An Ethnographic Filmflam: Giving Gifts, Doing Research, and Videotaping the Native Subject/Object

Using the discussion of self-reflexivity as an organizing principle, this article examines how mobilizing digital video technology during fieldwork opens up empirical and theoretical space for reconceptualizing the relationship between anthropologists and informants. Placing the field of visual anthropology into critical conversation with long-standing theoretical arguments about the objectivist limitations of native anthropologists, I argue that the slipperiness of nativity as an anthropological designation helps to provide analytical tools for examining filmmaking as a kind of gift-giving process between native ethnographic filmmakers and the subjects of their films. This article highlights some of the ways in which my own filmic and videographic exploits in Harlem, New York, mark integral connections between seeing and being the proverbial other, probing social exchanges predicated on the usefulness of low-budget digital technology as a means of fostering politically and epistemologically valuable ethnographic collaborations.     

Sows' Ears and Silver Linings. A Backward Look at Ethnography

Globalization, changing views of science, and alterations in the culture concept have gradually modified the way fieldwork is perceived within anthropology. This paper briefly examines the contributions of four ethnographers in order to argue that ethnography based on fieldwork remains essential to our definition as a profession. The claim is made here that unless anthropologists continue to make fieldwork central, anthropological theory will be cut off from its grounding in data. Other observers, less skilled than anthropologists but more daring, will increasingly supplant ethnographers in gathering new information that they then interpret and in claiming the public readership that anthropologists were once able successfully to address.     

Language in fieldwork: Making visible the ethnographic impact of the researcher's linguistic fluency

This paper analyses the impact of the researcher's linguistic fluency or competence (or lack thereof) on the data collection process during fieldwork and subsequent analysis. We focus on researcher interaction with the field in a largely monolingual setting in Japan, and the multilingual setting of an international school in Indonesia. Researcher positionality during fieldwork shifts with their (perceived) linguistic fluency, which in turn affects the data. Despite the emphasis on reflexive ethnography, anthropological research rarely interrogates the impact of the researcher's linguistic fluency on the field. We attribute this silence to the perception that highlighting researcher language ability may compromise their ethnographic authority. In this paper we use self‐reflexivity to make visible the ethnographic impact that the researcher's language ability has on fieldwork processes. We argue that being self‐reflexive about our linguistic fluency, or lack thereof, does not necessarily compromise our analysis.     

The ethics and obligations of long-term ethnographic relationships: revelatory moments and the concept of solidarity

This article reflects on an ethical and revelatory moment in the development of my long-term fieldwork relationships with people of the Lihir Islands in Papua New Guinea. Ethnographic research globally is now shaped through formal processes of ethical review, with the requirements for informed consent, privacy, and consideration of harm and beneficence. Researchers then have to put these procedures into practice, often encountering the need to weigh competing ethical principles, particularly when unforeseen events occur. Reflexivity has been argued to be crucial on these occasions. Yet both ethical codes and reflexivity fall short of managing ethical and relational implications of long-term field relationships. This article suggests that the concept of solidarity as theorized recently in bioethics may be helpful, particularly the discernment of three layers of relationship. What responsibilities might we as anthropologists have to the people we work with that go beyond procedural ethics? And how do moments such as the one described in this article shape ongoing field research?     

Negotiating Dangerous Fields: Pragmatic Strategies for Fieldwork amid Violence and Terror

As anthropology turns toward the cultural issues of the 21 st century, more and more ethnographic fieldwork is and will continue to be conducted in regions fraught with conflict, instability, and terror. Despite a growing literature that seeks to develop new theories and perspectives for the study of violence, little mention is made of the practical matters of survival in perilous field sites and how the anthropologist's experience of violence in the field should be considered. What is needed is a pragmatic strategy for dealing with threats to the safety, security, and well-being of anthropologists and informants who work amid the menace of violence. Drawing on my own fieldwork in Haiti, I suggest the adoption of new tactics for ethnographic research and survival in dangerous fields—strategies that challenge the conventional ethics of the discipline, reconfigure the relationship between anthropologist and informant, and compel innovation in negotiating the exchange of data under hazardous circumstances. [Keywords: fieldwork, violence, methodology, ethics, Haiti]     

