This volume examines some crucial issues in the conduct of fieldwork and ethnography and provides new insights into the problems of constructing anthropological knowledge. How is anthropological knowledge created from fieldwork, whose knowledge is this, who determines what is of significance in any ethnographic context, and how is the fieldsite extended in both time and place?
Nine anthropologists examine these problems, drawing on diverse case studies. These range from the dilemmas of the religious refashioning of the ethnographer in contemporary Indonesia to the embodied knowledge of ballet performers, and from ignorance about post-colonial ritual innovations by the anthropologist in highland Papua to the skilled visions of slow food producers in Italy. It is a key text for new fieldworkers as much as for established researchers. The anthropological insights developed here are of interdisciplinary relevance: cultural studies scholars, sociologists and historians will be as interested as anthropologists in this re-evaluation of fieldwork and the project of ethnography.
Table of Content
Introduction: Experiencing the Ethnographic Present: Knowing through ‘Crisis’
Narmala Halstead
Chapter 1. Knowing, Not Knowing, Knowing Anew
Eric Hirsch
Chapter 2. The Transformation of Indigenous Knowledge into Anthropological Knowledge: Whose Knowledge Is It?
David P. Crandall
Chapter 3. Knowing without Notes
Judith Okely
Chapter 4. To Know the Dancer: Formations of Fieldwork in the Ballet World
Helena Wulff
Chapter 5. Knowledge as Gifts of Self and Other
Narmala Halstead
Chapter 6. Knowledge from the Body: Fieldwork, Power and the Acquisition of a New Self
Konstantinos Retsikas
Chapter 7. What is Sacred about that Pile of Stones at Mt Tendong? Serendipity, Complicity and Circumstantial Activism in the Production of Anthropological Knowledge of Sikkim, India
Vibha Arora
Chapter 8. Learning to See: World-views, Skilled Visions, Skilled Practice
Cristina Grasseni
Chapter 9. Rescuing Theory from the Nation
Viranjini Munasinghe
Notes on Contributors
Index
About the author
Judith Okely, Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology, Hull University, is Deputy Director of the International Gender Studies Centre and Research Associate, School of Anthropology, Oxford University. She co-edited Anthropology and Autobiography (1992) and is researching Anthropological Practice. Other publications include The Traveller-Gypsies (1983), Own or Other Culture (1996) and (co-ed) Identity and Networks (2007).
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