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Kulturanthropologie Notizen 83 Interventions with/in Ethnography
DOI: 10.21248/ka-notizen.83.4
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Available at ka-notizen.de
Situated Withnessing in/as Intervention:
Co-Laborative, Ethnographic Long-Term
Research with Social Psychiatry
Patrick Bieler
Abstract
As part of my research on the relations between mental health and urban environments in Berlin,
Germany, I observed in and worked with a project that aims to improve living conditions for
people with severe mental health problems facing an increasingly expensive and competitive
housing market. Over the course of the project, I became an active member of the project rather
than a ‘mere’ participant observer. This kind of engagement is based less on an ethical
commitment to the research partners’ moral and political goals than on generating situated
empirical knowledge and concepts. Working with the project created situations of critical
dialogue and confrontation from which analytical insights gradually emerged. This ultimately
blurs the distinction between known and knowing subject(s), as well as those between observing,
intervening and analyzing. Moreover, actively participating in this way serves as an ethnographic
long-term intervention, which can produce novel research questions and methodological insights
that may guide further research. The intervention’s target is thus beyond locally observed
problems. I will briefly illustrate this argument by discussing my contribution to the
interdisciplinary field of urban mental health research.
Keywords: ethnographic analysis, co-laboration, withnessing, relational anthropology, urban
mental health
Patrick Bieler, Institute of European Ethnology, Humboldt Universität, Berlin, Germany
Introduction
In 2018, I participated in a meeting between community mental health care workers, a rep-
resentative of private landlords, and a member of parliament for the Social Democratic Party
(SPD) in Germany. The meeting was part of the Inclusion Project, a 5-year funded project on
strategies for inclusive living for people with mental health problems, and was hosted by a
national welfare organization. The Inclusion Project, which was one of the field sites for my
doctoral research on the relations between mental health and urban environments, was a
response to the increasing housing challenge faced by mental health care services. Due to
rapidly increasing rents and a general lack of affordable housing in many German cities – as
well as some rural areas – mental health care services have been confronted with the regular
eviction of their clients, and have seen an increasing number of homeless people applying
Kulturanthropologie Notizen 83 Situated Withnessing
44
for psychiatric assistance. As a result, the Inclusion Project’s main aim was to establish alli-
ances between mental health care services, representatives of housing corporations, private
landlords, and political stakeholders.
During this particular meeting, one of the departmental heads from the welfare organi-
zation employed the phrase “hardware of inclusion” (“Hardware der Inklusion”, fieldnotes,
20.03.2018), in order to emphasize the fact that the successful cohabitation of people with and
without mental health problems was not only a question of available housing and social at-
titudes, but could also be fostered by particular material arrangements and objects. His sug-
gestion did not provide concrete proposals, but served as a provocation: it challenged the
arguments put forward by the employees of the community mental health care services, who
had previously focused on reducing stereotypes and tackling the prejudices of landlords. In
the departmental head’s opinion, addressing the quantity of available housing, as well as
people’s individual attitudes, were not in themselves sufficient to ensure a decent standard
of living arrangements for their clients. I agreed with him, and added that a report written
by myself and the project manager supported his claims. When asked about problems and
potential improvements regarding their living conditions in focus group interviews, mental
health care clients had expressed wishes for basic decorative or practical objects, such as a
bathtub or flower boxes, and asked for sound insulation to avoid conflict with neighbors. In
addition, they had highlighted neighborhood arrangements such as green spaces, meeting
areas, and public transport.
While this discussion had no immediate consequences in the meeting, it was of great sig-
nificance for me as an ethnographer, because the departmental head had articulated limita-
tions in his colleagues’ approach, and by doing so had opened up the possibility of changing
the Inclusion Project’s course. Weeks later, in an attempt to unpack the analytical importance
of the encounter, I recounted the conversation in a presentation to the Inclusion Project’s
team and the advisory board.
