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Anthropology Texts for TeachingETHNOGRAPHIC PRACTICE IN THE PRESENT
Edited by Marit Melhuus, Jon P. Mitchell and Helena Wulff
| 208 pages, illus. ISBN 978-1-84545-616-0 Hb $75.00/£44.00 Published (November 2009) Buy now and get 15% off listed price |
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, as well as the potential ‘costs’ of this success for the discipline. Contributors also discuss how the ethnographic method is influenced by current institutional contexts and historical "traditions" across a range of settings. Here ethnography is featured less as a methodological "tool-box" or technique but rather as a subject on which to reflect.
Marit Melhuus is Professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo. Her earlier work has been on issues of gender, morality and change in Latin America, and her publications include Machos, Mistresses, Madonnas. Contesting the Power of Latin American Gender Imagery (co-edited with Kristi Anne Stølen, Verso, 1996). Her current research concerns biotechnology, kinship, and law, and she has published numerous articles on these questions. Recent publications include Holding Worlds Together. Ethnographies of Truth and Belonging (co-edited with Marianne Lien, Berghahn, 2007) and La Norvège, vues de l’intérieur, a special issue of Ethnologie francaise (jointly edited with Sophie Chevalier and Marianne Lien, 2009).
Jon P. Mitchell is Reader in anthropology at the University of Sussex. His main ethnographic research was conducted in Malta, covering themes of ritual and religion, politics and the state, history, memory and modernity, and popular culture. His publications include Ambivalent Europeans: Ritual, Memory and the Public Sphere in Malta (Routledge, 2002), Powers of Good and Evil: Social Transformation and Popular Belief (jointly edited with Paul Clough, Berghahn, 2002), Modernity in the Mediterranean (edited special issue of Journal of Mediterranean Studies, 2002), Human Rights in Global Perspective (jointly edited with Richard Ashby Wilson, Routledge, 2003). His current research focuses on the religious origins of secular charity.
Helena Wulff is Professor of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University. Her research interests focus on expressive forms of culture in a transnational perspective, with a recent interest in writing and Irish literature as cultural process and form. Among her latest publications are Dancing at the Crossroads: Memory and Mobility in Ireland (2008, Berghahn), The Emotions: A Cultural Reader (editor, 2007, Berg), and Ballet across Borders: Career and Culture in the World of Dancers (Berg, 1998, reprinted 2001). She is also Editor of Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, the Journal of the European Association of Social Anthropologists.
Related Link:
European Association of Social-Anthropologists (EASA)
Series: Volume 11, EASA Series
Contents
Introduction
Jon P. Mitchell
Chapter 1. Ethnography and Memory
Johannes Fabian
Chapter 2. Fieldwork as Free Association and Free Passage
Judith Okely
Chapter 3. Bringing ethnography home? Costs and benefits of methodological traffic across disciplines
Thomas Widlok
Chapter 4. Ethnography at the interface: ‘corporate social responsibility’ as an anthropological field of inquiry
Christina Garsten
Chapter 5. Notes From Within a Laboratory for the Reinvention of Anthropological Method
George E. Marcus
Chapter 6. Making Ethics
Sharon Macdonald
Chapter 7. Ethnographic Practices and Methods: Some Predicaments of Russian Anthropology
Alexei Elfimov
Chapter 8. Getting the ethnography ‘right’: On female circumcision in exile
Aud Talle
Chapter 9. An Ethnography of Associations? Translocal research in the Cross River region
Ute Röschenthaler
Chapter 10. Tracking global flows and still moving: the ethnography of responses to AIDS
Cristiana Bastos
Chapter 11. Ethnography in motion: shifting fields on airport grounds
Dimitra Gefou-Madianou
Epilogue I: Re-Presenting Anthropology
Simon Coleman
Epilogue II: Prelude to a Re-functioned Ethnography
Douglas R. Holmes and George E. Marcus
Bibliography
Index