Jan Beek, Thomas Bierschenk, Annalena Kolloch, and Bernd Meyer (eds) (2023), Policing Race, Ethnicity and Culture: Ethnographic Perspectives across Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 352 pp, £90, ISBN: 9781526165589.

Policing Race, Ethnicity and Culture: Ethnographic Perspectives across Europe edited by Jan Beek, Thomas Bierschenk, Annalena Kolloch, and Bernd Meyer, all scholars at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, brings together ethnographic contributions from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds to form a unique anthology on the questions of race, ethnicity, and culture in everyday policing practices. Through an ethnographic and interdisciplinary approach, the authors draw on confrontations between police officers and migrantised citizens in order to better understand how ‘difference’ is being produced, perceived, rationalised, and acted upon in such encounters. Moreover, this volume proposes a shift from the general research positioning that focuses mostly on the victims of policing practices to the police officers in order to contribute to what the editors call a ‘nuanced understanding of policing’ and to move beyond the normative dominant narratives; either about police officers or victims of police activities. To this end, the authors focus on the everyday work of police officers on the one hand and carry out a comparison of police practices in different countries and contexts on the other.

The book is organized into thirteen chapters divided into four analytical sections, an introduction, and an epilogue. The introduction provides an insightful overview of ethnographic approaches in the field, theoretical and methodological implications, as well as practical and ethical challenges of researching the subject.

In the first section ‘Categorisations of Difference in Police Work’ the contributors examine the production of ‘difference’ in policing practices. Defining the police work as a ‘practice of differentiation’, they focus on the technological, organizational and political frameworks that produce categories of difference used in everyday policing of migrantised groups. Police officers are expected to ‘do difference’, that is, they should have the ability to put people in different categories when confronting them. In this practice, they may use categories according to legal and institutional guidelines, such as suspect, witness, victim, and so on, as well as ‘underground’ or ‘clandestine categories’, such as gender, age, ethnicity, culture, and race, which are not included in the guidelines and whose use in decision-making is prohibited. The book proposes to see these categories as ‘closely interwoven’ and to contextualise them in a broader ‘web of difference’ in order to grasp their relationality both in theoretical and methodological sense. Four chapters of this section provide remarkable accounts on how confrontation between police officers and migrantised people are motivated by or based on clandestine categories and whether and in what way these confrontations lead to violence. For example, chapter 1 concludes that the racial categorisation is not a ‘common feature’ shared by all police officers engaging migrantised groups. Instead, racism in policing practices is more a ‘systemic rather than an individual feature’ (49). The (violent) confrontation based on clandestine categories, however, are multidimensional and multidirectional and should not be reduced to the normative unidirectionality, such as police officers towards migrantised people. Given that many police officers themselves belong to marginalised and migrantised groups, this part offers a complex picture of confrontations in this context, where categories of difference are seen to be fluid and situational, rather than as natural and separate entities. This section also reflects on how data is being collected and used in the ‘crime statistics’ in European countries and the inconsistencies and challenges that arise from such engagements with data on the one hand (chapter 2), and on terms such as ‘parallel society’ that have been increasingly used in political discourse in Europe, and how police work, for example in Sweden, is influenced by such terms on the other (chapter 4).

In the second section, the authors focus on everyday policing practice and the ways ‘difference’ is relevant to the work-routines of police officers. For example, how police officers measure the value of their work and ‘police impotence’ by relating these factors to both the quality and quantity of sentences for ‘foreign criminal suspects’, that is how harsh the sentence is and how bad these suspects themselves feel about the sentences they have received (chapter 5). Everyday interactions may be different for police officers with migrant background both in their contacts with their non-migrant colleagues and with people of (shared) migrant background. They may be confronted ‘with a multitude of problems concerning loyalty, acceptance and identity’ (158) in their professional and private lives (chapter 7).

