Dissonant alignments: The ethics and politics of researching state institutions

Abstract

Spanish

French

This article explores the ethical challenges of conducting fieldwork in state institutions. It critically engages with the chain of competing claims and multiple loyalties that confront social researchers, and addresses as the main question: how does working with people with whose goals one fundamentally disagrees shape the necessity of building collaborative alliances and trust?

Drawing on the experience of a sensitive and precarious procedure – the administrative hearing of two fiancés suspected of a sham union – the article aims to give situated answers to general questions about the ethics of fieldwork relations. By challenging ideas about trust, neutrality and loyalty, it explores the tensions between building field alliances and private moral and political alignments. In the light of such dissonance, the article discusses the stakes of disclosure and the imposition of a covert role in forging alliances; the consequences of working in a state institution, where ‘customers’ are submitted to civil servants’ discretionary power; and how this blurs, for the researcher, the opposition between adopting a neutral stance and taking sides. Finally, the article addresses the ethics of unethical alliances and how this tension challenges choices in portraying and betraying research participants.

Keywords

Ethics of fieldwork neutrality sham marriages state institutions Switzerland trust and field alliances

This article addresses ethical issues that confront social scientists working in formal institutions. It draws on a rich literature about ethnography as a method, and an empirical corpus based on fieldwork conducted with Swiss registrars – the civil servants in charge of officiating at marriages and civil partnerships¹ – on sensitive issues linked to discrimination, state violence and structural (in)equality.

Fieldwork refers to presence in situ and uses observation and participation as cognitive ways of producing data (Lofland et al., 2006). Interpersonal relations are at the core of this method, where the attention paid to microscopic, detailed accounts constitutes ways of deepening the appreciation of variation and unpredictability, and of highlighting ‘agency and contingencies rather than statically deterministic outcomes’ (Emerson, 2009: 536). These features convey distinctive qualities for the study of formal institutions and the processes of bureaucratic decision-making (Crozier and Friedberg, 1980; Merton, 1949). Confronting practices and discourses about what is done and why, ethnography addresses taken-for-granted features of organizational life and provides rich data about how people build meaning into their work (Castellano, 2007).

Qualitative data are not mushrooms waiting to be picked up by researchers (Bensa, 2010). They do not exist independently of the context of interpersonal relations, which makes it impossible to disentangle the contributions of the researcher from those of the research participants (Boden et al., 2009). Data are dynamically produced through observation, discussion and through processes of selection and interpretation, which involve taking, discussing, reading, restructuring and coding field notes (Wolfinger, 2002). Together with research participants (Gunaratnam, 2003), social scientists produce situations and moments to reflect upon what is done, why it has been done like this, how it could – or not – be done in another way, and what are the reasons for doing this at this moment.

Drawing on these premises, my argument highlights how ethical choices are framed by hidden operations of power (Boden et al., 2009) and are challenged during fieldwork in formal organizations (Bernstein and Mertz, 2011). It considers ethics as relational practices taking the form of a number of choices over how to conduct oneself in a complicated political, moral and epistemic context (Wainwright et al., 2006). Following Wainwright et al., its goal is to provide grounded answers, often ‘erased’ or ‘skated over’ by purely ‘philosophical analyses’ (2006: 745). Centred on the ethical challenges of working in a conflictive and hierarchical context, the article addresses a specific experience – participation in the administrative hearing of fiancés² suspected of a sham union – which proved crucial in regard to fieldwork relations.

The article is divided into four sections, each of which aims to provide situated answers to general questions on ethical conundrums linked to fieldwork relations. It begins with a review of the relevant literature about trust, proximity and distance, all central issues related to the methodological and ethical crux of research collaboration. After a description of the hearing and its context, the second section shows how working in a formal organization jeopardized my ethical commitment to disclose my identity as a researcher. The third section deepens the analysis of this specific experience by addressing ethical issues related to neutrality and taking sides, and their significations in a context of competing loyalties. The fourth section discusses how these issues go beyond fieldwork as a particular moment of the research, characterized by the production of qualitative material, and reach out to the ethical challenges of representing research participants.