1
I thereby tried to provoke a discussion about the potential to
establish future cooperation between social psychiatric services and private landlords by
carefully designing neighborhood life (Imrie & Kullman 2017). To me, this seemed to be a
chance to problematize two of the Inclusion Project’s core ontological assumptions; firstly,
that the integration of people with severe mental health problems into urban ‘communities’
is necessarily an issue of (tight-knit) ‘social’ relations between humans, and, secondly, that
mental illness is an individual state within a person’s body which creates a particular kind
of behavior, separate from and independent of its environment. I hoped to initiate a joint
reflection about the pitfalls of reproducing the dichotomy between ‘the mentally ill’ and ‘the
mentally sane’, the structural antecedents that have constituted this reproduction, and the
limitations that complicate more flexible provision of care under current housing market
conditions. Moreover, I wanted to gain insight into the actors’ knowledges of how the built
environment affects people with mental health problems, and what – according to them –
good cohabitation of people with and without the need for psychiatric assistance could look
like.
1
The project team consisted of members of community mental health care services in two German cities and
two rural areas in Germany, mental health care clients, and a project manager (who was an employee of the
welfare organization). Moreover, every six months an advisory board – comprising representatives of fe-
deral ministries, private landlords, the real estate industry, renters, and organizations for homeless people
– met to evaluate the Inclusion Project’s development and discuss further action.
Kulturanthropologie Notizen 83 Situated Withnessing
45
In this paper, I use my involvement in the Inclusion Project as a vantage point for methodo-
logical reflection. I will depict how I gradually transformed from a participant observer of
the Inclusion Project into a quasi-member, and demonstrate how I worked with the project
while simultaneously trying to provoke discussions within it. After describing the Inclusion
Project and my research process, I will discuss two interrelated implications: firstly, the blur-
ring of distinctions between knowing and known subject(s) as well as the seemingly clear-
cut spatial and temporal separation of observation (in fieldwork encounters), intervention
(co-creating objects of analysis in and beyond fieldwork) and analysis (after fieldwork and
away from the field). Working in and with (activist) interventions (such as the Inclusion Pro-
ject) and feeding back observations and preliminary interpretative thoughts, I argue, serves
as an ethnographic method: a means to learn from and with research partners through joint
attempts to change problematic situations. Secondly, in this way, participating in an inter-
vention functions as an intervention aiming at ethnographic knowledge production. Thus,
an approach that sometimes sides with and sometimes criticizes research partners aims nei-
ther to intervene into the research partners’ practices from an outside perspective nor to in-
tervene on behalf of their interests, but rather to enhance ethnographic (as well as interdisci-
plinary) knowledge production by generating situated, distributed analyses from within
fieldwork encounters. These can lead to situated concepts and be mobilized for methodolog-
ical reconceptualization. This, I claim, is a long-term endeavor that targets the development
of novel research questions and methodological approaches that can inform debates far be-
yond the problems of a local intervention. I will shortly illustrate this argument with an ex-
plication of my contribution to the interdisciplinary field of urban mental health research.
Taken seriously, these methodological implications call for a broader problematization of
ethnography as (usually) individual, short-term and project-based research.
Participation in the Inclusion Project
In my current research, I problematize the relation between urban life and mental health. My
research is part of a long-term co-laborative research focus on psychiatric practices estab-
lished at the Institute of European Ethnology (at HU Berlin). My initial research design was
especially inspired by the concept of niching developed by Milena Bister, Martina Klausner
and Jörg Niewöhner (2016). This concept enables an analysis of how people with mental
health problems create bearable living conditions while navigating urban environments be-
yond their treatment in psychiatric institutions. While psychiatric institutions were the start-
ing point and remained an important field site for Bister and colleagues, they also accompa-
nied mental health care patients after their release from clinics. This enabled an analytical
shift away from Foucauldian analyses of subjectivation through psychiatric classification
and treatment – a common interpretive framework within the empirical study of psychiatric
institutions. As their co-laborative partners in psychiatry were well aware of and familiar
with this mode of critique, Bister and colleagues decided to confront them with “ethno-
graphic material [which] demonstrates that much more goes on than can be captured solely
by the vocabulary of control and resistance” (ibid.: 190). This confrontation could potentially
create generative tensions between anthropological and social psychiatric thought styles.