The third section addresses translation in the police work. By focusing on the everyday work of policing, the book is able to see policing as communication and translation when it comes to the interactions between police and migrantised groups. Everyday communications of police include increasingly ‘multilingual communicative acts, identities and communities’ involving third party actors like translators, colleagues, family members, digital translating tools, and so on. These actors and practices form everyday police work by shaping perceptions of difference in this context. Additionally, the authors use translation in a metaphorical and figurative meaning and understand everyday police work as ‘mediation between social orders’ (3). It includes linguistic as well as non-linguistic forms of translation like translating ‘everyday situations into the operative technical language of police, the language of law, as well as into moral and other idioms’ (10–11). The way police officers handle translation in their work can impact the outcome of their encounters and determine whether or not they result in violence (chapter 9). Communication without a mutual language seems challenging for police officers; however, they do not consider such situations as their main challenge because their focus is more on ‘doing police’ than ‘doing translation’, and this may work through ‘talking with hands and feet’ (chapter 10).

The final section concentrates on practical and ethical challenges of conducting ethnographic research with police as an institution that ‘is highly policed themselves’. It makes doing research difficult in terms of obtaining official permissions and convincing authorities as well as police officers. These challenges are particularly present for ethnographic research as it demands long term participant observation in the research practice. Moreover, ethnographic research with police raises questions about the positionality for ethnographers. In this context, it is particularly challenging to distinguish different roles of ethnographers in research practice, such as ‘the role of the researcher from that of the citizen’ (18).

This volume addresses essential questions about policing practices from a variety of disciplines, including social and cultural anthropology, linguistics, sociology, criminology, and political science. It includes highly recommended texts for students and scholars interested or researching in the field. Additionally, the reflexive approach of the book in problematizing even permanently used terms like ‘minority’, ‘migrant’, ‘ethnicity’, ‘race’, ‘culture’, and so forth prompts readers to critically examine the complexities of these terms.

Reza Bayat

University of Göttingen

E-mail: reza.bayat@uni-goettingen.de

ORCID: 0009-0004-0701-1658

Robert Parkin (2023), White Eagle, Black Eagle: Ethnic Relations in the German-Polish Borderlands (New York: Berghahn Books), 192 pp, $135.00/£99.00, ISBN: 978-1-80539-002-2.

The book, with the poetic title White Eagle, Black Eagle and the subtitle Ethnic Relations in the German-Polish Borderlands, is devoted to the analysis of the political-economic relations of the inhabitants on both sides of the border from the perspective of history and sociocultural anthropology. An important leitmotif is ethnic or national identity, which the author deals with mainly as a regional and local identity, as well as the confrontation of the approach of official authorities and ‘ordinary’ people to cross-border relations and the impact on their lives. The author, Robert Parkin, is an Emeritus Fellow of the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology of the University of Oxford and has worked in many European universities and research institutions. His research has focused on kinship, South Asian anthropology, French anthropology and, in the last two decades, European anthropology.

In the introduction, the author declares that he avoids using the term ethnicity in defining German and Polish identities. Instead, he prefers to opt for nation and notes that the focus in this book is on local or regional identities within a national identity. The thematic works dealing with the German-Polish border area are summarised, followed by an outline of the topics of the individual chapters. Chapters 1 and 2 review the history of German-Polish relations, partly from the point of view of their respective states, but also as a matter of relations between peoples. Chapter 3 looks at both national and strong regional identities today. The next chapter considers Polish migration to Germany both historically and in the present day. The second half of the book, at least from my point of view, is the key part of the text, particularly chapters 5 and 7. Chapter 5 reflects a region in Poland with strong ties to Germany, namely the western province of Ziemia Lubuska, characterised to an extent by migration and daily cross-border traffic with Germany. Chapter 7 focuses mainly on the question of Silesian identity, both historically and today, asking whether it can be considered Polish, German, or something else entirely.

The focus of the first part of the book is mainly the analysis of thematic historical and anthropological literature in German, Polish, English, and other languages. The second part of the text is based mainly on the author's fieldwork conducted between February and September 2002. Chapter 8 offers findings from repeated research in 2010 and 2014. Unfortunately, Parkin was unable to carry out the intended continuation of the fieldwork due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It should be noted that the basics of chapters 3, 5, and 6 have been published in the past (Parkin 2002, 2013a, 2013b). The core of the research consists of interviews with officials at all levels of administration in Poland, particularly where they were concerned with cross-border relations, like many of their counterparts in Germany. In the case of Poland, everything happened before it joined the EU and Schengen. Other reflections are based on more casual conversations with new and existing acquaintances in Poland, including journalists, politicians, and ordinary people.

