“Not knowing”, Hakala & Hynninen (2007, 213) argue, is the basis on which an ethnographer defines the questions they ask. As they determine what they don’t know in a specific context of knowledge, time and place, their questions in turn determine the field―or at least what they observe and what kind of data they produce. Malkki (2007, 171; emphasis original) writes: “The ‘facts’ or ‘data’ are not, in other words, objets trouvés waiting to be discovered and recorded. They are made [...]. They are a social product, whether expressed in numbers, words, images, or other media.” Understanding this, Malkki (ibid., 171–172) underlines, is not a novel insight in anthropology: long before postmodern reflections on the social construction of knowledge, Malinowski wrote about the need for constantly switching from observation and data collection to moulding theory and, vice versa, having plastic theoretical ideas that adapt to empirical data. On one hand, observations are impossible without theory, but, on the other, theories must be re-moulded, and even dispensed with, in the course of observation and analysis.
(Malinowski 1935, 321; ref. Malkki 2007, 172.) In addition, ethnographic truths have long been recognized to be “partial” (Clifford 1986, 7) or “particular” (Leach 1967, 78; ref. Malkki 2007, 167): they are in essence “situated knowledges” (Haraway 1991).
This, Cerwonka (2007, 26) argues, is relevant not only in the sense of acknowledging how one’s positionality and sociohistoric situatedness affects one’s research, but also in the sense of understanding that without the mediation of a researcher situated in a particular way the information would be meaningless and uninterpreted. “This point bears on the important question of how one’s personhood is also a condition for knowledge claims, rather than a deterrent to understanding” (ibid., 28; emphasis mine).
Continual tacking between empirical data and theoretical concepts has formed the backbone of this research process as well, especially during the analysis phase.
On one hand, I have read and re-read my data through different kinds of theoretical lens, asking what emerges from it as especially interesting from a particular conceptual vantage point. On the other hand, I have let the data challenge the concepts by asking what they do not recognize, or the ways in which my data does
not fit a certain theoretical framework, but sticks out as disturbing and demanding attention. Thirdly, I have tacked between my own field notes, material which is not based on my interpretation, such as recordings, videos, photos, or reports written by others, and my research companions’ reflections regarding the interpretations I have made on the basis of this body of material. The movement back and forth between theory, empirical material and interpretations of it has, as the literature quoted above emphasizes, been a continual process throughout this research process, and it would be impossible to unfold all the layers of this work. In the following section, then, I will concentrate on describing those dimensions of my analysis that are more prone to explication.
3.3.1 Coding
When I first wanted to distance myself from the fieldwork and get absorbed in my data as a mass of information, I started out by doing some quite fervent coding. As encounters had emerged as my primary focus already during my fieldwork, I started coding by going through all the encounters that I could find in my data: encounters that I had witnessed, and encounters I had been told about. At this point, I included all my data in the process, from the fieldwork I had done in larger settings (like the family group home, or a youth space) to more detailed individual work with my research companions. I started the analysis from such an encompassing vantage point to tease out themes that would be relevant with regard to refugee background young men more generally, not “just” from the vantage point of my three main research companions. I tried to pinpoint all the various types of encounters that the youths had, and ended up with a following list:
- encounters with other Finns
- encounters with family members and relatives
- encounters with “foreign” friends/other people of colour/Africans
- encounters with officials (such as teachers, social and youth workers, job office workers etc.)
- encounters with me (as a researcher)
- encounters with other people, not defined (e.g. non-defined friends or colleagues)
- encounters with no-one: loneliness
- encounter with oneself: self-reflections, encountering different social roles in different situations
- encounters with difference, either in other people or in oneself (situations in which the youths underline difference themselves)
In the midst of this rather mechanical work, I also spent time with my data in a fashion that could be described as “hermeneutical hanging around” (Kankkunen 2007, 189): I read, listened and watched time and again extracts of the data that I felt intriguing or bothering, transcribed and corrected transcriptions that called for attention, and wrote short analytical texts about some photos, moments and details that inspired me and felt important. For example, I wrote several short texts regarding skin and touch: moments in which I had seen skins touching each other either on purpose or not, reactions to that, and touches that I had seen being avoided. Few of these initial analytical texts appear in this dissertation, but it was by writing them that the importance of touch became evident to me and that I started to look for theoretical concepts regarding touch (e.g. Manning 2007).
Then I went back to coding again. Now I went through all the different kinds of encounters listed above, trying to track what happened in each. On the basis of earlier coding work and hermeneutical hanging around, I had formed the following questions that I asked of the data: How were the young men treated in each encounter? Were they categorized somehow? If yes, did this categorization include differentiation? If yes, how did this manifest in the encounter in question? How did the young people themselves act in these encounters? I drafted different kinds of tables on the basis of this work, in which I tried to create thematic categories out of the mass of data. For example, as an answer to the question of how the difference of the young people was manifested in different encounters, I made a table that specified all the encounters of my five key research participants, and ended up organizing the way they were treated in these encounters into eight categories:
- as being different by their very being, by essence
- as behaving differently and thus being objects of integration work - as being in need of support or protection: being vulnerable - as being immigrants
- as being in need of encounters: being alone - as being objects (and subjects) of research
- as being successful in integration and thus not that different anymore - as being (almost) similar/included/equal with others
Other tables I compiled treated, for example, the encounters the youths had with officials, or the reactions and actions of the young people in different kinds of encounters specifically. Here, I did not go through all my data with as much precision, however; at some point it became evident that the results started to repeat each other and I felt that, in this sense, I had exhausted my data. Also, some themes had already risen as most relevant from the mass of data: they kept on repeating themselves with more density and intensity than others, or stuck out as somehow disturbing in their difference in relation to others. At this point I moved on to reading the material related to each theme that I had dug out analytically, and to theoretical reflection on the concepts that had arisen through coding and categorization (Coffey & Atkinson 1996, 26–27).
