Peripheral Vision As a Method for Anthropological Knowledge Production

The concept of the peripheries is integral to how socio-cultural anthropology produces knowledge. Specifically, it is central to the discipline's trademark ethnographic method. This chapter draws from historical and contemporary anthropological theory to examine the significance of “peripheral vision” in the discipline. In the process, I outline three contributions that anthropology's use of the ethnographic method can make to conceptualizations of the peripheries in European Studies: (1) from its very inception, anthropology has cultivated a long track-record of employing ethnography to record and analyze the perspectives and experiences of people and societies considered to be on the “peripheries” of power; (2) ethnography encourages an “unbounded” approach to knowledge production, often resulting in unexpected findings emerging out of the peripheries or margins of one's research focus; (3) the practice of ethnographic fieldwork encourages decentering hegemonic assumptions by requiring us to relegate them (however momentarily and partially) to one's peripheral vision.