Plotting the field

Fragments and narrative in Malinowski's stories of the baloma

Datos Bibliográficos

ID2402004
AutoresAndrew Brandel (0000-0001-6201-1635, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, autor de correspondencia), Swayam Bagaria (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Md)
Año2020
Volumen20
Número1
Páginas29-52
Fecha de publicación2020-03-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaAnthropological Theory (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1463-4996 • E-ISSN: 1741-2641
EditorialSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/1463499619830480
OpenAlexW2919512677
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas2
Referencias citadas17

Anthropologists have long relied on powerful concepts operant in the societies where they have carried out fieldwork to unlock the meanings of various, even seemingly disparate, practices and experiences, and which, in virtue of their sharing a name, are given coherence by ethnographic and ethnological texts. In this essay, we examine how anthropological icons like hau, mana, and the shaman, are created, and suggest that there might be fragments encountered during fieldwork that do not, in themselves, necessarily add up to a coherent whole, but which are fit into stories of these kinds because of the pressure of narrativity within conventional notions of anthropological theory. To illustrate this argument, we draw in particular on Malinowski's stories of the baloma, Trobriander spirits of the dead, reading his well-known fieldwork diaries alongside his published account, in order to show how life is always stitched across multiple registers of storytelling, some of which take the form of narrative and others that do not. Attending to the space between these modalities, or to their crossings, a different picture of theory begins to emerge, and which hews a bit closer to our ordinary experience of social life

Aesthetics · Argument (complex analysis · Art · Coherence (philosophical gambling strategy · Epistemology · Ethnography · Field (mathematics · Linguistics · Literature · Narrative · Narrativity · Object (grammar · Parallels · Reading (process · Sociology · Storytelling · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Cambodian History and Society · Philosophy · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies