Challenges and ambivalences of a global micro-sociology

1.) Actor’s perspective: Anyone engaging with the legacy of slavery—or other comparable contexts—is confronted with the fact that history tends to be written by the perpetrators, with visual and textual testimonies of historical events mostly reflecting a racist, pejorative perspective. To learn about the perspectives of the ones affected by these processes through historical data is a challenge. The question of whose voices are (or can be) heard is a constant companion of our research process. Focusing on the perspective of those involved in, and affected by, social phenomena is a major goal and strength of interpretive methods and micro-sociological perspectives. However, it poses various challenges in the current project with its long-term historical perspective. There were projects in the 20th century where researchers were still able to speak with survivors of enslavement. The biographies written by the anthropologists Zora Neale Hurston (on Oluale Kossola, a.k.a. Cudjoe Lewis 2018) and Miguel Barnet (on Esteban Montejo 1977) are outstanding. These are very valuable contemporary testimonies. In our project, however, we do not work with these historical testimonies, but with people of the present. We talk to descendants—mainly of enslaved people, but also of people who were involved in the trade and exploitation of enslaved people. So, this project is decidedly not about what the concrete historical facts were, but about what is known by today’s generations, which perspectives there are on history, what role this history and these perspective play in people’s lives, and so on. As a biographical researcher who usually studies the biographical experiences of people and how they are remembered and presented in the present (of the interview) (cf. Rosenthal, 2006), I am learning that ‘remembering’ has a different meaning in this context. The people we’ve interviewed so far mostly speak about their experiences with collective memories and discourses and the respective conflicts. So, while this is a different way of remembering, perhaps in some cases more detached from the biographical experience, I still tend to use the term ‘remembering’ because I assume it emphasizes the practice, which is what I am most interested in.

It is enormously important, and a great strength of biographical research, to give space and priority to the relevances of the interviewees over one’s own interests or interests of the research project. However, the challenge often arises that it remains unclear which historical phases and events our interviewees are referring to, and to which historical events and experiences we should relate this knowledge. For example, during our research in northern Ghana, we found that Babatu, a warlord and notorious slave raider in the late 19^th century (cf. Weiss, 2008, p. 121 ff.), was so present in the narratives of our interviewees that the question arose to what extent he occupies a proxy position in the telling of centuries of enslavement history. Thus, when it becomes clear that concrete historical experiences have not been passed on to current generations for various reasons, the question arises as to what function certain memories or discourses of memory have.

The point is to approach the following questions from the actor’s perspective: Which knowledge is transmitted, and which is not? What can be known at all, and is it “book knowledge” or incorporated knowledge? Which perspectives do today’s descendants of people who experienced enslavement have on these historical processes? There should be more research on the transgenerational transmission of enslavement experienced by relatives, and thus especially on the question of the transgenerational consequences for the descendants of enslaved people, but also of owners or traders of enslaved people.

2.) Historical context: The question of actor perspectives is closely related to the historical context. We have repeatedly found that our interviewees have a diffuse knowledge, which is mediated, for instance, through everyday family or religious contexts, or through music, while the concrete historical facts do not really play a role for them. As researchers, we are curious about which historical phases their statements refer to, but we have to live with the imprecision, or reconstruct the historical events and phases that are referred to latently.

In sociology, a social phenomenon must always be regarded as something that has become and is becoming (cf. Elias, 1987). The dangers of ahistorical thinking include: (1) mistaking phenomena that actually have a long history for new phenomena, (2) failing to recognize continuities, and (3) analyzing social phenomena as static. This is particularly true of Global Sociology for a variety of reasons.

In the case of our project, we are working on historically distant phases. Slavery was officially abolished in Brazil in 1888 (it was one of the last countries to do so), almost 150 years ago. And the first registered enslaved people were deported from Elmina, Ghana, in 1519. That is more than 500 years ago. This poses a number of challenges. First, the obvious one: we need to do a lot of historical research to be able to understand these long-term historical processes (at least to some extent). Second, we need (very good) contextual knowledge when dealing with social fields into which we have not been socialized, or when dealing with transregional processes. Third, there are always things we cannot grasp or understand. And fourth, we have to offer the reader or partner in the scientific dialogue an introduction to the respective historical and social context, which is not necessarily familiar to them. Although this may appear self-evident, I argue that it is a special challenge for Global Sociology, where research is not carried out and presented (mainly) in the context of a single nation state. This last aspect, which concerns above all the communication of our results, may become even more complicated if theoretical references are added which are not necessarily known in our scientific community.