‘Eating a hot ice-cream’

The centrality of interpersonal relations constitutes a crux from both methodological and ethical perspectives. As a method, ethnography entails critical moments such as gaining access to the field, which requires important material and timely resources (Atkinson et al., 2001). In the case of the registration institution, access to people and premises was determined by its specific hierarchical organization: I presented my research to the authorities of the six French-speaking cantons in Switzerland, drawing upon my role as ‘credentialized expert’ (Snow et al., 1986), and my social capital (Bourdieu, 1980) as a university-based PhD researcher. Having convinced them of the relevance of my research, but also of my reliability and my aptitude for ensuring the confidentiality related to institutional treatment of personal data, the authorities gave me access to local offices.

Once blessed by the hierarchy, the job was far from being done. Aiming at understanding insiders’ perspectives – in this case, the registrars’ – required the building of close relations. Negotiating productive conditions of collaboration has been addressed by scholars through topics such as trust, fieldwork alliances and disclosure (Anderson and Calhoun, 1992). Ethical issues arise regarding the constitutive tension between the necessity and the extent of disclosure, and the way to deal with the instrumental character of a relation motivated by the necessity to produce (useful) data (Emerson and Pollner, 2001).

Disclosure has been widely discussed in relation to working c/overtly, a decision presented as preceding the fieldwork itself. Deliberately concealing one’s purpose and identity as a researcher tends to be considered problematic for the ethical dimension of the research (Lofland et al., 2006). ‘Full disclosure’ might be an ideal but it remains unrealistic (Lofland, 1976) and subject to situated interpretations (Harding, 1991). I have made mine the minimal criterion of disclosing ‘those personal and emotional experiences that significantly affect the researcher’s understanding of the setting in general or of critical activities within it’ (Emerson, 1981: 370). This highlights the fuzziness between personal and professional selves, a blurring that became critical in regard to my participation at an administrative hearing.

Analysing social settings implies not only processes of building proximity through trust and disclosure, but also strategies of distancing. The complex dynamic of ‘doing distancing’ and ‘anchoring’ (Castellano, 2007) has been discussed in the light of various combinations of observation and participation (Lofland et al., 2006). The general assumption is that the researcher has to struggle to obtain the emic perspective (participating), while preserving enough distance in order to analyse the situations and experiences shared with informants (observing). To underline the difficulty of such alternation, anthropologist Favret-Saada (2009) has compared it to ‘eating a hot ice-cream’.

Fieldwork roles evolve out of a negotiated social contract between the researcher and informants (Berg, 2004): the researcher is not alone in defining the possible roles s/he might endorse in fieldwork contexts (O’Reilly, 2005). To reflect on the stakes of such negotiations, one has to take into consideration elements as disparate as the research context, its central topics, the researcher’s social characteristics and personality, as well as the research participants’ agendas and personalities, to mention just some of them (Telfer, 2004).

Recognizing the collaborative character of fieldwork does not mean that all groups participate in similar ways. Research participants do not exert the same control as the researcher over the trajectory of the research (Gunaratnam, 2003: 85). Their respective impact varies according to the research stages: the power balance in the social settings under scrutiny is not the same as during the process of coding field notes, the analysis of data and the writing of articles. Fieldwork relations do not end with the act of ‘leaving the field’. They must be dealt with in the long run, a process that entails strategies of extrication and disengagement (Snow, 2001 [1980]). Physical extraction from the field shifts the focus from interpersonal relations to the field notes but does not put an end to the system of moral obligations and indebtedness that links researcher and research participants. Chronological field notes – themselves a selection of the field shared experiences (Wolfinger, 2002) – are read, split and reorganized around emergent themes (Weber, 1990). After coding (Strauss, 1987), they become data serving the production of scholarly legitimate knowledge. Even if this seems to be a solitary process, shadows of fieldwork relations keep haunting the researcher: how does one ensure faithful portrayal, anonymity and confidentiality? Should research participants screen the interpretations? To what extent should the researcher be concerned about the influence of the publication on public opinion and on policy towards the research participants (Snow, 2001 [1980]: 392)?