Vatted dreams: neurophilosophy and the politics of phenomenal internalism

Despite much social‐scientific work on the neurosciences, little ethnographic and historical attention has been paid to the field of neurophilosophy. Yet anthropologists studying brain research occasionally critique neurophilosophers for reducing the mind to the brain while affirmatively citing philosophers of mind who present the mind as emerging from interactions between brain, body, and environment. This article examines the ostracized camp of so‐called ‘phenomenal internalists’ – neurophilosophers who believe that consciousness can supervene on the brain alone. This ontological commitment is driven by certain existential and political experiences from false awakenings to disenchantment with the counterculture of the 1970s. But it also draws from neuroscientific research on the dreaming brain. The inquiry concludes with a plea to anthropologists to attend to relations of detachment, both social and neural, and to reconsider their own ontological commitment to externalism in the light of dream research.     

Anthropology at Home in Australia

This introductory essay takes ‘anthropology at home’ to refer to the conduct of fieldwork and other kinds of anthropological research in or about communities which Australian anthropologists regard as culturally familiar. In that sense, anthropology at home raises two interrelated questions: 1) ‘What is an appropriate anthropological object?’ and 2) ‘What are the appropriate methods for studying that object?’ I argue that anthropology remains overdetermined by its colonial heritage and that it is still overly concerned with the study of ‘the other’ through long-term fieldwork. My feeling is that we should displace the idea of ‘the other’ in favour of an anthropological object construed in terms of self-other relationships. This not only implies that anthropology at home should cease to appear as an oxymoron, but also suggests that a more comprehensive employment of various study methods should displace long-term fieldwork as metonymic of the discipline.     

Plains History and Cultural Anthropology

Abstract

Recent cutbacks in research funding and the burgeoning population of anthropology graduate departments may soon force cultural anthropologists to recognize what their archaeological colleagues have long known: their own “backyard” is a field for fertile research. Specifically, cultural anthropologists may turn increasingly to using long-neglected data sources - rich in documentation - on Anglo-Saxon America. This paper briefly investigates some reasons for the study of American historical data and presents a preliminary analysis of some data.     

Is 2020 the year when primatologists should cancel fieldwork?

Year 2020 has brought the greatest global pandemic to hit the world since the end of the First World War. The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 and the resulting disease named coronavirus disease 2019 has brought the world to its knees both financially and medically. The American Society of Primatologists has postponed their annual meetings from the end of May 2020 until the end of September 2020, while the International Primatological Society have postponed their biennial congress from August 2020 to August 2021, which has also resulted in their 2022 meetings in Malaysia being pushed back until 2023. Here, I explore the potential dangers of pursuing any primate fieldwork during this pandemic on our study species, their ecosystems, and local peoples. I believe that the risk of bringing this virus into our study ecosystems is too great and that primatologists should cancel all field research until the pandemic ends or a vaccine/reliable treatment is widely available. This is the year we all must become One Health practitioners!     

Capitalist Philanthropy and Russian Revolutionaries: The Jesup North Pacific Expedition (1897-1902)

This review of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, still the most important expedition in American anthropology, gives an idea of the goals and hazards of fieldwork around 1900, the pitfalls of international research, the tensions between anthropologists and host populations, the careers of early anthropologists, the role of private philanthropy, and the character of anthropology at the turn of the century. Franz Boas was the Expedition's linchpin. His organization of the Expedition, the way he handled problems, and his personal concerns reveal aspects of his view of anthropology and some of his basic attitudes.     

Biological anthropology of aging--past,present and future

Biological anthropologists have a strong tradition of studying growth and development and research on aging has been limited. This paper explores the past and current contribution of biological anthropologists to the field of aging through an examination of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology (AJPA) and the American Journal of Human Biology (AJHB). It is clear from this survey that biological anthropologists and human biologists have predominantly studied growth and developmental processes relative to aging. However, there is a trend of increasing interest in aging over time. In the AJHB, papers discussing chronic disease were predominant, followed by reproductive aging (19%), bone aging (15%) and body composition (10%). Within the AJPA, the majority of articles were in the field of human biology (43%) and bioarchaelogy (42%) with a lesser contribution from primatology (14%) and dermatogliphics (1%). Biological anthropologists still have great potential to make contributions to gerontology with our evolutionary and holistic perspectives and focus on cross-cultural research.     

