Crisis Ethnography: Reflections on the Tunisian Revolution

The paper addresses the theoretical and methodological challenges of doing ethnographic work in a political crisis context. Using ethnographic data gathered at the Union Générale Tunisienne du Travail (UGTT), the biggest union organization in the country on three specific episodes (December 2010, February 2011 and December 2011), we explore the entanglements of personal and political elements when doing research in a crisis context. The following questions are addressed in this paper: How can an ethnographic approach be true to the events it is purposed to describe in the context of a popular upheaval? How can ethnographic work render the complexity of a transformational event on the personal as well as the political and social level? How is it possible to convey the multiple layers of personal involvement with the political and social stakes at hand?