Full Description
Challenges to ethnographic authority and to the ethics of representation have led many contemporary anthropologists to abandon fieldwork in favor of strategies of theoretical puppeteering, textual analysis, and surrogate ethnography. In "Being There", John Borneman and Abdellah Hammoudi argue that ethnographies based on these strategies elide important insights. To demonstrate the power and knowledge attained through the fieldwork experience, they have gathered essays by anthropologists working in Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tanzania, the Canadian Arctic, India, Germany, and Russia that shift attention back to the subtle dynamics of the ethnographic encounter. From an Inuit village to the foothills of Kilimanjaro, each account illustrates how, despite its challenges, fieldwork yields important insights outside the reach of textual analysis.
Contents
Acknowledgments 1. The Fieldwork Encounter, Experience, and the Making of Truth: An Introduction John Borneman and Abdellah Hammoudi 2. Textualism and Anthropology: On the Ethnographic Encounter, or an Experience in the Hajj Abdellah Hammoudi 3. The Suicidal Wound and Fieldwork among Canadian Inuit Lisa Stevenson 4. The Hyperbolic Vegetarian: Notes on a Fragile Subject in Gujarat Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi 5. The Obligation to Receive: The Countertransference, the Ethnographer, Protestants, and Proselytization in North India Leo Coleman 6. Encounter and Suspicion in Tanzania Sally Falk Moore 7. Encounters with the Mother Tongue: Speech, Translation, and Interlocution in Post-Cold War German Repatriation Stefan Senders 8. Institutional Encounters: Identification and Anonymity in Russian Addiction Treatment (and Ethnography) Eugene Raikhel 9. Fieldwork Experience, Collaboration, and Interlocution: The "Metaphysics of Presence" in Encounters with the Syrian Mukhabarat John Borneman 10. Afterthoughts: The Experience and Agony of Fieldwork Abdellah Hammoudi and John Borneman Biographical Notes Index
