Researching ethnicity, identity, subjectivity: anything but the four lettered word

Abstract

The article gives a frank account of how anthropological research on Cape Verdean migrant experiences of parenthood in Portugal developed from avoiding the use of the analytical concept of ‘race’ to encountering ‘race’ as a category of practice in a number of fieldwork settings and discusses the implications of this for analyzing the data. The aim of the research was to look beyond categorizations, to explore the emotional dimensions of lived experience. Although the data reveals how ‘racial automatisms’ constituted part of the social structure that impacted upon migrant subjectivities, it also draws attention to the nuances that may be overlooked if racist effects are mechanically conflated with racist intentions.