Judith Okely
Biographic Data
| ID | 3637686 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Judith Okely |
| GIVEN NAMES | Judith |
| FAMILY NAME | Okely |
| SIGNATURE | OKELY J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Hull |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 40 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 124 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 39 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1969 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Locked out in Oxford: A review
This article explores some implications of the experience of being locked down in the city where the author lived as undergraduate and as postgraduate following anthropological fieldwork. The author returned to Oxford after early retirement and university appointments around the UK and Europe. Enforced residence for months in one dwelling and location triggered past incidents linked to place. A 21st century perspective provoked contrasts with sex…
Part 1: Tribal Peoples, History and Ethnology
Three authors reflect on their conversations and interactions with Sue with particular reference to her fieldwork in south-west Iran in the mid-1970s and how that influenced her subsequent research on community development, organisations and social change
Autobiography, Anthropology: A Personal Historical Recollection
In the 1980s, the theme for a future ASA conference had to be personally proposed by a potential organiser at the conference two years earlier. The proposer had to personally convince attending participants, who decided by a visible vote of hands. This recollection on the theme ’‘Anthropology and Autobiography’’ traces the successful 1987 vote for the 1989 conference proposed by myself with Helen Callaway. Before the vote, there were many negativ…
Debating Authenticity: Concepts of Modernity in Anthropological Perspective
The longing for authenticity, on an individual or collective level, connects the search for external expressions to internal orientations. What is largely referred to as production of authenticity is a reformulation of cultural values and norms within the ongoing process of modernity, impacted by globalization and contemporary transnational cultural flows. This collection interrogates the notion of authenticity from an anthropological point of vi…
Ethnographic Practice in the Present
In its assessment of the current "state of play" of ethnographic practice in social anthropology, this volume explores the challenges that changing social forms and changing understandings of "the field" pose to contemporary ethnographic methods. These challenges include the implications of the remarkable impact social anthropology is having on neighboring disciplines such as history, sociology, cultural studies, human geography and linguistics, …
Anthropological Practice: Fieldwork and the Ethnographic Method
Anthropologists are increasingly pressurised to formulate field methods for teaching. Unlike many hypothesis-driven ethnographic texts, this book is designed with the specific needs of the anthropology student and field researcher in mind, with particular emphasis on the core anthropological method: long term participant observation. Anthropological Practice explores fieldwork experiences unique to anthropology, and provides the context by which …
Autobiography, Anthropology and
A written account of the self as autobiography in anthropology can be created either by the researcher/outsider or by an individual member of a group studied by an anthropologist. Both types of autobiography were initially sidelined in the history of the discipline but are open to greater attention
G ypsies ( R omany People, Travellers)
“Gypsy,” “Romany,” and “Traveller” are only some of the titles of the various mobile groups found in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia. This entry concentrates on Gypsies, Romany people, or Travellers linked to the United Kingdom. The label “Roma” is adopted by groups mainly in the European continent. It has not been used among travelling peoples in Britain. The UK Gypsy Council survives from the mid‐1960s.
Retrospective Reading of Fieldnotes. Living on Gypsy Camps
Decades after embarking on research among Gypsies, I examine that earlier context when there was little published discussion of participant observation practice. Snatched advice and rare texts suggested an open-ended approach rather than limited hypothesis. The anthropologist's first weeks of chronological narrative without selection of relevance, vindicate a holistic perspective. Details reveal themes prophetically to emerge as central. There ar…
The Dale farm eviction: Interview with Judith Okely on Gypsies and Travellers (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)
Dale Farm, an Irish Traveller site in Essex which until recently was occupied by multiple families, gained national and some international publicity in October 2011, when an eviction order against its unauthorized settlement was enforced. In this interview, Judith Okely, who has performed fieldwork and research with traveller communities, reflects on the issues surrounding the eviction
Some political consequences of theories of Gypsy ethnicity: The place of the intellectual
Anthropology and autobiography: Participatory experience and embodied knowledge
Vicarious and sensory knowledge of chronology and change: Ageing in rural France
ASA 2010 (Respond to this article at http: (Www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)
Knowing How to Know: Fieldwork and the Ethnographic Present
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 s…
Response to George E. Marcus: ‘How Short Can Fieldwork Be?’
