Anthropological Locations

Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science

Datos Bibliográficos

ID7436717
AutoresRena Lederman, Akhil Gupta (0000-0002-3751-1600), James Ferguson (0000-0002-3736-0603)
Año1999
Volumen72
Número4
Páginas191-191
Fecha de publicación1999-10-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoREVIEW
RevistaAnthropological Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0003-5491 • E-ISSN: 1534-1518
EditorialJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/3317541
OpenAlexW2057435147
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas2

This collection defines an array of key issues to consider in deepening our understanding of what we might call disciplinary practices. The volume fixes its sights (sites?) on faultlines in existing constructions of field, weaknesses that have become evident as our interests have shifted with changes in the world and the academy- The separate chapters are, for the most part, critical and reflexive rather than ethnographic. They draw their conclusions on the basis of critical commentary on textual sources of various sorts and, retrospectively, on their own experiences in and around anthropology rather than investigations of anthropological practice. Gupta and Ferguson have organized their volume with care so that successive articles overlap in subtle ways. Chapters bear on one another's themes, but mostly without explicit cross-referencing. Instead, the editors' juxtapositions invite readers to compare (for example) the insider offered in their own introductory chapter (Discipline and Practice: 'The Field' as Site, Method, and Location in Anthropology) with Kuklick's chapter (After Ishmael: The Fieldwork and Its Future) which immediately follows. The first is nuanced exploration of relations between hegemonic and heterodox research practices within and bordering the discipline, in search of resources for a 'reinvention' of the tradition (p. 25). The second is an historian's defamiliarization of anthropology as one among several turn-of-the-century natural history (field) sciences undergoing important transformations. Two kinds (not just scales) of historiography are at work here. Kuklick alerts us to historiographic terms for evaluating research (rigorous documentation 11 as against privileged or even pretensions to superior . . . individual judgment [pp. 63, 641). In the next chapter Des Cherie describes her experience of doing historical research as anthropology (Locating the Past). Readers may be prompted to match Kuklick's critique of as enacting romance of manly heroics against Des Chene's plea that trips to archives also be accepted as proper fieldwork (rather than, perhaps, as proper historical research). Des Chene argues that the prominence of ahistorical functionalism helped to canonize (or localized encounter [p. 71]) as anthropological method. However, while recognizing the lack of fit between theory and method both nowadays and (in footnote) also in the past, she falls back on repeated references to field as bounded locale, rather than exploring the complexities of practice. Sustained engagement with Gupta and Ferguson's discussion of earlier heterodoxies might have helped here. Still, Des Chene's convincing argument about the potential value of multi-locale research in her work on Gurkhas foreshadows issues to be raised, few chapters later, by Martin and Passaro. As if in counterpoint to the anthropology/history dialectic, Malkki's News and Culture: Transitory Phenomena and the Fieldwork Tradition explores the relationship between anthropological and journalistic claims to authority. Like Des Chene, Malkki sees structural-functionalism as the key intradisciplinary foil, noting its disabling emphasis on social continuity. She is interested in revaluing for anthropology the experiential sense of rupture and indeterminacy in events and crisis situations (such as she encountered in refugee camps in Rwanda and Burundi), sense she argues is obscured by notions of structure and system. Finding Sahlins's structural unconvincing, she looks to genres like witnessing and testimonio (utilized, in fact, by several authors in this collection). Her position is in strong tension with Kuklick's criticism of these genres. These rich intertextual relations remain for readers to articulate: indeed, they provoke reflection on the legitimacy of different kinds of sources (experiential, documentary, etc

Historical and Cultural Archaeology Studies · Indigenous Studies and Ecology