3.) Sites of knowledge production: I constantly try to ask myself: What literature do I use? What theoretical references do I make? And I become aware again and again that German-language sociology strongly refers to, and tends to stay inside, its own nation-state “container” (see Beck 2000, p. 23ff.). This is reflected in the use of literature and theoretical references. A minimum standard for sociologists could be to quote authors from the regions of the world that they are writing about. However, this requires language skills. For example, while I am able to read and cite Portuguese and English literature, I cannot read texts in the indigenous languages of Ghana and Brazil. As the production of scientific texts mostly takes place in the languages introduced by the colonizers, this is not such a big problem in Brazil and Ghana. But when I was doing research in the Moroccan-Spanish border zone (cf. Bahl, 2021), my lack of knowledge of Arabic (and to a lesser extent Tamazight) closed my access to relevant research literature from a Moroccan perspective. The greater challenge is to access this literature from Germany. Open access formats are valuable for this, and I take a heavy suitcase full of books home with me every time I go on a research trip. In the long term, beyond this reception of locally produced literature, it is necessary to work toward ensuring that research in and from the Global South is not perceived as insignificant and regionally specific, while universally applicable theories emerge in “the West”. We need to start “provincializing Europe” (Chakrabarty, 2000). Reflecting upon my own sociological and theoretical socialization and its limits is related to a broader reflexivity in respect of my role in research and society.

4.) Reflexivity in respect of one’s own role: Referring to Simmel and Mannheim, Patricia Hill Collins (1986) discussed “the potential usefulness of identifying and using one’s own standpoint in conducting research” (p. 16). Depending on the research field, different positionalities and belongings become relevant. For me in my current research project, this is chiefly my position as a white European researcher whose ancestors may potentially[4] have been involved in slavery practices and/or colonial violence, and the fact that I am currently based at a German university. An interesting difference that has emerged is that this positionality of mine didn’t seem to play an explicit role in my research in Ghana, while it was very quickly “on the table”—and openly thematized by interview partners—while doing field work in Brazil. In Ghana, my positionality as a white European researcher was rarely openly addressed or questioned. In Brazil, on the other hand, a question that was often asked, especially in marginalized Quilombola communities, but also in a university where the majority of students saw themselves as Africans or of African descent, was: why are you white people doing this and what do we get out of it? The answer was never easy and always constituted a process of negotiation. Honesty also requires us to share our own interests, such as career building and ‘successful’ research. My assumption is that these different research experiences (among other components) are related to the difference between the two post-colonial societies: Brazil is a very diverse society with a strongly inherent racist hierarchy, while Ghana is a post-colonial nation state where the current elites are not of European descent. This kind of comparison can be very helpful in the research process.

5.) Comparison: In the project, we work with a permanent logic of comparison. We make comparisons between Ghana and Brazil, between Rio de Janeiro and Bahia, between northern and southern Ghana, and so on. This does not mean, however, that we assume that stable comparison parameters exist in the process. Rather, I argue (1) that comparison is a permanent sensitization to similarities and differences, to questions that should still be asked and facts that should still be researched; (2) the units of comparison are constructed by us as researchers: they arise from field work; and (3) as discussed above, they refer to our belongings as researchers and mutual attributions with the research subjects, since we are part of the field and comparison logic. We need to ask ourselves which ascriptions, which “we-” and “they-”images (cf. Elias, 1994) become relevant within the shifting power relations in our field. From a micro-sociological standpoint, we must ask which of these images are relevant for people who experience different social phenomena in their everyday lives, i.e., in their interactions with family members, with neighbors, or with ‘us’ as ‘researchers’. We do this by systematically comparing different cases within the units or groupings we discover in the field, and by carefully reconstructing the different ‘framings’ of interviews, group discussions and participant observation, based on the question: which cases might help us to understand more about a particular grouping and its figurations with others? As Jörg Niewöhner and Thomas Scheffer have pointed out, “objects of comparison are not found ‘out there’. They are not ready at hand. They are produced through thickening [analogously to Geertz’ thick description] contextualisations, including analytical, cross-contextual framings that are meant to facilitate comparison” (2010, p. 4). To give an example, although Rio de Janeiro is not part of our research project, visiting the museums and memorials there made us aware of how they were largely absent in Salvador and all of Bahia. And probably we wouldn’t have been aware in the same way of the common use of Adinkra symbols in theme-related cultural projects in Brazil (cf. Nascimento & Gá, 2022), of the similarities of food, religious clothing, and music (to name but a few) between Ghana and the Brazilian Northeast if we hadn’t gone to both places to look for these entanglements and differences.