Abstract
The predominance of the myth of the asexual, non-racialized ethnographer, long debated in the scope of Anthropology, has led many ethnographic studies to search for neutrality in the fieldwork, thus silencing how matters of gender and race, for example, influence the development of research in organizations. Aiming to contribute to tackle this theoretical and empirical limitation, the objective of this paper is to discuss the influences of race relations on the ethnographic fieldwork structure. For this purpose, we emphasize the process of building a multi-sited ethnographic study carried out in the organizational context of the contemporary circus. The study was carried out between the years of 2011 and 2013 in Brazil and Canada and emphasizes the development of the researcher in terms of race issues in the contexts studied by stressing how the different countries’ local cultural questions influenced her introduction in the field, her access to information and, consequently, the elaboration of the ethnography in the organizational field studied. As a contribution to organization studies, we argue that qualitative surveys carried out in organizations cannot be elaborated based on the supposed neutrality of the researcher in the fieldwork, and that race relations influence how organizational ethnographies are conducted, which includes transnational contexts.
Keywords:
Race; Subjectivity; Ethnography; Organizations; Circus