TIME, SPACE, CYBERSPACE AND BEYOND:

On Research Methods, Delicate Empiricism, Labyrinths and Egypt

Kyriaki Papageorgiou

As anthropology and social studies of science examine the knowledge-making practices of their subjects of research, they are increasingly forced to tackle their own analytical tools and claims to knowledge. In anthropology, the current epistemological debates draw on older discussions that have challenged both the tropes of classical anthropology and ethnographic authority. The 1980s critiques dismantled the traditional narratives of quest and discovery that rendered the anthropologist a hero and unraveled the discipline's entanglements with colonialism. Exposing the assumptions underpinning fieldwork and writing opened up the space for experimentation with new forms of research and expression. 

While in recent years ethnography has been enthusiastically adopted by several fields across the social sciences and humanities, anthropologists are questioning their discipline's emblematic method, along with the nature, scope and purpose of their work. How do we demarcate our field when the territory we study transforms itself continuously? How can we represent phenomena that constantly defy our categories? What toolkits are appropriate for grasping perceptually entangled subjects? How do we mediate between theory and data, general and particular? Is this distinction even relevant? This essay addresses these questions interweaving my own research on genetics and fieldwork in Egypt with broader discussions about how knowledge is generated, disciplined and rendered valid. More specifically, my presentation studies the impact of the new information and communication technologies on anthropology's methods, particularly the ways in which they have influenced the space and time of work.

Drawing on the work of several scholars, the essay explores how place centered activities are becoming telemediated, spaces or time cycles are fluid, the material is chronically "under construction" and ephemeral, the boundary between the field and writing is blurred. For some, the internet is both the field and the laboratory. The internet has accentuated what others have diagnosed about our era where the spatial logic is late-modern in nature, a new socio-spatial nexus is being constructed and traditional modernist ideas concerning space, time, reality and so on are undermined and reconfigured. The work of cultural geographers is also important to consider in that argues that there has been a "spatial turn" across the social sciences and the humanities, which has had significant consequences because it questions fundamental concepts, such as life itself.

This presentation follows a somewhat labyrinthine path. It begins with a description of my own research, from its inception, to its formulation into a proposal and subsequent modifications during fieldwork. I present the methodological challenges faced and I position these vis-à-vis broader relevant discussions. I concentrate on one metaphor traditionally used for spatial design and navigation, which I connect to certain characteristics of anthropological work and to my fieldwork in Cairo. The paper ends with an introduction to a different epistemological paradigm encountered in Egypt: delicate empiricism.