Ethnography’s Queer Timing

This collection affirms Tom Boellstorff as a crucial theorist of the relationship between anthropology and queer studies. At the collection’s heart is a sequence of ethnographic chapters that extends studies of sexuality and nationalism in Indonesia that Boellstorff first explored in The Gay Archipelago.¹ These chapters are framed by a provocative introduction, which asks how questions of time in culture and theory clarify the relation between anthropology and queer studies. Boellstorff’s theme is the term coincidence, with which he invokes images of the co-occurrence of multiple phenomena, representing not so much a time as “timing” (25). While he appears to translate coincidence from temporal tropes in Indonesia, as when revisiting Clifford Geertz’s words on the Balinese calendar, he earlier uses coincidence to describe a coevalness of researcher and subject in ethnography, and he argues a compatibility of coincidence with theories of queer time, saying that it is “difficult to operationalize within straight time because it implies two events occupying the same moment” (28). Coincidence thus speaks to queer studies via Indonesian studies by honoring an integrity in ethnography, which involves the meeting of distinct yet mutually informing subjects in new and unforeseen understanding.

The introduction grounds the collection in pursuing Boellstorff’s conjecture that anthropology and queer studies “stand in a relationship of coincidence to each other” (2). He explores their capacity to be mutually informing, even as his goal is “to argue for anthropological futures of queer studies” that will focus on “the foundationally social character of human being” (3). The introduction proffers benefits of ethnography for queer studies. These include entering situations where surprise can complicate expectations; facilitating the study of “everyday life with all of its complexities, specificities, and inequalities” (15); and forming theory from empirical research that doesn’t marshal evidence only to support prior claims or ensconce theory outside “the empirical contexts through which all theory is derived and toward which all theory ultimately makes its claims” (17). Recalling Marilyn Strathern’s citation of Donna Haraway when exploring the relation between feminism and anthropology, Boellstorff presents coincidence as a “temporal model . . . for nonhierarchical interdisciplinary relationships between queer studies and anthropology” that may inspire queer studies in methodologically ethnographic directions (32).

As an ethnographer I am compelled by Boellstorff’s words about the integrity of ethnographic methods and positionalities and their benefits to queer scholarship. His discussion is among the most thoughtful I have read on these themes, and I expect it to inspire important conversations. I wished for even more nuanced discussion on two points. One would be to lift ethnography from the burden of granting queer studies qualities that also appear in literary analysis and critical theory, which draw interpreters to the surprising effects of crossing multiple symbolic registers, and to the unique conjunctures such encounters form among readers, narrators, and texts. A second would be to complement his discussion of ethnography’s contributions to queer studies with equally lengthy discussion of his conceptualization of queer studies and of what it distinctly offers to anthropology. His comments on theories of queer time reminded me that a crucial link between queer and anthropological scholarship remains a historical demand in queer theory, that all social scientific studies of sexuality must contextualize their claims in genealogy. The genealogy of modern sexuality reminds scholars that when studying sexuality we study its production as knowledge, such that we require a theory of the history of knowledge production to evaluate the evidence subjects or researchers present.

Linking ethnography to genealogy is a noted strength of Boellstorff’s original research, which A Coincidence of Desires reaffirms. The collection’s intermediary chapters join The Gay Archipelago in modeling the study of national and transnational sexualities and genders that interpret everyday life in relation to historical trajectories of knowledge and power. Chapter 2, “Warias, National Transvestites,” invites transgender studies to counter the anthropology of primordial gender roles by representing warias negotiating postcolonial nationality through institutional arrangements of visibility and marginality. Chapter 5, “The Emergence of Political...