The hip-hop box, the stranger, and the Indian shopkeeper: Nearness-distance in ethnographic fieldwork

Working through encounters between streetcorner men and a South Asian anthropologist in Newark, NJ, this paper examines the methodological implications and productive possibilities of the failure of rapport. This failure crystallized in antagonism over consumption of rap music, and the experience of being essentialized and othered by local streetcorner men. This essentialization functioned in a register that went beyond race and ethnicity, going towards forming specific roles in the field that both anthropologist and interlocutors eventually strived to maintain. This pointed to another, latent but already available position—The Stranger—for the anthropologist in the field. The process also revealed the leveling effect of exchange. This paper argues that to recognize and maintain difference and distance—contra an idealized communion and erasure of difference—is productive of specific forms of knowledge in ethnographic praxis.