Faier, Lieba, and Lisa Rofel. 2014. “Ethnographies of Encounter.” Annual Review of Anthropology 43 (1): 363–77. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102313-030210.
Lisa Rofel is a professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz. Rofel has consistently brought feminist, postcolonial and Marxist poststructuralist approaches to bear on questions of modernity, postsocialism, capitalism, desire, queer identities, and transnational encounters. She has written extensively about China. Lieba Faier is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles.
This piece was published in Annual Review of Anthropology which has been active since 1972. This piece, specifically, was published in 2014 in response to conversations about decolonizing the discipline.
Centering encounter as the main focus of the article, the authors examine how encounter is the very means by which categories such as transnational capitalism, space/place, and human-nonhuman relations emerge and exist. In this article, the term encounter refers to “everyday engagements across difference.” Ethnographies of encounter, then, focus on the cross-cultural, relational, and uneven dynamics of these processes and exchanges.
Because this is an annual review article, the authors trace the trajectory of how encounter and intimacy have been shaped throughout the trajectory of the discipline. Different terms have been used to think about this particular space, some have included “contact zone,” which theorized the space of colonial encounters in particular. Moving from one type of encounter to another, the authors then think through the term in the context of transnational capitalism. This type of encounter has been based in frictions and processes and unevenness.
Encounters prompt unexpected responses and improvised ac- tions, as well as long-term negotiations with unforeseen outcomes, including both violence and love. Ethnographies of encounter focus on the cross-cultural and relational dynamics of these processes.
In terms of characterizing ethnographic places, “Ethnographies of Encounter,” pushes us to think about the contradictions, complications, and complexities of places/spaces. Spaces are produced and reproduced. These productions happen in multiples and due to multiple encounters and engagements with various groups. This text also thinks about the intimacy of certain encounters, as well as spatial knowledge. Using Mei Zhan’s work, in particular, the authors talk about worlding and the “awkward resonances that produce translocal encounters” (370).