Reply to George E. Marcus: ‘How Short Can Fieldwork Be?’
La justice des Tsiganes contre la loi des Gadjé
Au lieu de procéder à une classique étude comparée des Tsiganes - de culture orale - et des Gadjé, l'article met en évidence l'interrelation de leurs différences. Ainsi les Gadjé sont-ils souvent utilisés, individuellement ou en groupe, par les Tsiganes pour régler leurs conflits internes. Des matériaux inédits, comprenant des études de cas tirés d'un terrain mené en Angleterre dans les années 1970, fondent l'étude interculturelle menée ici
Fieldwork Embodied
Participation entails bodily engagement. Participant observation has been integral to anthropological fieldwork. Although cross-cultural ideas of the body have been elaborated theoretically in social anthropology, the Cartesian mind/body dichotomy has privileged the cerebral in the understanding of fieldwork practice and the bodily experience of the fieldworker has been under-scrutinized. In seeking to rectify this situation, this chapter draws o…
Changing Senses Across Cultures
2006). Changing Senses Across Cultures. The Senses and Society: Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 277-281
Gypsy Justice versus Gorgio Law: Interrelations of Difference
Resonating with Frankenberg, this article explores the role of the individual stranger/outsider. The non-Gypsy (gorgio) individual or system is often used to settle internal disputes among Traveller-Gypsies, although rarely in the relatively benign role, as in Frankenberg's study. The outsider's system, while representing centuries of sedentarist and racist persecution, may also be open to manipulation. While popular discourse represents the Gyps…
The filmed return of the natives — to a colonizing territory of terror
Until the 1970s, sexual and social fidelity was essential for upper-middle-class English women. They had to preserve the cultural capital of their class. This was achieved primarily through the boarding school which was set invariably in rural or non-metropolitan areas. The total institution formed bonds of shared deprivation. For females, once destined to be the servers and breeders for male colonists, subservience and a lobotomized intellect we…
Vicarious and sensory knowledge of chronology and change
This chapter is concerned less with the limitations of written, indigenous texts than with those of the spoken word in conveying a people's changing and past experience. It focuses on knowledge beyond language, less as extrasensory perception than as that which comes from all the senses, both of the fieldworker and of the subjects. The earlier belief that all knowledge could be traced back to immediate sense data, fails to recognize the way in wh…
Deterritorialised and Spatially Unbounded Cultures within Other Regimes
Patrick Williams. 2003. Gypsy World: The Silence of the Living and the Voices of the Dead. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. The Gypsies or Roma are an example of a people who live within the space and dominant culture of others. It is only from the late 1980s or later that non territorialised, non spatially bounded groups and identities have captured the imagination of mainstream anthropology which recognises the changing implications of mig…
Visualism and Landscape: Looking and Seeing in Normandy
Critiques of visualism, i.e. an epistemological 'bias toward vision', have focussed on surveillance and overview. Taking a different perspective, this paper differentiates looking from seeing, the latter being linked to all the senses. Discussions of landscape appreciation in Western literature have reflected a similar restriction to the distant or privileged gaze. Theorists have rendered invisible the labourers' and inhabitants' view of landscap…
Fieldwork Embodied
Participation entails bodily engagement. Participant observation has been integral to anthropological fieldwork. Although cross-cultural ideas of the body have been elaborated theoretically in social anthropology, the Cartesian mind/body dichotomy has privileged the cerebral in the understanding of fieldwork practice and the bodily experience of the fieldworker has been under-scrutinized. In seeking to rectify this situation, this chapter draws o…
Visualism and Landscape: Looking and Seeing in Normandy
Critiques of visualism, i.e. an epistemological 'bias toward vision', have focussed on surveillance and overview. Taking a different perspective, this paper differentiates looking from seeing, the latter being linked to all the senses. Discussions of landscape appreciation in Western literature have reflected a similar restriction to the distant or privileged gaze. Theorists have rendered invisible the labourers' and inhabitants' view of landscap…