Building on this co-laborative work in the field of psychiatry, I undertook extensive field-
work with mental health care clients in the public realm (Lofland 1998). I started my research
Kulturanthropologie Notizen 83 Situated Withnessing
46
with go-alongs (Kusenbach 2003).
2
However, I soon realized that the relations between men-
tal health and urban environments cannot be fully understood through a sole focus on situ-
ated immersions in socio-material surroundings, because the daily routines of clients are
shaped in large part by (emplaced) care infrastructures (Söderström et al. 2017) and broader
social and political dynamics (Rose 2019). In order to capture this, I expanded my initial re-
search focus by conducting participant observation and interviews in various branches of
the community mental health care system of a local district in Berlin (community mental
health care services, the social welfare office).
Particularly, I became interested in the topic of housing – which is simultaneously a nec-
essary but scarce precondition of community mental health care provision and a highly in-
fluential factor determining clients’ everyday exposures to urban life (Lancione & McFarlane
2016: 49). Hence, housing is entangled with and a vital element of clients’ recovery processes.
When I began my research, the lack of affordable housing in Berlin (Holm 2016) in conjunc-
tion with rapidly rising rental costs triggered gentrification processes in inner-city neighbor-
hoods (Frank 2017; Lees 2008; Schulz 2017), which posed major problems for the psychiatric
care system (Bieler & Klausner 2019b): mental health care clients were threatened by (poten-
tial) eviction from their homes, while the population of homeless people applying for mental
health care services dramatically increased. This not only had an impact on the affected peo-
ple themselves, but also posed problems for the mental health care services that provide
apartments for their clients. On the one hand, the service providers were afraid of rental
contract cancellations and their clients losing apartments, while on the other, their housing
resources and work capacities were too limited to effectively deal with the situation.
In various sites in Berlin, mental health care service providers and public administration
employees began to publicly lament and criticize these problems and started forming net-
works for political action. When I started my research at the end of 2015, I encountered the
Inclusion Project, which had already been running for about a year at that time. This project
explicitly addressed the aforementioned problems and translated them into public issues
(Marres 2007) by fostering alliances with housing companies and political stakeholders – an
attempt which has so far been unique in Germany (according to the project’s self-descrip-
tion). These alliance building practices became a strategy to pursue the overall goal of the
project: enhancing dwelling opportunities for people with severe mental health problems.
However, the alliance building practices did not always have a clear and straightforward
trajectory, since they entailed an inquiry into housing market actors’ wishes, needs and prac-
tices.
3
Rather than simply demanding rights and resources, project participants assessed the
problems and needs of mental health care clients, community mental health care services,
and housing companies, and tried to establish possibilities for alliance building between
housing companies and social policy stakeholders.
Before beginning my research, the manager of the Inclusion Project and I had agreed that
I would be able to observe the regular meetings of the advisory board, as well as the meetings
2
Go-alongs are a mobile research method somewhere between participant observation and (narrative) in-
terviews. Researchers follow their informants on their routes through urban environments (mostly walking
together), observe the informant’s embodied use of (public) places, and conduct conversations about per-
ception, experiences, and memories. For a discussion of go-alongs as an iterative, long-term method see
Bieler & Klausner 2019a.
3
Moreover, these practices were continually debated within and beyond the project team, since there was
often no consensus on solutions to the aforementioned problems.