Unpredictability is a central feature of ethnography as a method resting on dynamic interactions: it draws its strength, interest and relevance from the impossibility of anticipating all situations, of knowing beforehand what will emerge from fieldwork and how research participants might be affected by the research. This is an important element situating issues related to the use of informed consents and the work of ethical board committees. The unpredictability based on the volatility of interpersonal relations makes it impossible to anticipate all developments. This is why meeting the expectations of ethical board committees is far from resolving the ethical dilemmas which emerge in the field (Boden et al., 2009; Snow et al., 1986). The institutions which are implicated in the funding of the present research project³ have not set up ethics committees.

In the light of these debates, this article aims at taking one step forward in the discussion of ethical issues, and showing that ethical reflexions are not loosely hanging in the air but might give unique insights into the central epistemological and theoretical issues of the research.

Troubles in the field

In Switzerland, the possibility for registrars to conduct hearings, which came into force on 1 January 2008 by popular vote,⁴ is one of several controversial practices widely discussed in the media,⁵ by politicians⁶ and by lawyers (Coussa, 2008). Such controversy makes visible the conflict between two aspects of the registrars’ professional mission, who are simultaneously civil servants and specialists of the intersection between legality and intimacy. Officiating at unions, registrars contribute to the production of state credibility by applying the national Constitution, which guarantees the right to freely choose a partner (Article 14), a right also guaranteed by the European Convention on Human Rights,⁷ signed by Switzerland in 1974. They have to perform this task in accordance with the equal treatment of any person, without arbitrariness and in conformity with good faith (Article 9). As civil servants, they share responsibility regarding the implementation of measures aimed at protecting national territory and its borders. This takes the shape of struggling against ‘abuses’, an issue closely linked in Switzerland to the figure of the ‘foreigner’, as in the title of Article 97a of the Civil Code.⁸ The figure of the ‘abusive foreigner’ is part of the narrative on the Überfremdung, a classical local idiosyncrasy referring to the supposed threat of the outnumbering of nationals by ‘foreigners’ (Papadaniel, 2006). With the introduction of the Schengen regulations,⁹ civil servants all over Europe are increasingly involved in migration and borders issues (Spire, 2007). The construction of a partially commonly administrated territory shifts the focus of control from the national borders to the surveillance of the population on the national territory (Jacot-Descombes and Wendt, 2013).

The object of the research is to understand how this contributes to the surveillance of nationals and the normative machinery affecting nationals as well as non-nationals. It is a contribution to whiteness studies, whiteness being defined as normative space constructed by the way in which it positions others at its borders (Frankenberg, 1993: 231). Along the lines of research conducted in the Netherlands and Norway (Gullestad, 2005; Yanow and Van der Haar, 2012), it focuses on a national context where race remains unaddressed by dominant narratives. Still considered as having stayed apart from and unaffected by colonial flows (Purtschert et al., 2012), Switzerland offers a striking contrast with intensely race-conscious societies such as the United States (Blee, 2000). Exploring the fine mechanisms of the bureaucratic decision-making process helps to analyse how racialized representations blur the distinction between nationals and non-nationals. The specificity of this production of ‘raceless racism’ (Goldberg, 2009) is that it takes place in a democratic institution following a legal framework which explicitly condemns racism and discrimination.

Unaddressed as such, the tension between the two aspects of the registrars’ mission – on the one side, ensuring a democratic equality of treatment and the freedom to marry; on the other side, contributing to the struggle against abusive foreigners – becomes manifest in ordinary, ‘low-visibility’ troubles (Emerson, 2009: 538), the analysis of which helps to explain social and normative orders and how they are sustained (Emerson and Messinger, 1977).

In this context, hearings appeared as desirable sites for me to conduct fieldwork. So, when registrars took the initiative by inviting me to attend one, I experienced a feeling of success, which was soon overshadowed by ethical concerns: as hearings are reserved for civil servants on oath, I could not attend as a researcher but would be presented as a trainee. Sensing my uneasiness, registrars underlined that this undercover strategy would have no consequences, as their superiors would not be told about it.

Their interpretation of my uneasiness was not quite accurate. My hesitation reflected discomfort that was not about trespassing institutional hierarchy and formal authority, but about fieldwork ethics related not to institutional hierarchy but to fiancés under scrutiny. Despite my previous resolution to work overtly, I finally accepted the registrars’ invitation and conditions.

Having read reports of former hearings did not prepare me for experiencing one of them. It turned out to be an exhausting experience with regard both to its length (four hours of interviewing and then the writing of the final report, which lasted about one and a half hours) and to the registrars’ attitude towards the suspect fiancés. The hearing signals the fiancés’ entry into a new bureaucratic space, explicitly marked by mistrust. One of the most distinctive features is that the fiancés are summoned to appear separately at the hearing while they are otherwise strongly advised to attend all appointments together, togetherness being considered as the visible sign of their intimate relations. Another aspect is the intense and extended physical presence of fiancés on the premises: up until this point, the fiancés’ presence is limited, as they are encouraged to return all documents by electronic or conventional mail, and only come for appointments that last about 15 to 30 minutes. The recurrent and insistent demands made to the fiancés, urging them to ‘tell the truth’, the steady rhythm of the questioning, the repetition of questions, the alternation between the two civil servants, who had shared out the roles of ‘good cop’ and ‘bad cop’ (following their own words) were strong reminders of criminal hearings (at least in their versions as popularized on TV series).

Immersion into the (re)production of structural discrimination through the lens of suspicion sheds new light on the uses and consequences of the popularization – among civil servants – of the figure of the ‘abusive foreigner’. I argue that it works as a normative tool extending to the whole population, and affecting not solely non-nationals: as was the case in the hearing I attended,¹⁰ mistrust attached to couples defined as ‘mixed’, an expression which mixes elements of national belongings, racialized and gendered features (Lavanchy, 2012c). The surveillance of intimacy by state representatives on the grounds of Article 97a of the Civil Code affects couples designated by their mixedness as deviant.

As an administrative procedure, hearings made visible the continuum between family and state (Hill Collins, 1993). They bring up to date Switzerland’s long history of moral panics regarding deviant unions, providing a highly gendered history of the nation (Studer, 2004). Attending one of them revealed useful data with regard to my research topic: the experience of the physical demands – its length, its rhythm and its exhausting effects – gave me valuable insights for understanding the use of administrative tools.

In this light, the infringement of my professional ethics – my original choice not to work undercover – might appear as anecdotal, since it apparently had little consequence for all the other participants: I had been advised to remain absolutely silent and not disturb the proceedings, and so I sat at the back of the room. Nevertheless, I deeply resented the fact that I had been presented as a trainee, which designated me as a state representative, and therefore a link in the imposition of normative narratives which I felt a stranger to. To compensate for my uneasiness, I kept furiously scribbling notes during the whole procedure, writing several pages, trying to register each sentence as well as my observations regarding bodily attitudes and comments on some questions and answers.

Dissonant alignments

The necessity of dealing with awkward fieldwork situations was not unexpected. Choosing to explore the process of decision-making through the registrars’ emic perspective, I consciously stepped back from the ‘implicit romantic assumptions’ that social scientists ‘[emphasize] caution, distance, and objectivity in interviews with members of elites and egalitarianism, reciprocity, and authenticity in interviews with people outside elites. However, this epistemological dichotomy reflects implicit romantic assumptions … difficult to defend when studying ordinary people active in the politics of intolerance’ (Blee, 1993: 596). State agents’ actions and decisions have concrete effects (Hertz, 2010): registrars control and structure the access to state resources, in this case the rights and obligations entailed in unions as legally binding. Embracing such a study-‘up’ perspective (Nader, 1972) meant adopting the stance of the social agents who were the most removed from my own experience and point of view.

This raises critical questions in respect of fieldwork alliances. Attending the hearing forced me to reconsider my interlocking into the power balance as well as what I was prepared to disclose. Up to this point, I had decided to suspend my judgement and avoid taking sides, and felt successful in keeping my professional self apart from my personal values and experiences. But my direct implication with the state machinery as alleged trainee in a context of direct antagonism between two sets of research participants (registrars and fiancés) disrupted this separation.

The main aspect of this disruption was the conflation between my professional and personal identities: I had myself faced suspicion and mistrust,¹¹ and my interest in the registry institution was a direct consequence of this experience. I had chosen to focus my research project on registrars and to put fiancés to one side partly because I already had some insights into the meanings of being under suspicion, and partly because of my agreement with the registration authorities. When I had presented my project, we had discussed the extent of my access to the institution. Even if each canton formulated its own limits and conditions, I was mainly enjoying considerable freedom in dealing with registrars and archives, being in the premises and attending appointments. This freedom of movement also included the copying of documents and the taping of interviews. Limits were the interdiction to contact clients I met or whose data were found in the files; and from publishing anything in newspapers. In contrast, I was free to use all material for scientific purposes. This negotiation about how to enter the field determined which side I had to take, and my relative impotence facing registrars’ conditions.