In the final chapter, the author briefly and concisely summarises his findings, analysed throughout the course of the text. It focuses in particular on the current state of German-Polish relations in the framework of cross-border cooperation through the eyes of officials on both sides of the border. It comes to the point that officials often consider themselves architects of identities, although this is often not the case in practice. Cross-border links are also significantly influenced by the national policies of both countries, which are not shy about using local cross-border links for their own ends. Probably the most important outcome of Parkin's text is the thesis that there are still many Poles and Germans who have no time for each other and even still hate each other. Even the activities of those who advocate deepening cross-border cooperation sometimes provoke resentment on the other side. This reflects the inevitable combination of differences in perspectives and perceived interests and the influence and reactions of particular political egos. Yet this is one part of Eastern Europe where international cooperation has so far been relatively smooth and has brought real gains in reducing potential conflicts. This is more typical of this half of the continent than otherwise, despite the tragedy of the Balkans in the 1990s. Given recent events in Ukraine, the observation at the very end of the book that on its now more heavily controlled eastern border, Poland is also contributing to an alternative idea, that of Fortress Europe, while ensuring that it will itself be within the laager, is also timely.

The book is undoubtedly a very successful contribution to the issue of cross-border relations within Central/Eastern Europe and the politics of European local identities. Current and future scholars should definitely not overlook it.

Libor Dušek

University of Pardubice

E-mail: libor.dusek2@upce.cz

ORCID: 0000-0002-3691-2867

Hugh Firth and Loulou Brown (2023), Love, Loyalty and Deceit: Rosemary Firth, a Life in the Shadow of Two Eminent Men (New York: Berghahn Books), 320pp, £107.00, ISBN: 978-1-80073-976-5.

Publishers like biographies because there is a category of fantasy dwelling readers who like reading them; but they are not ‘true’. . . Letters and diaries may give the illusion that somehow, they reveal the authentic author as distinct from the poseur who exhibits himself/herself on the public stage. But you may argue just the other way round.

– Edmund Leach to Rosemary Firth 1985 (274)

The interest in other people's private lives may be considered a common trait of an average anthropologist, so it is always a special event for us when anthropological private writings of any kind are published. Certainly, the moral dilemmas about the (posthumous) publication of such written materials are always present, and the decision of revealing the personal life of the authors’ parents was not straightforward for either of them (Hugh Firth is the son of Raymond and Rosemary Firth, and Louisa (Loulou) Brown is the daughter of Edmund and Celia Leach). Rosemary Firth herself was very much against the publication of other people's letters and personal stuff, although in her later years she apparently changed her mind about it. The general (anthropological) change in attitude towards the exposing of private writings also changed during that time, which was particularly visible after the second edition of Bronisław Malinowski's Diary in 1989. This kind of material was no longer seen as ‘an act of betrayal’ and a kind of exploitation of the anthropologist's weaknesses for commercial purposes (as Raymond Firth himself once stated, twenty years after the first edition of the Diary, see 199). On the contrary, anthropologists even saw a heuristic value in writings concerning the person of an anthropologist/ethnographer and his/her (secret) dilemmas and attitudes, especially in the wake of the so-called reflexive turn. Later, personal journals, letters, and similar materials started to be seen as legitimate sources for general exploration of interconnection between private lives and public settings of all kinds.

The unique way this book is conceived makes it a kind of biographical autobiography. The authors represent Rosemary Firth's life history through her chronologically arranged and carefully contextualised diary records for over fifty years, as well as great many letters written to or received from different important figures in her life, among whom are in the first place ‘two eminent men’ from the title – Edmund Leach and Raymond Firth. In fact, it can be said that the entire narrative of her life, as presented through her private writings, largely revolves around her emotional relation with these two men. Of course, such a remark should be taken with some reservations, considering that Rosemary was an exceptional woman in many ways, including her lifelong pursuit for intellectual and personal identity and integrity. However, such an observation is indicative for deeper understanding, not just of Rosemary's own course of life and the course of her professional career but for understanding the life of a woman in Britain and its public sphere during the majority of the twentieth century.