Kulturanthropologie Notizen 83 Situated Withnessing
47
of the local project team in Berlin. In return, she asked me to present my observations to the
advisory board and team every now and then. Over the course of the research, my involve-
ment in the Inclusion Project intensified. This began most noticeably when I started co-writ-
ing a report based on focus group interviews with mental health care clients. The interviews
had been conducted by a private research institute for the project. My task was to analyze
the interview material and, together with the project manager, deduce actionable recommen-
dations from the results. From that point on, I found that I had access to otherwise confiden-
tial meetings with housing companies and political stakeholders. Even more importantly,
my status within the Inclusion Project changed: I became a quasi-member of it. I accompa-
nied the manager to various conferences, and we held joint presentations about the project
results. I even stood in for her at one conference because she was unavailable. We discussed
publications in specialized journals, as well as a leaflet informing actors across the housing
market about potential cooperation with mental health care service providers. We co-wrote
the final report of the Inclusion Project (including further policy recommendations), and I
was involved in planning the project’s closing conference.
Co-working, however, did not mean to “go ‘native’” (O’Reilly 2009: 87). Although I took
over the tasks of a regular team member at times, it was always clear to everyone that I was
at the same time conducting research. Throughout my involvement in the project, I actively
emphasized the differences between the Inclusion Project members’ thought styles and my
own ethnographic way of thinking. In my regular presentations, I not only informed the
advisory board and project team of my observations, but also tried to involve them in ongo-
ing discussions regarding both the potential and the limitations of their mutual cooperation.
This distinction was formally indicated by the titles of my presentations, such as “Discussing
the outside perspective of an anthropologist”, or “Preliminary ethnographic conclusions of
the project results”. Finally, I was able to present my “social scientific view on the project”
in the concluding conference, as well as in the final report. In addition, co-writing the two
reports that featured recommendations for action, co-presenting the results at conferences,
and co-designing the final conference for the Inclusion Project itself allowed for even more
direct forms of dialogue. Overall, I was directly confronted with the ways in which the pro-
ject team dealt with, legitimized, and problematized practical obligations and pressures,
while I was simultaneously able to confront the project team with (often) divergent, ethno-
graphically informed readings of the situation and to construe complementing or alternative
conclusions.
Preparing presentations to the advisory board and project team, as well as co-working
with the project manager, were important, tentative, analytical steps carried out during the
ethnographic fieldwork process. These presentations also offered a chance to mobilize my
ethnographic knowledge in ongoing interventions: they were my attempt to contribute to
the Inclusion Project’s overall aim of improving the living conditions of people with mental
health problems by both questioning its rationalities and trying to provide perspectives that
had not been considered relevant thus far. Specific analytical topics gradually crystallized as
I prepared my ethnographic reading of observations in order to provoke discussion or to
argue in co-working situations, even though the empirical material had not been fully pro-
cessed.
Our recurring discussions did not only impact the Inclusion Project’s work and conclu-
sions, but also shaped my own analytical work. Taking up the discussion on the “hardware
of inclusion” that I introduced in the beginning of this article, for instance, allowed two dif-
ferent things at once. Firstly, I could convince the project manager to include a section on the
Kulturanthropologie Notizen 83 Situated Withnessing
48
necessity of planning and developing urban neighborhoods in the final report for the welfare
organization. Importantly, this implied a shift from a focus on social relations between hu-
mans to the design of socio-material arrangements – introducing atmospheres and infra-
structures as topics of community mental health care, aspects that have so far been marginal
if not completely absent from mental health care. Secondly, the particular fieldwork situation
itself, and my subsequent attempts to reflect upon it, were of analytical and conceptual im-
portance. These prompted me to question the nature of social relations in neighborhoods in
two ways: on the one hand it became clear that neighborhood sociality is not to be equated
with dense (and generally harmonious) social networks (as the notion of community sug-
gests), and on the other hand I needed to work with a concept that could account for more-
than-human sociality when analyzing the relation between urban life (and particularly
neighborhood cohabitation) and mental health. Consequently, my involvement in the project
had a strong impact on elaborating and sharpening my main analytical concept: the (urban)
encounter.
In the remaining pages of this article, I will reflect upon my approach with regard to the
relations between ethnographer and research partners, as well as those between observing,
analyzing and intervening. I argue that participating in an intervention such as the Inclusion
Project is not an end to ethnography, but a means to jointly generate situated and distributed
knowledge. This, I claim, is itself an ethnographic intervention that aims at the production
of novel insights and analytical as well as methodological enhancements. Subsequently, I
illustrate the argument by explaining how far the concept of encounter(ing) contributes to
interdisciplinary debates on urban mental health research.