Despite my limited contacts with fiancés, I had found echoes of my own feelings of anger, indignation and impotence whilst reading and analysing documents found in the files. Some letters drew a parallel between suspicion against mixed couples with a violent intrusion into intimacy and privacy, and one of them compared it to a rape. The necessity of framing relations as romantic love narratives (Lavanchy, 2012a) to prove the genuineness of couples and the legitimacy of claims for union was felt as profoundly inadequate, and also led to feelings of being soiled.

The particular form of the hearing and the obligation to conceal my identity as a researcher made me conflate both selves. The emotional charge made it difficult to treat this hearing as fieldwork experience. Processes of doing distance in order to produce useful data lead to recognizing the epistemic and methodological productivity of awkwardness (Hume and Mulcock, 2004). This deepens the reflexion about alignment and neutrality.

Taking sides and neutrality have been presented as two irreconcilable ways of practising sociology (Burawoy, 2005; Holmwood, 2007). The ethnography of institutions as power sites allows the blurring of this opposition. Interested in gaining the registrars’ point of view, I had adopted a neutral stance and became genuinely involved in the risks of their position. As institutional representatives, they were agents of state power and contributed to institutional discrimination. But they were also at the bottom of the hierarchical ladder, with little control over their working conditions and with little choice regarding the general orientation of their institution. Neutrality does not mean that I lied in order to conceal my beliefs. When registrars asked me for my opinion about what they considered as the ‘obvious’ character of a ‘fake union’, I answered that assessing the genuineness of a relationship seemed to me an impossible task, and that I could not perform it, as I felt that their criteria were biased.

I had always considered the capacity to weave friendly interactions as part of my professional ability. This has taken a particular shape working with people with whose goals I fundamentally disagree. In the context of the hearing as a place of explicit clash of interests between fiancés and registrars, the suspension of judgement and the adoption of a neutral stance revealed the manipulative potential of building proximity with research participants. During the whole procedure, I was deeply resenting the dissonance between my apparent taking sides with the registrars and my personal identification with the fiancés, and the fact that I had been thrust into this fraught space of encounter. I experienced feelings of failure in respect of my professional and personal identities: I was betraying registrars’ trust and my personal experience simultaneously.

Even if this particular fieldwork lacked the dramatic dimension of research conducted in extremist groups (Avanza, 2008) or life-threatening settings (Bourgois, 2000), the conflation between professional and personal experiences in the face of the display of state violence, symbolic power and institutional arbitrariness was emotionally and physically challenging: it made me literally ill the same evening and the day after. Interestingly, such sickness returned months later as I was analysing my notes.¹²

The ethics and politics of representation

The discussion about the imposition of a covert role and the impossibility of remaining neutral in a field site dedicated to the production of state power has shown the durable impact of field experiences on the researcher’s life (Snow, 2001 [1980]). Similarly, ethical conundrums related to fieldwork relations and alliances do not end when leaving the field. It might be useful to recall that both building up proximity and doing distance take place over the whole process of knowledge production, i.e. during and after fieldwork. If I have discussed field relations especially with regard to building up proximity with registrars through disclosure and its limits, strategies of doing distance were also present during fieldwork. Taking notes is one of them, as it implies the constant reflection and selection of what is important and worth being recorded (Wolfinger, 2002).

This section explores the understudied process of disengagement, and the ethical challenges it involves. Politics of representation are its main feature. The three aspects raising attention are the processing of field notes as reappropriation of shared experiences; the role of reflexivity regarding empathy and disagreement; and dealing with confidentiality and formal agreements concluded with institutional authorities.

From notes to data

Leaving the registry offices meant a shift from working closely with registrars to a lonely processing of the field material – notes, records of interviews, document copies, institutional guidelines, law articles and newspapers articles. During fieldwork, especially at tough times such as the hearing, I longed for this part of the research process as a way for counterbalancing disagreeable feelings of impotence, which had been strong reminders of the assessment of the legitimacy of my own romantic union.

