Full Description
Fieldworkers' notebooks are full of sensations and observations in which the subjectivity of the ethnographer seeps through. Not really science. Much closer to life. Yet in classical anthropology they are invisible to the reader. In this book the focus is reversed, turning Anthropology Inside Out as it explores the vibrant backstage life of field notes. What happens when we put them centre stage? Aimed at both curious novice and experienced practitioner, the chapters read as a catalogue of experimental practices teetering on the edge of the tradition: intuitively observational drawings; notes pervaded with paranoia; collective notetaking;crisis-ridden personal confessions; layers of notes in photographs and archives; old flip-flops that trigger memories in mind and body. This exploration of what field notes are, can do and could be, concludes with a constellation of shimmering notes on notes from Michael Taussig, a meta-commentary on anthropologists' fetishistic relationship with the most personal of professional tools.
Contents
Acknowledgements; Chapter 1 Introductory notes (Anne Line Dalsgard, Cecilie Rubow and Mikkel Rytter); Chapter 2 An ecology of notes in a utopian fieldwork (Ester Fritsch, Marianne Hedegaard and Cecilie Rubow); Chapter 3 Field notes from a field of notes: anthropology and the afterlife of notes in archives (Marianne Holm Pedersen and Lars Christian Kofoed Romer); Chapter 4 The 'proto-language' of anthropological practice: an exhibition of original field notes (Sofie Isager Ahl); Chapter 5 The wind in the mirror: some notes on the unnoteworthy (Martin Demant Frederiksen); Chapter 6 The world in a grain of dust: the significance of the apparently insignificant (Maria Nielsen); Chapter 7 Life notes: when fields refuse to stay in place (Morten Schutt); Chapter 8 Risky notes: reading tense situations in Cairo 2015 (Mille Kjaergaard Thorsen); Chapter 9 ethnoGRAPHIC field notes: on drawn notes and their potentials (Mette Lind Kusk); Chapter 10 Visual note-making: photo-elicitation and photographic re-interpretations as collaborative anthropological techniques (Christian Vium); Chapter 11 Stimulating presence: on the materiality of field notes and a few Brazilian flip-flops (Anne Line Dalsgard); Chapter 12 Fourteen endnotes (Michael Taussig); Contributors; Index.
