Full Description
Fieldwork Connections tells the story of the intertwined research histories of three anthropologists working in Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan, China in the late twentieth century. Chapters are written alternately by a male American anthropologist, a male researcher raised in a village in Liangshan, and a highly educated woman from an elite Nuosu/Chinese family. As decades of mutual ethnographic research unfold, the authors enter one another's narratives and challenge the reader to ponder the nature of ethnographic "truth."
The book begins with short accounts of the process by which each of the authors became involved in anthropological field research. It then proceeds to describe the research itself, and the stories begin to connect as they become active collaborators. The scene shifts in the course of the narrative from China to America, and the relationship between the authors shifts from distant, wary, and somewhat hierarchical to close, egalitarian, and reciprocal.
The authors share their histories through personal stories, not technical analyses; their aim is to entertain while addressing the process of ethnography and the dynamics of international and intercultural communication.
Contents
Preface to the English Edition
Acknowledgments
Part One: Origins
1. Growing up Half Yi / Bamo Ayi
2. In the Shadow of the Han / Ma Lunzy
3. A White Guy Discovers Anthropology / Stevan Harrell
Part Two: China
4. Yinchang: My First Fieldwork, 1987-88 / Bamo Ayi
5. Getting Started in Southwest China, 1987-88 / Stevan Harrell
6. Chasing after Bimo, 1992-93 / Bamo Ayi
7. Getting Started Again, 1991 / Stevan Harrell
8. First Contact, 1991 / Ma Lunzy
9. Almost Real Fieldwork, 1993 / Stevan Harrell
10. In the Month of the Snake , 1993 / Ma Lunzy
11. Fieldwork with Muga, 1994 / Bamo Ayi
12. Getting Further Implicated, 1994 / Stevan Harrell
13. The Last Time I Led the Horse, 1994 / Ma Lunzy
14. The Bimo in the Modern World, 1994-95 / Bamo Ayi
Part Three: America
15. The First International Yi Conference, 1995 / Ma Lunzy
16. Seattle First Free Methodist Church, 1996-97 / Bamo Ayi
17. Collecting Mountain Patterns, 1999 / Ma Lunzy
18. Conceptualizing Mountain Patterns, 2000 / Bamo Qubumo
19. Celebrating Mountain Patterns, 2000 / Stevan Harrell
Epilogue: Fieldwork Connections and the Process of Ethnography / Stevan Harrell
Cast of Characters
Chinese and Nuosu Glossary
Bibliography
Index