The first generations of female anthropologists were fully aware of how invisible women were in British society. Some of them were Audrey Richards, Lucy Mair, and Ann Oakley, with whom, among others, Rosemary had close friendly and professional relations. This could also be one of the reasons why women felt the need to express their thoughts and feelings in private diaries and through letter correspondences – Ann Oakley herself stated in her 2021 book Forgotten Wives that ‘it is only the preservation of letters and diaries that enables us to ensure that the wives of publicly well-known men are not forgotten’ (6). Rosemary herself later in her fifties, when she finally managed to establish her academic career and become part of the British academic world, had similar thoughts and feelings: ‘Why do I not feel sure of my existence unless it is written down? Other people identify themselves in other ways: Raymond and Edmund by their intellectual work, which stands for them as the outside world recognised aspects of their existence. Perhaps because I am a woman, my sense of identity is only found in a relationship of love to someone else’ (211).

Although she was fully aware of her own social position as a woman and although she was ahead of her time in many respects, especially in terms of sexual relations, she repeatedly emphasised that she did not want to declare herself a feminist. Rosemary saw different positions between men and women almost as given facts of a society – be it her own or Malayan, and had developed her own understanding of the ways a woman should behave during fieldwork, especially in a Muslim society (see 82). As I have somewhat indicated above, she developed her anthropology in harmony with her husband's interests, but she added to it her own sense of practicality. She never aspired to be a theoretical anthropologist; her main interest has always been to use an anthropological perspective to shed light on her own society and she wanted to show how such a perspective could help others in the fields of education, social work, and medicine (230).

Apart from her intimate diary notes, which reveal to us the whole world of her tender, almost girlish feelings (‘It is an astonishing fact that girl's passions of 1928 is still a warm living fire in nearly 1978’, 238), Rosemary's letter writing was peculiarly careful and considered, as if she always had the feeling that someone else would (and should) read it. Edmund Leach himself once noticed: ‘But are you not at times too conscious of yourself, too anxious to force your own image into the words you write?’ (Leach to Rosemary from China 1934, 46). These letters give us additional insight into some aspects of her everyday life, a look at her perspective to significant social events and processes of that time, observations from her travels and much more.

And finally, Rosemary's private writings were mostly oriented around two men she loved – Raymond Firth (her husband) and maybe even more Edmund Leach (and her unfulfilled love to him), and we will probably not be far wrong if we assume that most readers will be attracted by that very fact. And yes, this book certainly gives us some very interesting (sometimes intriguing) details about these two great men of our discipline and largely completes and corrects our knowledge and ideas about them.

Personally, I grew very fond of this book, so much so that I was sorry to see it end. After all, no description or review can convey the rich and sincere content of this book, its intimate atmosphere nor the personality of its heroine and its heroes. If you are interested in the history of British social anthropology and profession of anthropology per se, the hidden lives, sufferings, and joys of a famous anthropologist's wife, and some intriguing naughtiness in the meantime, this book is a must read.

Ivana Gačanovič

University of Belgrade

E-mail: ivgacanovic@gmail.com

ORCID: 0000-0002-4783-8025

Robert Rydzewski (2024), The Balkan Route: Hope, Migration and Europeanisation in Liminal Spaces (London: Routledge), 160 pp, £135.00 (Hb), ISBN: 9781032395432.

Robert Rydzewski's The Balkan Route: Hope, Migration, and Europeanisation in Liminal Spaces is a robust piece of ethnography that examines the uncertainties along the Balkan migration route, a key pathway for migrants seeking entry into the European Union. Focusing on Serbia's southern and northern borders, and to a lesser extent North Macedonia, Rydzewski's research spans from 2013 to 2021, offering insights into the temporal and spatial dynamics of the ‘long summer of migration’ and its aftermath. His work contributes to broader scholarly efforts to paint a picture of ‘EU-rope’ from its periphery.

