Fieldwork in transition: Rethinking anxieties, solidarities, and ontologies amid compounding forms of distress

Drawing on preliminary research in Italy in the months following Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the gradual lifting of pandemic-related public health measures, this essay explores the widespread economic, political, and environmental anxieties as well as calls for solidarity that were circulating at this time and their implications for ethnographers in attempting to “make sense” of sociocultural phenomena in a world that feels “unhinged.” From these swirling anxieties, hegemonic framings of “reality” by state actors contrast significantly with the lived experiences of the working class and reveal the function of salvage realism in reproducing racial capitalism. Following recent work in anthropology on the unhinged and affective possibilities in troubled times, I argue that these dynamics demand deeper anthropological engagement with theories that continue to be marginalized by the discipline, including from Black and Indigenous scholarship. These dynamics also raise important questions regarding the realities and temporalities of fieldwork and the onto-epistemological frames that inform anthropological research processes.