The term ‘political ethnography’ has been used to describe a recent trend whereby political scientists, including scholars of security studies and international relations, increasingly deploy fieldwork to explore a variety of political arenas. This article challenges a one-dimensional understanding of political ethnography that sidelines the politics activated in an ethnographic research process and instead calls for political ethnographers to self-reflectively analyse their own positionality in terms of imperial complicity. It discusses experiences of researching counterinsurgency practices in southern Thailand and outlines different dimensions through which counterinsurgents positioned the author as a ‘military mascot’. These include assumptions about the Western and Christian identity of the researcher as well as ideas about the author’s ability to produce objective ‘facts’ in reporting a presumably peaceful military mission. The article concludes by reflecting on the problematic alliance between political science and imperial military projects of counterinsurgency, arguing that the lack of discussion about this affinity constitutes one of the conditions that facilitate the ‘mascotting’ of political ethnographers with military interlocutors.

中文翻译：

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作为军事吉祥物的研究：泰国南部的政治民族志和反叛乱

“政治民族志”一词已被用来描述最近的一种趋势，即政治科学家，包括安全研究和国际关系学者，越来越多地部署实地工作来探索各种政治领域。本文挑战了对政治民族志的一维理解，这种理解将民族志研究过程中激活的政治置于一边，而是呼吁政治民族志学者从帝国共谋的角度自我反思地分析自己的立场。它讨论了研究泰国南部反叛乱实践的经验，并概述了反叛乱分子将作者定位为“军事吉祥物”的不同维度。其中包括关于研究人员的西方和基督教身份的假设，以及关于作者在报道可能是和平的军事任务时产生客观“事实”的能力的想法。文章最后反思了政治学与帝国军事计划之间存在问题的反叛乱联盟，认为缺乏对这种亲和力的讨论构成了促进政治民族志学家与军事对话者“伪装”的条件之一。