'Hair economies': power and ethics in an ethnographic study of female African hairdressers in Cape Town

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In this empirical study, which focused on power and ethics, I explored the relationshipbetween the researcher and the research participant in the context of migrant African womenin Cape Town. The study, located in hair styling salons, had dual aims; one ethnographic andthe other methodological. In the ethnographic context of the hair salons, I sought to analysehow female migrants from African countries chose specific economic activities that expresstheir cultural or gendered identities. Methodologically, this study was aimed at identifyingand analysing how the power between the researcher and the research participants impactedon a study of migrant women's experiences, with specific consideration of the social andeconomic contexts within which research participants navigate and assert their own agency.Participant observation was used as the primary data collection method, a method that I usedin conjunction with semi-structured interviews. For a period of 12 weeks, between May 2013and August 2013 I entered and engaged the social world of migrants and hair salons inMowbray, Cape Town. From the onset securing access to the research field and participantsproved to be a challenge since initial possibilities of access to a primary identified site wasdenied. Through a process of negotiation and securing access, I, as researcher had to confrontissues of privilege in relation to migrants, even though my race and gender provided me witha degree of intersectionality in relation to African migrant women. Further, I found that notonly does migrant women`s ownership and labour in hair salons disrupt imagined ideas abouttheir mobility, but also that they asserted their agency by presenting me, the researcher, witha protracted set of rules of engagement. This resolved, to a degree, their vulnerability and mypower as a researcher. By default, I managed to find a salon owner willing to grant access.The aim of the study was to interview the owner of the hair salon as well as the fourhairstylists but only two stylists agreed to being interviewed. Findings from this researchshow the complexities of power relations between the researcher and the researchparticipants. African migrant women in scholarship are imagined in a gendered context andalmost always in relation to their partners as the primary decision-maker around migration.This study shows how African migrant women facilitate their own agency in the context ofmigration and how the hair styling industry provides them with a range of economicpossibilities. The study further shows, notwithstanding their vulnerability as migrants, howAfrican women in this research project exercised their agency as women by refusal, selfsilencing,determining the level and measure of participation and the content of discussions.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University