Commentary: Intimacy through the Ethnographic Lens

Abstract

The multiplicity of meanings that have been attributed to intimacy are both a weakness and a strength: a weakness because of the indeterminacy with which the category is used; a strength because it allows us to explore the relationship between its various meanings, and through this exploration address theoretically important questions. While it is commonly conflated with sexuality, intimacy concerns a considerably broader range of aspects of human life, which only an ethnographically founded approach can help us understand. Because of its indexical qualities, intimacy cannot be understood devoid of the context that gives it meaning. Why has intimacy become the object in the last couple of decades of so much attention in the disciplines we practise and read? Is it because our intimate activities, and in some cases our very entitlement to live, are increasingly under the scrutiny of structural forces, from the state surveillance of our phone calls to the shadowing of our lives by drones? Is it because what we had come to think of as the prime locus of intimacy in our lives, namely conjugality, is now open to new definitions and regulations, such as the rapid spread of the legalization of same-sex marriage around the world? Or has a rethinking of what counts as public and what counts as private (prompted by debates about domestic violence, human trafficking and parents' entitlement to smack their children) bestowed upon intimacy an increasingly fragile and problematic quality? Whatever the answer to these questions may be, understanding intimacy has increasingly become one of the key issues of the contemporary moment, which has implications for other central issues of our times: the problem of scale, for example; that of borders, limits and the right to belong; the increasingly complex and insidious workings of power in our lives; and that of trust, danger and violence. One of the problems one faces when grappling with intimacy is its deeply taken-for-granted nature. Widespread is the assumption that intimacy is unproblematically embedded in the private, the amorous, the small-scale and the pleasurable, and many writers have made the mistake of taking these qualities as given. For example, Anthony Giddens' (1992) widely read The Transformation of Intimacy (one of the first titles that the keyword 'intimacy' returns in a computer search) places intimacy right at the