On Pandemic Privilege: Reflections on a “Home‐Bound Pandemic Ethnography”

Abstract

This essay examines the experience of conducting a “home‐bound pandemic ethnography”—one that toggles back and forth between the ethnographer’s own experience of the pandemic while in quarantine and the very different pandemic experiences of her Latina immigrant essential worker interviewees. Maintaining a split gaze between one’s own experience and those of one’s interviewees, a home‐bound pandemic ethnography lends itself to a kind of reflexivity and comparison that traditional ethnographic “immersion” does not. Involving the disjunctive knowledge of “being here” while listening to the very different experience of “being there,” it throws into stark relief asymmetries built deep into the ethnographic relationship. While ethnographic immersion rests on the illusion of ethnographers’ acculturation so they become a kind of insider–outsider, a “home‐bound” ethnography refuses the claims of traditional ethnography to “truly understand” the plight of the marginalized populations with whom we work. Just as critiques have emerged of anthropologists’ silence regarding our relative immunity from climate catastrophes (Jobson, Am Anthropol , 122 , 2020, 259) and from state violence (Gomberg‐Muñoz, J Anthropol N Am , 21 , 2018, 36) in comparison to those whom we research, the pandemic also demands an honest reckoning with the chasm that has widened anew between the lived realities of ethnographers and those of our research “subjects.” Highlighting the discomfort of disjunctive lived realities, a home‐bound pandemic ethnography creates a careful ledger of the ethnographer’s comparative privilege, and questions the very premises of ethnographic immersion.