The ethnographer's magic as sympathetic magic
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 18957730 |
|---|---|
| Authors | K Weston (0000-0002-9524-7334, Department of Anthropology; University of Virginia; Charlottesville VA 22904-4120 USA, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2018 |
| Volume | 26 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 15-29 |
| Publication date | 2018-02-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Social Anthropology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0964-0282 • E-ISSN: 1469-8676 |
| Publisher | Berghahn Books (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/1469-8676.12492 |
| OpenAlex | W2792148182 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 7 |
| References cited | 18 |
With all the attention paid to empathy in recent years, sympathy has received short shrift. Yet it is sympathy that has the longer legacy in anthropology, both as a descriptor for certain ways of relating to the world, and as a moral passion that characterises something important about the relationship between ethnographers and those they study. By juxtaposing biographical accounts of the author's own research with a reading of 18th‐century texts from the Scottish Enlightenment on sympathy, this essay calls into question the assumption that sympathy arises from, even as it generates, culturally inscribed forms of empathy or closeness. I argue that what Malinowski called ‘the ethnographer's magic’ is (or can be) a sympathetic magic woven from biographical threads, depending for its efficacy on concealment and action at a proximate distance, rather than ‘shared experience’, identification with research participants, or affective appeals
Aesthetics · Empathy · Enlightenment · Epistemology · Ethnography · Inscribed figure · MAGIC (telescope) · Passion · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Sympathy · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Culinary Culture and Tourism · Philosophy · Psychology · Qualitative Research Methods and Ethics · Social Psychology
Redescribing Relations
Fieldnotes
Flashbulb memories
The ethnographer's magic and other essays in the history of anthropology
Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande
Theodor Zwinger's Methodus Apodemica
Resentment and History in the Scottish Enlightenment
Anthropological Locations
Objectivity and the Escape from Perspective
The Golden Bough
The Ethnographic Experiment
The Infidel and the Professor
Binary License
The Moral Neoliberal
Political Systems of Highland Burma, a Study of Kachin Social Structure
Primitive Classification (Routledge Revivals)
Analogy and (White) Feminist Theory
| Citations per year | 0.88 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2018 - 2025 (8) |
| Highly cited | No |