Engaging with the analysis of this material through reading it, identifying emergent topics, coding¹³ them and splitting the chronological order of taking notes during fieldwork constitutes a reappropriation of the experiences shared with registrars. At the same time, and despite their physical absence, registrars seemed to follow from the field by haunting the process. This appears under the guise of accounting for their motivations to engage with my research, which was mainly their feeling that they had to justify their practices.

Processing my notes, I found several quotes about their claim of ‘not being racist’, which I did not remember having heard. At first glance it seemed difficult to cope with such affirmations as they were superimposed in several quotations which make explicit how they used racialized criteria in their assessments (Lavanchy, 2012a). But reflexively addressing my lack of any memory proved to be an effective way of overcoming unconscious limits imposed by my tacit knowledge and expectations when engaging with registrars. Far from aiming at the production of a narcissist, auto-centred ethnography, the willingness of engaging with self-conscious examination of the fieldwork’s personal and emotional dimensions allows for the avoidance of biases (Emerson, 1981). In this case, it also led to a richer analysis of formal organizations as complex social settings, providing more elaborate accounts of them.

Disagreeing

Closeness to research participants has been discussed in regard to the nature and extent of the researcher’s obligations to befriend participants (Snow, 2001 [1980]). As qualitative social science rests on the importance of empathy, the debates on how to deal with negative feelings in the field and with the debts after fieldwork remain under-addressed, despite the work of several scholars (Hume and Mulcock, 2004; Thorne, 1980).

Analysing the hearing required a conscious struggle to maintain my professional suspension of judgement. A complicated but crucial aspect was the identification of emotions related to my own experience as a fiancée facing suspicion – anger, rage, impotence and sensations of being soiled through undue intrusions into my intimacy – and the way they resurfaced in this specific institutional context. It was necessary to identify and explicitly discuss them to keep them from jeopardizing the analytical process. This discussion made explicit the limits of involvement and commitments.

Reflecting on antipathy and disagreement questions the instrumentality and manipulative potential of fieldwork alliances, and the uses, organization and types of knowledge (Thorne, 1979). But beyond this, it also provides productive insights for analysing registrars’ answers to their antagonistic missions: ensuring the equality of treatment and the absence of discrimination, and participating in the redefined surveillance machinery of the state towards its population. Tasks linked to suspicion occupy a significant amount of the registrars’ time and energy.

Tension and the importance of suspicion in their daily work helps us to understand that what is at stake is not primarily preventing marriages (as they state) as that is a failure.¹⁴ But shifting the perspective from the final effects to the process itself, and to the way couples are affected by the special procedures, the suspicion machinery proves effective in the production of two categories of couples: the suspicious ones and the ones who remain beyond suspicion. This conclusion echoes Bourdieu’s analysis on rites as acts institutionalizing social difference (Bourdieu, 1982). Special procedures contribute to the social marking of mixed couples as deviant, and extend the idea of threat, a central feature of the narratives about the figure of the ‘foreigner’, to the nationals guilty of opening loopholes in the migration regulations. In the same vein, the necessity for mixed couples to comply with a disclosure of their intimacy institutes a difference from the ‘genuine’ couples, who can ignore the reality of the feminist affirmation that ‘the personal is political’ (Hanisch, 1970). This becomes evident in the registrars’ strategies: as one of them told me, the multiplication of bureaucratic hurdles, the conscious distillation of doubts regarding the sincerity of the foreigner’s fiancé and the slowing down of their cases were all ways to ‘make Swiss women think better about it’.

Confidentiality

As briefly mentioned, the institutions funding my research did not require the submission of informed consent forms to research participants. Nevertheless, I took the initiative in asking registration authorities about confidentiality agreements. My purpose was to avoid finding myself with notes and pieces of information that I could not use as scientific data. Confidentiality agreements signed by me and cantonal heads of registration were the result of negotiations, where state representatives aimed at protecting their institution from my work. Interestingly, the ‘right to use all my material for scientific purposes’ was easily given, while access to the media arena (publishing in newspapers or providing reporters with information) was carefully excluded.¹⁵ Measures regarding the protection of the research participants (ensuring confidentiality and anonymity to registrars and fiancés with regard to political and administrative authorities) were my contribution to the agreement. This included the impossibility of making use of personal data to contact fiancés beyond the framework of the institution. During fieldwork, registrars were as keen as me to request the fiancés’ authorization for me to attend appointments and weddings. The only exception was the case of the hearing. An alleged trainee, I was explicitly told not to make this request to the fiancés, whose right regarding the disclosure of personal data was then suspended because of the administrative suspicion affecting them.

