1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910827182103321

Titolo

Being there : the fieldwork encounter and the making of truth / / edited by John Borneman, Abdellah Hammoudi

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Berkeley, : University of California Press, c2009

ISBN

1-282-77255-4

9786612772559

0-520-94343-0

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (289 p.)

Classificazione

73.02

Altri autori (Persone)

BornemanJohn <1952->

HammoudiAbdellah

Disciplina

305.8/00723

Soggetti

Ethnology - Fieldwork

Anthropology - Fieldwork

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- 1. The Fieldwork Encounter, Experience, and the Making of Truth: An Introduction -- 2. Textualism and Anthropology: On the Ethnographic Encounter, or an Experience in the Hajj -- 3. The Suicidal Wound and Fieldwork among Canadian Inuit -- 4. The Hyperbolic Vegetarian: Notes on a Fragile Subject in Gujarat -- 5. The Obligation to Receive: The Countertransference, the Ethnographer, Protestants, and Proselytization in North India -- 6. Encounter and Suspicion in Tanzania -- 7. Encounters with the Mother Tongue: Speech, Translation, and Interlocution in Post-Cold War German Repatriation -- 8. Institutional Encounters: Identification and Anonymity in Russian Addiction Treatment (and Ethnography) -- 9. Fieldwork Experience, Collaboration, and Interlocution: The "Metaphysics of Presence" in Encounters with the Syrian Mukhabarat -- 10. Afterthoughts: The Experience and Agony of Fieldwork -- Biographical Notes -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

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.