Defiant Moments: Gender, Resistance and Individuals
Non-Territorial Culture as The Rationale for the Assimilation of Gypsy Children
This article argues that the ambiguous status of a travelling ethnic group has implications for the state's interest in the assimilation of that group. The social reproduction of the group through the education of children becomes a crucial site of struggle. The Gypsies have to adapt to or subvert the dominant hegemony of sedentarism and the priveleging of a permanent place for identity. They must also retain control over their social reproductio…
Anthropological Practice: Fieldwork and the Ethnographic Method
Anthropologists are increasingly pressurised to formulate field methods for teaching. Unlike many hypothesis-driven ethnographic texts, this book is designed with the specific needs of the anthropology student and field researcher in mind, with particular emphasis on the core anthropological method: long term participant observation. Anthropological Practice explores fieldwork experiences unique to anthropology, and provides the context by which …
Response to George E. Marcus: ‘How Short Can Fieldwork Be?’
Gypsy Justice versus Gorgio Law: Interrelations of Difference
Resonating with Frankenberg, this article explores the role of the individual stranger/outsider. The non-Gypsy (gorgio) individual or system is often used to settle internal disputes among Traveller-Gypsies, although rarely in the relatively benign role, as in Frankenberg's study. The outsider's system, while representing centuries of sedentarist and racist persecution, may also be open to manipulation. While popular discourse represents the Gyps…
Ethnographic Practice in the Present
In its assessment of the current "state of play" of ethnographic practice in social anthropology, this volume explores the challenges that changing social forms and changing understandings of "the field" pose to contemporary ethnographic methods. These challenges include the implications of the remarkable impact social anthropology is having on neighboring disciplines such as history, sociology, cultural studies, human geography and linguistics, …
Anthropology and Autobiography
Fieldwork in the Home Counties
Debating Authenticity: Concepts of Modernity in Anthropological Perspective
The longing for authenticity, on an individual or collective level, connects the search for external expressions to internal orientations. What is largely referred to as production of authenticity is a reformulation of cultural values and norms within the ongoing process of modernity, impacted by globalization and contemporary transnational cultural flows. This collection interrogates the notion of authenticity from an anthropological point of vi…
The Dale farm eviction: Interview with Judith Okely on Gypsies and Travellers (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)
Dale Farm, an Irish Traveller site in Essex which until recently was occupied by multiple families, gained national and some international publicity in October 2011, when an eviction order against its unauthorized settlement was enforced. In this interview, Judith Okely, who has performed fieldwork and research with traveller communities, reflects on the issues surrounding the eviction
La justice des Tsiganes contre la loi des Gadjé
Au lieu de procéder à une classique étude comparée des Tsiganes - de culture orale - et des Gadjé, l'article met en évidence l'interrelation de leurs différences. Ainsi les Gadjé sont-ils souvent utilisés, individuellement ou en groupe, par les Tsiganes pour régler leurs conflits internes. Des matériaux inédits, comprenant des études de cas tirés d'un terrain mené en Angleterre dans les années 1970, fondent l'étude interculturelle menée ici
Gypsies and Government Policy in England. A Study of the Traveller's Way of Life in Relation to the Policies and Practices of Central and Local Government
Gypsies: Current Policies and Practices
This article describes current policies and practices in relation to English Gypsies and a study of Gypsies by participant observation. While governments in the past have always sought to prevent the Gypsies from travelling, local authorities have been equally concerned to prevent camping or settlement in their district. Despite the Caravan Sites Act 1968, which makes the provision of caravan sites mandatory, many authorities are reluctant to ful…
