Ethnographic challenges to studying the poor in and from the global South

Abstract

The ethnographic challenges of studying urban poor communities in the global South have been rarely addressed from a methodological standpoint. These issues are also relevant to studies of, and work with, migrants from the global South. Based on nearly 300 interviews conducted between 2010 and 2018 in low-income neighbourhoods of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, the last 20 of which were conducted through Skype interviews through mobile phone. I discuss the benefits and disadvantages of using Skype for interviewing in the global South. I then consider some challenges of conducting interviews among individuals with extremely low education levels, whose basic needs are not met in their daily lives. These include informed consent, memory and stress, and the meanings of personal data for persons whose lives may be undocumented. I propose third-person elicitation and perceived causation as methods that can be used to circumvent some of these challenges, while arguing that a “Southern” twist is needed away from ethnographic assumptions familiar to ethnographers in wealthier countries, and toward an approach that acknowledges the effects of poverty on persons interviewed by ethnographers in the global South.