The first chapter, ‘Chaos of Liminality’, vividly portrays the transformation of Preševo – already a liminal area on the border between Serbia and RN Macedonia – into a ‘hotspot’, during the Balkan corridor. The Balkan corridor stands for the semi-formalised and semi-organised transit of migrants through the Balkan states to the EU, which was operational from summer 2015 to spring 2016. For instance, in the subchapter ‘Self-Organization of Disorder’, Rydzewski illustrates how everyday life came to a halt, local communities abandoned their roles, and authorities vanished. This suspension of normalcy created a self-organised yet chaotic environment, highlighting the generative force of liminality.

While liminality is a powerful lens to examine the precarious states migrants endure, it risks portraying ‘non-migration’ as a ‘normal’ state. In the second chapter, ‘Solidarity in Abandonment’, the author ‘de-migranticises’ migration research by focusing not only on the migrants but also on the local Albanian and Serbian community in Preševo. He explores the everyday lives of these communities, which are historically marked by ethnonational conflicts and economic hardship. By doing so, he draws parallels between the liminality experienced by migrants and the sense of waiting and uncertainty prevalent among the local population, illustrating how both groups find themselves on the periphery of the EU, suspended from the promises of stability and progress. The dual nature of emigration and transit migration in Serbia is further examined in chapter 3, ‘Europeanisation of Migration’. By analysing anthropological, historical, and political science scholarship, the author dives into broader policy context, illustrating how Serbia, as a EU candidate country, aligns its policies with EU expectations in terms of migration control.

The fourth chapter, ‘Waiting: The Strain of Liminality’, delves into the theme of entrapment. Here, Rydzewski combines fieldwork insights with theoretical discussions, offering a profound exploration of the temporal and spatial dimensions of liminality. This chapter stands out for its theoretical depth, presenting a complex and nuanced understanding of waiting as a central motif in the migrant experience. In that waiting, there is something profoundly liminal, which is adeptly captured in this book, through the discussions of ‘delaying’, ‘boredom’, ‘queuing’, and being in a ‘transit zone’. In contrast, the fifth chapter, ‘Migrant Movement as In-Betweenness’, highlights the agency of migrants as they navigate and resist structural constraints of waiting. The resilience of migrants as they cross borders and challenge the barriers imposed by the European border regime outfaces the brutal violence of push-backs. This chapter juxtaposes the strain of waiting with the dynamism of movement, emphasising the active role of migrants’ hopes in shaping their journeys.

Rydzewski seamlessly integrates empirical data and theoretical insights, highlighting the relationship between migrants’ experiences and broader sociopolitical contexts. His skilful blend of personal testimonies from Syrian, Afghan, and other migrants, as well as the testimonies of locals who were helping them, enriches his theoretical analysis, contextualising their narratives within local and global migration dynamics. While Rydzewski's ethnography is well written and coherent, some areas could benefit from further reflection. The ethical considerations of ethnographic research, particularly in such vulnerable settings, require deeper exploration. Rydzewski's reflections on his own positionality – including his whiteness while ‘shadowing’ migrants’ movement in trains and taxis – are insightful but insufficiently developed. The author refers to his interlocutors as ‘research partners’ to emphasise their active role in his study, yet a clearer delineation of their roles and contributions would offer valuable understanding of their collaboration.

The Balkan Route: Hope, Migration, and Europeanisation in Liminal Spaces is a timely and significant contribution to migration and border studies. Rydzewski's years of meticulous research offer a testament to the struggles and resilience of migrants navigating the Balkan route. The book is a valuable resource for all readers who aim to understand the interplay between local contexts and broader migration regimes, particularly the externalisation of the EU border regime into the Western Balkans.

Anne-Christine Hamel (2024), Die Deutsche Jugend des Ostens: Interessenpolitik junger Vertriebener im Spannungsfeld von Heimat, kultureller Identität und Integration [The German Youth of the East: Politics of interests of young displaced persons in the tension of homeland, cultural identity and integration] (Göttingen: V&R unipress), 1008 pp, €140.00 (Hb), ISBN: 978-38471-1655-4.

