Speak, Friend, and Enter? Fieldwork Access and Anthropological Knowledge Production on the Copperbelt

Abstract

The ‘gate’ has been a recurring metaphor for moments of access and denial in ethnographic fieldwork. However, access challenges during fieldwork represent not only ‘gates’ opening up or foreclosing scientific opportunity: rather, they tell us something about fieldwork as a collection of scientific practices, and, more precisely, how practices of power mark the process of anthropological knowledge production and anthropology as a social science. Based on fieldwork in Luanshya from 2015 to 2016, the study of metatexts from ethnographies on Zambia’s copper mines, archival research and personal communication with Copperbelt scholars, I argue that ethnographic fieldwork has been able to challenge persisting power structures and social hierarchies in colonial and post-colonial Zambia. Similarly, as I will explain, ethnographic fieldwork made the anthropologist a social scientist who was being ‘chased’ by the practices of power that structured his or her prime work place–that is, the field. I set out as a historian of social anthropology, retracing how anthropologists on the Copperbelt gained or were denied access to their field sites from the studies of the Rhodes–Livingstone Institute (RLI), founded in 1937, to my own ethnographic research project up to 2017. Moments of fieldwork access and denial have occurred in this region in an especially clear form. I seek to contribute to the historiography of the Copperbelt as an anthropological field site and the understanding of anthropology as a social science. It is a science that is capable of illustrating power hierarchies through passing moments of gaining fieldwork access, continuous negotiations to maintain it, and prolonged efforts, ending in denial. These instances are not mere embellishments to be relegated to the introductions, appendices and postscripts of ethnographies or retrospective assessments of academic careers. Fieldwork access should be central within every reflection on the production of anthropological knowledge and the nature of anthropology as a social science.