Messing with methods: doing anthropology in uncertain times

The introduction to this special issue reconsiders anthropological methods in the lingering shadows of the COVID-19 pandemic. Bringing together ethnographically grounded contributions across Australia, Bangladesh, Germany, India, Indonesia, Fiji, Myanmar, Pakistan and Western Sahara, it examines how methods are unsettled and reworked in practice. Rather than asking whether anthropology requires new methods, we approach method as it comes to be shaped by encounters, disruptions and uncertainties in the field. We revisit critiques of the ‘ethnographic present’ while attending to the ways in which fieldwork exceeds bounded notions of time and place. We seek to expand anthropology's methodological repertoire through approaches attuned to temporality, multispecies relations, sensory experience, materiality and digital infrastructures, while attending carefully to the contingencies of fieldwork. The articles in this collection draw attention to vulnerability, care, suspicion and refusal in fieldwork, and in so doing unsettle disciplinary ideals of mastery and endurance. By ‘messing with methods’, we suggest a vision of anthropology as a responsive and reflexive practice that takes uncertainty as a condition through which knowledge is reconfigured in a changing world.