Historians and social scientists have frequently designated the twentieth century as the century of refugees and expellees. At the global level, the comparative scale of demographic displacement may not have varied significantly from previous centuries, but the perception of the phenomenon has changed dramatically, leading in the early years of the twenty-first century to the resurgence of xenophobic populism in Europe and further afield. During the ‘refugee crisis’ of the 2010s, the German government's immigration policy was widely criticised as overly moderate. That policy arguably had its ideological foundation in the country's experience of integrating millions of ethnic German expellees and refugees from Central and Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War. In the course of this, the initially diverse range of organisations catering for expellee youth hampered their endeavours to secure funding from the federal government, who expressed a preference for dealing with a single body; this led to the establishment of the DJO-Deutsche Jugend des Ostens (German youth of the East) in 1951. Perceived controversially as ‘cadre-forge’ of a new nationalism during its early decades, it was re-constituted in 1974 as DJO-Deutsche Jugend in Europa, aligned with the European movement; following German unification, it became an umbrella organisation for immigrant youth groups from a wider range of backgrounds during the 1990s, and for its fiftieth anniversary commissioned a history entitled ‘We want(ed) to be a bridge!’ (Becker 2002). Apart from this ‘internal’ history, some journalistic articles and a few unpublished dissertations, there is a surprising dearth of research on the DJO, although its transformation highlights key concerns of contemporary research in anthropology and other disciplines – migration, belonging, indigeneity, integration – and offers a fascinating case study of these and related aspects.

Anne-Christine Hamel's painstaking and meticulous history of the DJO covers the period 1951 to 1974 and examines the transformation of the organisation's political and educational outlook, from an emphatically irredentist yearning for lost homelands that dominated in the early decades after the Second World War, to the gradual espousal of an integrationist multi-/interculturalism, expressed as the European ideal of ‘unity in diversity’.

Raising issues of cultural imagination and historicity, this trajectory connects with the eschatological aspect of ‘home’ that has been one of this reviewer's primary interests in recent years (see, for example, Kockel 2015, 2019). Since its inception, the DJO comprises two sets of associations, one representing territories of historical German settlement in eastern Europe, the other regions of postwar settlement in the US and British zones of West Germany (the French zone refusing to accept refugees/expellees from the East). They originally pursued a strategy fixated on the vanishing point of a return to the homeland in the German East (Heimat im deutschen Osten), supported by an extensive cultural and educational programme. As political circumstances changed, and once the ‘lost homelands’ were no longer inaccessible behind the Iron Curtain, the organisation reinvented itself around a core narrative of flight and expulsion on a global scale. From the late 1990s onwards, this supported its inclusion of youth with a similar background from other parts of the world, such as Kurdistan or Syria, who were ‘making their home’ in Germany.

Following a sensitive exposition of both her topic and her methodology (15–73), Hamel offers a detailed and illuminating contextualisation of the founding constellations out of which the DJO arose, reaching back to the end of the war (1944–1951; 75–234). In the two parts that follow – each the length (and depth) a conventional PhD in the UK might be – the cultural and political practices of the DJO between its foundation and the sociocultural tremors of the late 1960s (1951–1968; 235–593) and the new challenges arising from sociopolitical changes, especially in East–West relations (1968–1974; 595–839), are investigated. The study concludes with critical reflections on the organisation's future (1975–2020; 841–945) and a careful consideration of avenues for further research (947–961).

Although this is not an anthropological book in the canonical sense of that term, it should be of considerable interest, not just to European ethnologists / cultural anthropologists working specifically on Germany, but anyone dealing with home and displacement, forms of trans- and post-nationalism, memory, trauma, reconciliation, populism, and a whole range of other current topics. As the first in-depth study of a major European youth organisation and its transformation in the course of negotiating sociocultural and political change, Hamel's doctoral thesis provides an invaluable reference source for research on these broader anthropological themes. With that in mind, however, one thing must be noted as sorely missing: Given its substantial length, the book would greatly benefit from an index of persons, places, and topics.