Blurring the Distinctions between Observing, Intervening, and
Analyzing
In cultural and social anthropology, participant observation is the core method of research
(Spradley 1980; Breidenstein et al. 2013). Based on active participation within a research field,
ethnographic knowledge production is necessarily an interactive endeavor, produced in and
through encounters with interlocutors (Lindner 1981; Boyer 2014). Specific in my case was
that I supported my interlocutors in their attempts to overcome a problematic and complex
situation. I joined them in actively intervening into mental health care design and urban pol-
itics, trying to change conditions for the better. This is a somewhat common procedure in
forms of participatory research (Bergold & Thomas 2012) or militant anthropology (Scheper-
Hughes 1995), in which acting ethically on behalf of the interests of interlocutors and build-
ing alliances with activists guides the ethnographic endeavor. However, while in these
modes of knowledge production intervening into the world (by targeting injustices) and for-
mulating political claims serves as the “primary rationale for research” (Marcus 2018: xiii), I
understand my engagement first and foremost as an analytical method: “a simultaneous at-
tention to the engagement of actors and practices […] and to reflexive learning from those
actors and practices” (Downey & Zuiderent-Jerak 2017: 225).
My participation in the Inclusion Project’s intervention – understood as the production of
new realities in messy, non-linear and surely non-homogeneous attempts to achieve trans-
formation (in this case through forging alliances with housing market actors) – was not a
strategically planned objective of my research, but rather a methodological opportunity I
grasped when it appeared. In this case, participating in an ongoing intervention was a means
Kulturanthropologie Notizen 83 Situated Withnessing
49
to enhance ethnographic knowledge production (Binder 2018): I collaborated with my re-
search partners. Compared to ‘conventional’ participant observation or modes of ethical
knowledge production, collaboration implies shifting from a relatively hierarchical to a more
symmetrical relationship: the research subjects are taken not only as knowledgeable key in-
formants but also as epistemic partners whose potential to reflect on the conditions of their
own practices is of analytical value (Sánchez Criado & Estalella 2018). Participating in such
an intervention, then, is not necessarily motivated by an ethical commitment to the research
subjects, and it is not dependent on agreement with their political agenda.
4
Highlighting the special epistemic potential for ethnographic knowledge production,
George Marcus and colleagues (e.g., Holmes & Marcus 2005) have offered the metaphorical
para-site as a methodological concept, which describes “a bounded space of orchestrated
interaction that is both within the activities of a particular fieldwork project and markedly
outside or alongside it” (Deeb & Marcus 2011: 52). In this context, the research partners are
“open to risking interpretations together with the researcher about ideas fundamental to the
political organization of their institutional contexts and functions” (ibid.). With the label co-
laboration – which both relates to Marcus and colleagues’ methodological claim and draws
from a critique of integrative modes of interdisciplinary research (Barry & Born 2013) – Jörg
Niewöhner (2016) has proposed to pay particular analytical attention to the clashes between
thought styles, actively embracing, and potentially even creating them, within and beyond
fieldwork.
Co-laboration is not a completely distinctive genre of ethnographic knowledge produc-
tion. It requires the collection of empirical material through ‘classic’ ethnographic tech-
niques, such as participant observation or interviewing, and it operates via the epistemic
differences between ethnographer and interlocutors. However, these differences are not
taken into account as empirical material that can be interpreted “after the fact” (Knecht 2012:
264) from spatially and temporally safe distances. Rather, analytical insights and epistemic
differences emerge from engaging with and involving oneself in the practices of interlocu-
tors, not by withdrawing from the field and using concepts to alienate oneself from these
experiences (e.g. Amann & Hirschauer 1997).
