proposed section, and then share an example of a peripheral observation, a
short description of an unplanned visit to a rabbit exhibit in Potsdam, Germany. I then
conclude with some reflections on the innovations that a section dedicated to peripheral
observations might yield at the level of the discipline, its practitioners and their tools.
Addressing Possible Criticism
Firstly, some might argue that the proposed section would feature impaired fieldwork
techniques by distracted urban anthropologists whose peripheral observations would capture
seemingly interesting, but unfocused and poorly researched experiences. Anthropology
journals have the difficult and necessarily exclusionist task of enforcing high standards in
keeping with the discipline’s mission, which is, to follow Didier Fassin, making ‘sense of the
world that subjects create by relating it to larger structures and events’ (Fassin 2014: 53).
Peripheral observations do not meet this standard.
1
I would like to thank the DAAD and the Herder Institute, Leipzig, for the opportunity to study in
Germany and conduct preliminary fieldwork. I would also like to thank Josué Ramirez for his ideas
about ‘the new’ and innovation in anthropology. I am grateful to Odelia Ghodsizadeh for her incisive
comments. However, I alone am responsible for any mistakes or errors found in this text.
