Sondra Hale’s Ethnographic Accountability

I have tried to position the research in relation to my long personal history in Sudan and to my equally long and problematic academic connection with anthropology. I have come to recognize that my complex personal, ethical, and methodological dilemmas are the product of shifting paradigms and ideologies…. My purpose is to examine some of my long-standing dilemmas, which have been not only academic and political but also ethical and personal….

(Hale 1997, 8 – 9)

To me, accountability means not only being accountable to the people with whom we are working, in terms of moral values, ethics, politics, honesty, and sharing one’s work, but it also means being accountable to oneself—that is, being true to one’s own moral values, ethics, and politics.

(Sondra Hale, personal communication, 2013)

I first read Sondra Hale’s ethnographic writing in the late 1990s, around the same time I was beginning the research for my book, Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism (Naber 2012). Over the years, Hale has served as a feminist-scholar-activist mentor to me. I have been thinking about how Hale’s methodological commitments speak to two interrelated problems that often haunt social justice-based ethnographers working within the academy: 1) If ethnography reproduces colonial forms of power and knowledge, what are the possibilities for using ethnography as a de-colonizing tool? 2) If U.S.-based universities increasingly function to serve the neoliberal enterprise, then what are the possibilities for political dissent from within the university?

While critical scholarship has existed in anthropology, it has done so in tension with dominant strands of the institution that remain tied up in colonial forms of knowledge (Gupta and Ferguson 1997). More recently, some strands of anthropology have aligned more explicitly with the military and intelligence agencies of the post-September 11 War on Terror—from embedded, militarized research teams to new secretive Central Intelligence Agency-linked fellowship programs that infiltrating U.S. universities, to the use of anthropological research in counterinsurgency manuals and paramilitary social science units (Price 2011). In its course offerings, publications, and graduate training, a great deal of U.S.-based anthropology seems to focus less and less on self-critique, the imbalances of power constituting the ethnographic method, and the meaning of social justice-based anthropology. Contributing to these problems is perhaps the dominant assumption within the field that there is no longer a need for such discussions since anthropology has already undergone a major political transformation beginning with 1960s activist anthropology and culminating in the 1990s with poststructuralist and post-colonial critique.

Within this context, Hale’s critical approaches to anthropology provide many of my academic peers and me with a road map for preserving and advancing the tactic of anthropological self-critique and the commitment to de-colonizing ethnography within the confines of the academic industrial complex (Del Gandio 2010). Consider for instance how Hale has developed ethnographic methods that centralize the interrelated practices of political critique and activism, accountability and alliance building, and anthropological self-critique. Hale has practiced accountability beyond the conventional ethnographic commitment to one’s research participants’ individual needs and toward community-based agendas for social justice and self-determination. For instance, her own research centralizes political struggles that are profoundly relevant to her interlocutors’ lives, and her publications offer local, national, and transnational analyses of both deeply intimate and structural-systemic dilemmas and problems such as state violence, militarism, patriarchy, classism, and racism. Hale also remains consistently accountable to the critical scholarship that has been written by her interlocutors and by Africa-based scholars more generally. By centering anti-colonial, decolonizing, and post-colonial African studies frameworks in her own work and sustaining long-term relationships with scholars from within African contexts, Hale’s work exemplifies the possible alternatives to the dominant practices in U.S.-based area studies—practices that often overlook the critiques and research paradigms emerging out of the very context about which one is writing.

Unlike the typical leftist armchair professor asserting radicalism from the ivory tower, Hale developed her critical methodological practices out of fifty-two years of...