I pursued this goal by working together with the members of the Inclusion Project, in
particular by co-writing reports and elucidating policy recommendations. While this meant
temporarily co-working with my research partners from time to time, I also offered my own
observations to the members of the Inclusion Project, and confronted them with critical ques-
tions based on my ethnographic perspective. Rather than being a seamless fit between eth-
nographer and epistemic partners, then, my co-laboration in the Inclusion Project was char-
acterized by “tentative situations in which anthropologists […] are drawn into intense inter-
ventions in the field, at times working smoothly with counterparts, at other times clashing
with them” (Sánchez Criado & Estalella 2018: 10). In this way, I performatively co-consti-
tuted objects and situations that had an impact on the practices of the Inclusion Project: I
“participated in the production of the very things I was studying” (Marrero-Guillamón 2018:
4
Liburkina (this issue) rightfully observes that my way of conducting research in and with the Inclusion
Project was simplified by (and maybe even dependent on) a minimum of shared understandings of specific
(political) problems and injustices and, more broadly, a commitment to scientific practice by my research
partners. In her article she shows very well why and how collaboration (and especially co-laboration) could
and should also be possible with opposing actors. My argument on withnessing as intervention is conver-
gent with her claim that the target of ethnographic interventions is not limited to the dyadic relations with
individual research partners.
Kulturanthropologie Notizen 83 Situated Withnessing
50
183, emphasized by the author). By “empirically unpacking” (Zuiderent-Jerak 2016: 75) this
process, my involvement became part of my ongoing, gradual analysis (Bieler et al. 2021b).
Elsewhere, colleagues and I have discussed such a mode of co-laboration as decentering the
subject of ethnographic knowledge production: rather than the act of an isolated individual
interpreting observations (the ethnographer), the practice of reflecting observations and de-
veloping analytical ideas is distributed among a network of actors (Bieler et al. 2021a). In
accordance with insights from practice theory and material-semiotics, we highlight that in-
terpretation and reflection are situated and distributed processes rather than unique (mental)
capacities of the modern scholar. Here, I wish to emphasize the temporal dimension of this
problematization: co-laboration questions the seemingly clear-cut separation of observation
and analysis; not only is the division between the knowing and informing subject blurred,
but the linear succession of and spatial separation between observation and interpretation is
suspended (Corsín Jiménez 2003).
5
As a result, the distinction between acting on the world
(intervention) and knowing it (analysis) is transcended as well (Zuiderent-Jerak 2015). The
active engagement in, with, and in contrast to the field generates an ethnographic analysis
in an iterative way, while simultaneously shifting the intervention practices that the ethnog-
rapher is part of. Following Estrid Sørensen (2009: 134), co-laboration in intervention intro-
duces a shift from witnessing to situated withnessing – “participat[ing] carefully in the socio-
material knowledge and contribut[ing] to its continuous gradual mutation”.
Crucial to Sørensen’s argument is that situated withnessing is not limited to the immedi-
ate, embodied presence of the ethnographer in fieldwork situations. Supporting and chang-
ing ongoing interventions to solve problems is neither the final aim nor end point of engage-
ment but an important step in developing concepts that are neither too close nor too distant
from situated problematizations. Thus, participating in the Inclusion Project’s intervention
also functioned as intervention into ethnographic and interdisciplinary knowledge produc-
tion aiming at “the production of new […] knowledge and […] the production of new nor-
mativity” (Zuiderent-Jerak 2016: 76).
Hence, by siding with my research partners, I was interested less in solving their prob-
lems than I was in contributing to the transformation of ethnographic knowledge production
by developing concepts as well as discussing methodological implications for further re-
search. With concepts and methodological enhancements that I partially derive from my
fieldwork with the Inclusion Project, I am able to relate to ongoing ethnographic and inter-
disciplinary knowledge production on the topic of urban mental health. Thus, the ethno-
graphic intervention that I pursue is a long-term endeavor that draws on and enhances what
Stefan Beck (2008) has called a relational anthropology:
“a new kind of research pragmatics, systematically designed for interdisciplinary coop-
eration, which organizes and makes fruitful relationships between different knowledge
systems, thought styles and modes of research” (ibid.: 198; own translation).