Deterritorialised and Spatially Unbounded Cultures within Other Regimes
Patrick Williams. 2003. Gypsy World: The Silence of the Living and the Voices of the Dead. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. The Gypsies or Roma are an example of a people who live within the space and dominant culture of others. It is only from the late 1980s or later that non territorialised, non spatially bounded groups and identities have captured the imagination of mainstream anthropology which recognises the changing implications of mig…
Confronting Positionality
Drawing on a multiplicity of learning, teaching and educational experiences, I argue that understanding positionality, or the specificity of each individual, triggers necessary unlearning. Confronting hitherto hidden, subjective knowledge may be the means to recognize grounded learning as ethnocentric and time and space specific. The individual may learn positionality through unexpected contrast, especially through anthropology. The anthropologis…
Confronting Positionality
Drawing on a multiplicity of learning, teaching and educational experiences, I argue that understanding positionality, or the specificity of each individual, triggers necessary unlearning. Confronting hitherto hidden, subjective knowledge may be the means to recognize grounded learning as ethnocentric and time and space specific. The individual may learn positionality through unexpected contrast, especially through anthropology. The anthropologis…
Response to Amy Pollard
Gypsies: Current Policies and Practices
This article describes current policies and practices in relation to English Gypsies and a study of Gypsies by participant observation. While governments in the past have always sought to prevent the Gypsies from travelling, local authorities have been equally concerned to prevent camping or settlement in their district. Despite the Caravan Sites Act 1968, which makes the provision of caravan sites mandatory, many authorities are reluctant to ful…
Gypsies and Government Policy in England. A Study of the Traveller's Way of Life in Relation to the Policies and Practices of Central and Local Government
Gypsies. The Hidden Americans
The Traveller-Gypsies
In this book Judith Okely challenges popular accounts of Gypsies which suggest that they were once isolated communities, enjoying an autonomous culture and economy now largely eroded by the processes of industrialisation and western capitalism. Dr Okely draws on her own extensive fieldwork and on contemporary documents. The Traveller-Gypsies is the first monograph to be published on Gypsies in Britain using the perspective of social anthropology.…
Fieldwork in the Home Counties
The Traveller Gypsies
Short reviews
Milton J. Esman and Itamar Rabinovich (eds), ETHNICITY, PLURALISM, AND THE STATE IN THE MIDDLE EAST, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988, 304 pp., $35.00 cloth, $12.95 paper. Akbar S. Ahmed, DISCOVERING ISLAM, MAKING SENSE OF MUSLIM HISTORY AND SOCIETY, London: Routledge, 1988, 251 pp., £9.99 (paper). Edmund Burke, III and Ira M. Lapidus (eds), ISLAM, POLITICS, AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS, London: I. B. Tauris, 1988, 332 pp., £29.50. Asaf …
Defiant Moments: Gender, Resistance and Individuals
Anthropology and Autobiography
1. Anthropology and autobiography: participatory experience and embodied Knowledge Judith Okely 2. Ethnography and experience: gender implications in fieldwork and text Helen Callaway 3. Automythologies and the reconstruction of ageing Paul Spencer 4. Spirits and sex: a Swahili informant and his diary Pat Caplan 5. Putting out the life: from biography to ideology among the Earth People Roland Littlewood 6. Racism, terror and the production of Aus…
Anthropology and Autobiography
Non-Territorial Culture as The Rationale for the Assimilation of Gypsy Children
This article argues that the ambiguous status of a travelling ethnic group has implications for the state's interest in the assimilation of that group. The social reproduction of the group through the education of children becomes a crucial site of struggle. The Gypsies have to adapt to or subvert the dominant hegemony of sedentarism and the priveleging of a permanent place for identity. They must also retain control over their social reproductio…
Own or Other Culture
Portrait of a Greek Imagination: An Ethnographic Biography of Andreas Nenedakis