Conclusion

Considering ethics as grounded practice embedded in power relations (Boden et al., 2009; Wainwright et al., 2006), my objective was to discuss the competing claims and multiple loyalties I was confronted with during fieldwork with registrars. The experience of a sensitive and precarious procedure – the administrative hearing of two fiancés suspected of a sham union – reveals rich material to discuss this in the light of the dilemma represented by registrars’ invitation to the hearing, which went along with the condition of working under cover. Pondering my own interest for what seemed a desirable site to conduct fieldwork, the possible consequences for the fiancés and the solidification of my professional alliance with registrars, I finally accepted both the invitation and the conditions.

This experience led to unexpected conundrums regarding my capacity to suspend judgement and adopt what I consider a neutral stance. The hearing revealed an emblematic site to explore the Swiss state’s definitions of deviance and normality, and of mixed couples as constellations threatening the nation. But my participating in this moment of symbolic violence jeopardized the separation between my professional and personal selves, which I had successfully managed to keep up to this point. The resurfacing of strong emotions linked to my former experience as a suspected fiancée threatened my alliance with registrars. The discussion of such dissonance contributes to blurring the usual distinction between taking sides and staying neutral, a blurring that might be a central feature of conducting fieldwork in a site of power production.

Ethical challenges evolve out of the field. Processing the written material and reflexively addressing awkward emotions revealed a useful tool to address the tension between the two sides of the registrars’ professional mission. Navigating between ensuring the democratic ideal of the equality of treatment to all and the new paradigms of protecting the state against foreigners’ abuses, registrars are trapped within an antagonistic logic. Reflexivity thus provided useful insights into their strategies to cope with it: legal tools (hearings) and bureaucratic niggling (for instance, deliberately slowing some cases down) are powerful normalizing tools. Mixed couples are constructed as a threat towards the nation as they would allow foreigners to be smuggled in. Exploring the theoretical and epistemological implications of giving situated answers to general ethical dilemmas proves to be a powerful way to reveal the racialized decision-making processes of civil administrators and their own interest in presenting themselves as non-racists operating on the basis of objective legal criteria. It thus unveils the complex challenges of working with and against the representatives of institutional bureaucracy, as a citizen and an anthropologist.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

A former version of this article was presented in the AAA panel ‘Tracing Material and Relational Places and Spaces: Anthropological Reflections about Social Relationships that Matter’ (AAA Annual Meeting, Montréal, 2011), and I am deeply in debt to the participants for their comments and insights, as well to the organizers of this special subsection and to two anonymous reviewers, whose constructive reading helped me significantly improve this article. I remain solely responsible for all the shortcomings and inaccuracies that might remain.

Funding

The research project on which this article is based, entitled ‘Love at the Registry Office: An anthropological view on intimacy institutions’, was funded both by the University of Neuchâtel, which gave me the opportunity of conducting fieldwork, and by the Swiss Foundation for Science Research, which granted me with a funding for three years as a postdoctoral researcher.

Notes

Author biography

Anne Lavanchy completed her PhD in social anthropology in 2007. Her interests concern ethnicity constructions and gender, especially as they are shaped and produced by and within state institutions. In a first research study, she examined the ways Mapuche – the official indigenous people in Chile – articulate their political claims with official definitions of their cultural difference and authenticity (Les Langages de l’autochtonie - Enjeux politiques et sociaux des négociations identitaires mapuche au Chili, Paris, Neuchâtel: Musée des Sciences de l’homme, Institut d’ethnologie, 2009). Her current postdoctoral investigation draws on fieldwork in Switzerland and Scotland to produce a study of the ways civil servants of registry offices define and use intimacy and love narratives to assess the genuine character of marriage and partnership, in particular when they involve ‘foreigners’.

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