5
I have written of co-working when describing the actual instances of joint work on the project (writing
reports, giving presentations for the project etc.). Collaboration, or co-laboration, is a methodological
abstraction that I use to describe the full process of my engagement, including reflection upon the relations
between ethnographer and informants/epistemic partners as well as those between observation, interven-
tion, and analysis. As I will continue to argue, co-laboration also extends beyond the immediate fieldsites
and aims to intervene into different (scientific) discourses.
Kulturanthropologie Notizen 83 Situated Withnessing
51
Co-laborative Anthropology of Urban Mental Health: a Long-
Term Intervention
So far, I have described the process of my involvement with the Inclusion Project, which
gradually developed into a form of co-laboration blurring two conventional separations of
ethnographic research: the split between knowing and known subjects (that is, between the
ethnographer and informants) as well as the spatial and temporal distinction between par-
ticipating (including observing and making) and analyzing. As I have demonstrated, this re-
sulted in the inclusion of certain ethnographic findings in the publications and recommen-
dations of the Inclusion Project, while simultaneously altering my own analytical under-
standing.
One crucial concept I was able to develop through my withnessing in the Inclusion Project
was the above-mentioned concept of encounter(ing), which facilitates attendance to the spe-
cific relations between urban life (and particularly neighborhood cohabitation) and mental
health, highlighting more-than-human socialities. With my conceptual discussion of encoun-
ter(ing) I relate to wider debates on the entanglement of mental health and urban environ-
ments – a research question that has only recently been rediscovered in psychiatric and eth-
nographic work (Manning 2019; Amin & Richaud 2020; Winz & Söderström 2020). Most re-
searchers in both domains argue for the necessity of inter- and transdisciplinary modes of
knowledge production. While in psychiatry this is usually conceptualized as an integrative
interdisciplinary mode aiming for generalizable findings (e.g. Lederbogen et al. 2013), eth-
nographers argue for the necessity of ontological problematization of the relationships be-
tween mental health and the urban in co-laborative endeavors, in order to thicken research
designs (Fitzgerald et al. 2016; Söderström 2019; Rose et al. 2021).
Through my engagement with the Inclusion Project, I was able to identify, develop, and
enhance encountering as an ecological concept that introduces different avenues for urban
mental health research. Using encounter as an analytical heuristic, I have started to problem-
atize the conceptual identification of neighborhood with the notion of community and tight-
knit social relations in mental health care (Pols 2016) and psychiatric research. Following
discussions with project partners in the field, I started to relate and translate anthropological
(Faier & Rofel 2014), geographical (Wilson 2017) and sociological (Blokland 2017) debates
into an ecological concept of encountering (Bieler 2021). The notion of encounter allows us
not only to address the importance of weak or absent social ties (Small 2009, 2017; Felder
2020), but also to analyze the mutual co-constitution of humans and urban environments,
highlighting how emergent environments are at once embodied and effected by these em-
bodiments. Such a heuristic pays particular attention to material elements as active forces
within an encounter, and through this interrogation the distinction between ‘the social’ and
‘the biological’ is transcended. Moreover, such a focus pushes for a radical reconceptualiza-
tion of mental health: no longer conceptualizing it as a uniquely human and intersubjective
matter, but instead problematizing the overlaps and entanglements of human and more-
than-human life (Ingold 2014).
Taking part in the Inclusion Project’s intervention has also revealed an important meth-
odological lesson that should be taken into account in ethnographic and interdisciplinary
research: namely, that reflections on the practical limits and obligations of mental health care
practitioners have typically been neglected in studies of the relations between mental health
and urban environments. Inquiring into situated interventions which deal with and target
the conditions of mental health care practices, and encountering these actors as complexly
Kulturanthropologie Notizen 83 Situated Withnessing
52
constrained epistemic partners, is a means of jointly producing analytical work that is
uniquely sensitive to their working conditions. Local actors such as the staff of mental health
care services and welfare organizations are knowledgeable regarding the everyday lives of
people with mental health problems and the diverse features of neighborhood cohabitation.