Portrait of Greek Imagination: An Ethnographic Biography of Andreas Nenedakis. MICHAEL HERZFELD. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997; 333 pp. The dialogue between literature and ethnography is developed in innovative ways in this scholarly and imaginative text. The anthropologist has known the other author throughout his own fieldwork in Crete and is given unique opportunity to link the work of an indigenous intellectual and novelist wi…
Visualism and Landscape: Looking and Seeing in Normandy
Critiques of visualism, i.e. an epistemological 'bias toward vision', have focussed on surveillance and overview. Taking a different perspective, this paper differentiates looking from seeing, the latter being linked to all the senses. Discussions of landscape appreciation in Western literature have reflected a similar restriction to the distant or privileged gaze. Theorists have rendered invisible the labourers' and inhabitants' view of landscap…
The filmed return of the natives — to a colonizing territory of terror
Until the 1970s, sexual and social fidelity was essential for upper-middle-class English women. They had to preserve the cultural capital of their class. This was achieved primarily through the boarding school which was set invariably in rural or non-metropolitan areas. The total institution formed bonds of shared deprivation. For females, once destined to be the servers and breeders for male colonists, subservience and a lobotomized intellect we…
Vicarious and sensory knowledge of chronology and change
This chapter is concerned less with the limitations of written, indigenous texts than with those of the spoken word in conveying a people's changing and past experience. It focuses on knowledge beyond language, less as extrasensory perception than as that which comes from all the senses, both of the fieldworker and of the subjects. The earlier belief that all knowledge could be traced back to immediate sense data, fails to recognize the way in wh…
Deterritorialised and Spatially Unbounded Cultures within Other Regimes
Patrick Williams. 2003. Gypsy World: The Silence of the Living and the Voices of the Dead. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. The Gypsies or Roma are an example of a people who live within the space and dominant culture of others. It is only from the late 1980s or later that non territorialised, non spatially bounded groups and identities have captured the imagination of mainstream anthropology which recognises the changing implications of mig…
Gypsy Justice versus Gorgio Law: Interrelations of Difference
Resonating with Frankenberg, this article explores the role of the individual stranger/outsider. The non-Gypsy (gorgio) individual or system is often used to settle internal disputes among Traveller-Gypsies, although rarely in the relatively benign role, as in Frankenberg's study. The outsider's system, while representing centuries of sedentarist and racist persecution, may also be open to manipulation. While popular discourse represents the Gyps…
Changing Senses Across Cultures
2006). Changing Senses Across Cultures. The Senses and Society: Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 277-281
La justice des Tsiganes contre la loi des Gadjé
Au lieu de procéder à une classique étude comparée des Tsiganes - de culture orale - et des Gadjé, l'article met en évidence l'interrelation de leurs différences. Ainsi les Gadjé sont-ils souvent utilisés, individuellement ou en groupe, par les Tsiganes pour régler leurs conflits internes. Des matériaux inédits, comprenant des études de cas tirés d'un terrain mené en Angleterre dans les années 1970, fondent l'étude interculturelle menée ici
Fieldwork Embodied
Participation entails bodily engagement. Participant observation has been integral to anthropological fieldwork. Although cross-cultural ideas of the body have been elaborated theoretically in social anthropology, the Cartesian mind/body dichotomy has privileged the cerebral in the understanding of fieldwork practice and the bodily experience of the fieldworker has been under-scrutinized. In seeking to rectify this situation, this chapter draws o…
Knowing How to Know: Fieldwork and the Ethnographic Present
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 s…
Response to George E. Marcus: ‘How Short Can Fieldwork Be?’
Sociology (25 works) · History (18 works) · Romani and Gypsy Studies (15 works) · Anthropology (13 works) · Art (12 works) · Political science (11 works) · Geography (9 works) · History (9 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (8 works) · Psychology (8 works)