3.3.2 Building interpretations
At first, I tried to approach the themes and concepts in an all-encompassing fashion, aiming to write analytical texts that would cover basically all relevant themes in a systematic way. It didn’t take me long to realize that this wouldn’t work, neither economically (in the sense of the working time and pages needed to do so), nor intellectually (in the sense of the result being a list more than a thorough analysis). I thus changed my approach and returned to hermeneutical hanging around with the data, searching for moments that would at the same time crystallize some larger theme and bring out something specifically intriguing with regard to it. There were, of course, several captivating and inspiring moments to start working with, but quite soon three emerged as the ones that I found both most suitable and had enough data about. These three moments form the backbone of this entire dissertation: in them, Emanuel struggles with a baking task at his school, Manasse performs on the stage of Finlandia Hall, and Afrax gives a presentation to a steering group of a project he works in. In the first, Emanuel is encountered by his classmates and teachers as a racialized immigrant; in the second, Manasse is encountered by social workers as a vulnerable refugee youth; and in the third, Afrax is encountered by his colleagues as a representative of racialized immigrant youth. I started out from these three moments, reflected them in the light of other excerpts from my data and research literature, and in this way worked towards conceptualizing what was going on in each moment. The empirical chapters of this dissertation are written on the basis of this work, shedding light on the ways the young people are constantly categorized in their everyday encounters, and how the youth, each in their particular way, try to work on
those categorizations and carve out space for alternative positionings for themselves.
Thus, while I claim that the setting from which I start in the case of each young person is a typical one, and hence to some extent generalizable, the way each young person reacts and acts in the setting is a unique example of the strategies young people who find themselves in this kind of position can deploy.
Nevertheless, smooth as this solution seemed to be, I had trouble with some themes that had popped up during coding, but that did not fit into my tabulations regarding the different encounters and their particularities. I had odd lists around themes that didn’t fall under any neat file in my computer directory, but kept leaping out. They were lists I had somewhat intuitively named, for example, “scraping coins”
or “emotional labour”. The former consisted of excerpts of my data that had to do either with earning money from odd jobs or saving money with different techniques, either to make ends meet (like Afrax, who had serious difficulties, for example, paying the train trips from his home city to the town in which he studied; students were not allowed to spend weekends in the dormitory, so he had to travel about seventy kilometres back and forth), to be able to send some money to family or other relatives who were in difficulties, to be able to have some hobby, decorate their home or have some nice clothes, or to be able to finally travel to meet family members living far away that they had not seen for years (‘It’s seven years that I saw my parents last time... No, wait... it’s nine years already!’ one young boy of Afghan background, working hard in order to buy flight tickets, told me while we were watching a football match). The latter comprised situations in which I found the young people working hard with their emotions, trying to push away memories of, and worries about, their family, for example, in order to concentrate on school work, or forcing themselves to behave politely in situations in which discrimination occurs so as to be able to get away, or to get what one needs, or trying to find the courage and stamina to build social relationships in a place where they knew no-one, to participate in activities they found interesting, and to maintain self-respect and hope. What I found to combine these odd lists, in the end, was the fact that in one way or other they all required work or labour from the young people in question. I started to realize how much they worked in order to achieve longer-term aims, and to see connections between this work and the categorizing subject positions they kept been positioned in. I thus started working on conceptualizing this labour, which I now understood as a form of agency too. This forms the analysis of the third chapter regarding each young person.
As I have already mentioned, I conducted a kind of “second round” of fieldwork with Emanuel, Manasse and Afrax, going through what I had written regarding them
and discussing my interpretations. This was the most unnerving part of the analytical work for me: I was both worried and excited about the way the youths would react to my interpretations and my way of writing. These discussions turned out to be both fruitful and vital: in many cases in which I had been hesitant about my interpretation I got confirmation from the youth, and, in some cases, they disagreed with me, bringing out their own interpretations and the grounds for them. Inspired by these discussions, I have, in some cases, re-moulded my analytical work, and in some other cases―in which I have deemed my own interpretation as, if not the only right one, then perhaps just as valid as the young person’s―written our dialogue or its results in the text, most often in the epilogues. Including our dialogue about the interpretations is, in this sense, also an attempt to unwrap our power relations that, despite the involvement of my research companions in the analysis and writing phases of this work, positions me as the person who has had the final say on the interpretations and arguments of this dissertation.
4 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
In this chapter, I begin by briefly sketching out the development of the anthropology of the political, and position my research within this field, giving emphasis to the way anthropologists have approached the question of political agency. I then move on to inquire in more detail into the concept of agency itself, the ways in which it has been defined, and the problematics its theorization has recurrently stumbled upon. Thereafter, I outline three approaches to political agency: one, currently pivotal in anthropological study of the political, in which political agency is approached through the optic of citizenship; feminist new materialists’ posthumanist approaches to agency, which have been a central source of theoretical inspiration for this dissertation; and a more classic anthropological discussion of political agency as it pertains specifically to this research project. Finally, in the last subsection of this chapter, I will outline my own approach towards the subject matter of this dissertation, which I, following Häkli & Kallio (2018), in combination with insights from new materialisms and the anthropology of the political, conceptualize as mundane political agency.