Moreover, they actively shape, design, and try to transform the relations between mental
health and urban environments. Engaging with these actors and interventions creates a val-
uable site for situated ethnographic concept development, and is, I argue, a necessary com-
ponent of situated research on the relations between mental health and urban environments.
6
To conclude, I have argued that evolving situated concepts as part of withnessing enables
contribution to a local intervention, while itself being an intervention into dominant modes
of ethnographic and interdisciplinary knowledge production. It is thereby first and foremost
a long-term endeavor. This shift of temporal scale allows researchers and practitioners to
think beyond the narrow spatial and temporal contexts of one intervention in a single project.
Surely, my participation in the local intervention of the Inclusion Project has contributed to
its results and shifted its emphases, if only slightly. Whether or not any of the emergent con-
cerns – especially those raised by my contributions – will be taken up by local actors and
influence any particular course of action remains difficult if not impossible to know. How-
ever, the success or failure of my intervention does not depend on these outcomes. Rather,
what is meaningful is whether the concept of encountering is able to “animate anthropolog-
ical debate within as well as flourishing on its outside” (Strathern 2014: 34), “shift[ing] the
axis of analysis” (ibid.: 30) of urban mental health research.
Finally, I do not wish to claim that withnessing is a primary task for ethnography, or a
more adequate way of conducting it. Rather, it is a specific mode that, I argue, is a productive
means of highlighting the relevance of ethnography and sharpening its critical contribution
within controversial debates in the face of pressing global concerns (Latour 2004). While my
approach certainly does not imply a comment on or evaluation of individual research pro-
jects or short-term research endeavors, it necessitates a reflection on the use, implementation
and infrastructural conditions of long-term ethnography in teams and beyond disciplinary
boundaries. It is at least doubtful that my engagement with the Inclusion Project would have
been as productive without prior research by committed colleagues and a shift away from
exclusively Foucauldian analytical registers. Moreover, my own contribution is not intended
as a direct critique of (or attempt to impact upon) mental health care practice or research;
rather, its value lies in its relation to other inquiries. How ethnographers and their inter- and
transdisciplinary epistemic partners might be involved in long-term dialogue has recently
been discussed and (prominently) implemented in social and cultural anthropology (Choy
et al. 2009; Fortun et al. 2014). A relational anthropological take on urban mental health that
co-laboratively withnesses mental health care practice and administration, I claim, is about
to gain momentum and provide meaningful conceptual and methodological insights for the
discipline.
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank the members of the Inclusion Project – and especially its two project managers
– for allowing me to carry out participant observation and making joint work possible. In
addition, this article benefitted greatly from close reading and commenting by the editors of
6
These conceptual and methodological implications necessarily remain brief. For a more thorough discus-
sion, please consider Bieler 2021.
Kulturanthropologie Notizen 83 Situated Withnessing
53
this volume, especially Kathrin Eitel and Martina Klausner, as well as language editing by
Lauren Cubellis and Sam Wiseman. Moreover, I received valuable feedback from the parti-
cipants of the lecture series of the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and European Ethno-
logy at Goethe University Frankfurt, where I presented a first draft of this article in January
2020. The overall argument is inspired by years of joint work in the Laboratory: Anthropol-
ogy of Environment | Human Relations at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
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Author Information
Patrick Bieler is a researcher at the Institute of European Ethnology at the Humboldt-Uni-
versität zu Berlin. His PhD thesis BioÖkologien des Begegnens is a co-laborative ethno-
graphic inquiry into the relational constitution of mental health and urban life. He is inter-
ested in broadening anthropological conceptualizations of human-environment relations by
combining approaches from Science and Technology Studies, Urban Studies, and Medical
and Environmental Anthropology. He is currently exploring these interests through an in-
terdisciplinary research project with social psychiatrists.