Ullrich Kockel

University of the Highlands and Islands

Email: ullrich.kockel@uhi.ac.uk

Robin James Smith and Sara Delamont (eds) (2023), Leaving the Field: Methodological Insights from Ethnographic Exits (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 264pp, £90.00, ISBN: 978-1-5261-5765-2.

This is a detailed, well-considered collection of chapters that critically analyses the notion of ‘leaving the field’ via reflecting on twenty-four ethnographers’ methodological insights regarding their ethnographic exits from fieldwork expeditions conducted across the globe. Insight is gathered from ethnographers working on both ‘home turf’ and in foreign lands. It offers a vast collection of writings that attend to two overlooked areas. Firstly, it sheds a light on ‘lost’ projects, to include insight from fieldwork that ended abruptly, had been largely ignored or ‘forgotten’ about or had barely even commenced. Rather than framing these expeditions as ‘disasters’ the book provides an opportunity to learn from these ‘failures’ so that novice and more established ethnographers’ alike may gain insight from such experiences and adapt their practice and even publish afterwards. The second overlooked area this book considers is a more popular one, but nonetheless remains peripheral to many ethnographic methodological texts that include how ethnographers negotiate or experience their ethnographic exit. In some instances, arguably leaving the field actually never occurs, rather there is a haunting that follows the ethnographer well after the official fieldwork data collection phase has ceased.

It is vital to consider ethnographic exits, as for many this can involve a well-considered prolonged process or even an unexpected ending. All of which can leave the ethnographer with feelings of relief or even sadness due to the intimacy that ethnography facilitates by its very longitudinal and personal process. Good researchers want ‘good’ exits and giving thought to what this means helps develop good ethnographic practice, while simultaneously reassuring those ethnographers who do not always achieve this. This book offers a space for all to view these often ‘denied’ and unpublished encounters, allowing them to critically reflect on their own practice by considering the honest and open account of others before them. It contributes to filling the current dearth in the ethnographic methodological literature regarding this pertinent issue, whereby there is indeed a lack of reflective literature available.

The book constitutes seventeen chapters and is helpfully organised in to four intersecting and sometimes overlapping sections, all of which deal with specific aspects of leaving the field. Part 1 considers ethnographic entanglements, relationships, and field relations and interactions that sometimes lead to im/perfect exits. Here Sally Campbell suggests that there are no ‘good’ and ‘bad’ exits, rather all exits are individual and should be analysed via the ‘insider’ perspective to encourage open and honest accounts to be retold. Part 2 draws from a wide range of ethnographic approaches, from anthropological to ethnomethodology to question the very definition of what is meant by the ‘field’. Here accounts such as those offered by Jessica Nina Lester and Allison Anders remind the ethnographer about the importance and pertinence of memory, meaningful connections, and the issue many researchers face as they do not want to or even point-blank refuse to leave the field, given the investment in time and emotions already given to gain access and maintain strong relations with people and the ‘field’ itself. Part 3 highlights the variety in rhythms, patterns, and intensities often exposed in ethnographic work. Fieldwork can be disrupted for a variety of reasons, which may be due to the ethnographer or indeed by the participants themselves who may choose to withdraw, are forced to cease participation or even engage with temporary field exits and (multiple) returns. Andrew Clark and Sarah Campbell offer a unique insight into how the ‘field’ is conceptualised when working with people living with dementia, questioning the very nature of physically and/or indeed mentally leaving the field. Part 4 discusses returns, responsibilities, and what this means for how the ethnographer represents the ‘field’ and indeed its participants after leaving the field. Here questions of imperfect power balances within relationships made within and outside of the field come to the forefront and issues of positioning the ethnographer, the participants, and places as ‘authentic’ are recommended, yet rightly so problematised. Working in a critical way while holding some kind of obligation and commitment to the participants the ethnographer may have worked with can, for example, be a difficult space for the ethnographer to manage.

I very much enjoyed reading this book and view it as a unique and very insightful gathering of diverse tales taken from a variety of committed ethnographers. Taken together this collection offers original insight into the much-needed area of the actual process and experience of exiting the field.

Lisa Russell

Manchester Metropolitan University

E-mail: L.Russell@mmu.ac.uk

ORCID: 0000-0001-7690-3060