Noi culturi, noi antropologii - Humanitas

Raluca, the leader of one environmental NGO, told me that
for her, environmentalism is a hobby. She has two other
jobs and little time to commit to the NGO. Also, she told me
that it is difficult to motivate young people to devote time to
environmental projects, as most are students who complain
about being too busy with homework and exams. Similarly,
a woman working for a different NGO has three jobs, and a
third woman, Ioana, manages an NGO full-time, but has no
office. Although everyone with whom I met was very welcoming
and warm, their complicated schedules made the
logistics of „following“ them challenging.
A second obstacle concerns the lack of funding for environmental
projects. All of the NGO leaders with which I
met mentioned the lack of money as a problem. Several
told me that funding for environmental projects has been
cut in recent years, leading to a dramatic drop-off in the
number of active environmental NGOs. This situation further
complicated my efforts to carry out the „follow the people“
method. Since many projects were stalled, waiting for funding,
following a single group as it worked on a particular
project would have involved a great deal of down time. Due
to these obstacles, I began to use a decentered approach to
my research. The next section describes this method.
Decentered Ethnography
In their discussion of ethnographic research of social movements,
Holland, Fox, and Daro explain that „a decentered
approach calls for the ethnographic study of place-based –
or situated – movement actors and the cultural identities,
discourses and practices they promote“ 370 . It involves focusing
on many groups occupying different places within a
movement, trying to understand how each group’s particular
context shapes the way they understand the movement
370. Dorothy Holland, Gretchen Fox and Vinci Daro, „Social movements
and collective identity: A decentered, dialogic view“, Anthropological
Quarterly, 81, 1, 2008, p. 97.
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