Physiological anthropology: past and future

Environmental studies in adaptive human biology by North American anthropologists have a history of strong investigative research. From both laboratory and field work, we have gained major insights into human response to physical and social challenges. While these results were considered by most professionals to belong within evolutionary biology, in fact the intellectual structure sprang almost entirely from physiological equilibrium models. Consequently, physiological process itself was the focus. Further, most of the physiological patterns were not linked directly to important outcomes such as work output, reproductive success or survival.About 1975, American physiological anthropologists, led by Paul Baker, turned to studies of health, change and stress response. These studies were strong, but were still neither genetic nor evolutionary in intellectual structure. Evolutionary human biology was taken over by a new body of theory now called "behavior ecology", positing that selfish genes control human behavior to promote their own reproduction. This was paralleled by strong use of evolutionary theory in some areas of molecular biology. However, although physiological anthropologists have not focused on evolution, we have been developing powerful causal models that incorporate elements of physiology, morphology, physical environment and cultural behavior. In these "proximate" biocultural models, it is of little importance whether outcomes such as work or energy management are genetically based.Our future offers two major challenges. First, we must confirm causal links between specific physiological patterns and outcomes of practical importance to individuals and societies. Second, if we are to take our place in evolutionary biology, the one overarching theory of life on earth, we must understand the heritability of physiological traits, and determine whether they play a role in survival and reproduction.     

Politicized and depoliticized ethnicities,power relations and temporality: insights to outsider research from comparative and transnational fieldwork

The insider and outsider positions in migration studies have conventionally been approached in terms of ethnic or national belonging. Recently scholars have problematized the essentialist approaches to these roles by arguing for the inclusion of multiple intersecting social locations that are at play in the constitution of researcher positionality. Less attention has been paid, however, on how different ethnicities are constructed and how they can become politicized and depoliticized at particular moments during the research process. This article discusses the fieldwork experiences of two “apparent outsiders” to the studied diaspora community. Drawing from our experiences in multi-sited and comparative fieldwork on the Kurdish diaspora, we argue that rather than taking insider and outsider positions as a starting-point to understand researcher positionality, scholars need to look at particular moments of insiderness and outsiderness to grasp how the researcher’s assumed ethnicity becomes politicized and depoliticized during ethnographic fieldwork.     

Harmonic Dissonance: Reflections on Dwelling in the Field

Focusing on the idea of dwelling in the field, this paper explores the moral grammar of living with others in field settings, including the texture of membership in one's own family and host families. Through a comparative analysis of two ethnographic research contexts – one on transnational Christian non-governmental organizations in the US and Zimbabwe in 1996 –97, and the other on orphans and philanthropy in India in 2004–05 – I interrogate what it means to inhabit the field. In the world of multi-sited ethnography all research sites are not created equal; both in terms of the kinds of data one can collect and the types of observations one can make. How ethnographers are situated in a web of affliations affects their experience in the field, what they observe, and their research practice. I propose renewed attention to how anthropologists live in the field, including how relationships are interpreted in the field by ethnographers and their informants.     

Everything lies in a space: cultural data and spatial reality

This essay examines the use of spatializing techniques for analysing cultural data, drawing on fieldwork with developers of music recommender systems in the United States. Comparing these practices with related analytic techniques developed by post-war cognitive anthropologists, it explores three broad topics: how such techniques engender a sense of continuous, enveloping milieu from discrete and often sparse data; how spatialization is used to grant culture a kind of reality rooted in pragmatic action and scientific quantification; and how spatial representations of culture are essentially anticipatory for the people who make them, transforming the near future into the nearby.     

The emergence of biomedical anthropology and its implications for the future

Primarily during the past 15 years a distinct new area within physical anthropology has emerged, biomedical anthropology. Physical anthropologists have become heavily involved in studying problems of relevance to the health and illness patterns of living humans. There has been a proportionate increase in biomedically focused papers published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, in biomedically focused papers presented at annual meetings of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, and in physical anthropology doctoral dissertations oriented toward modern biomedical phenomena. Proportionately more physical anthropologists are now employed in medical schools and there has been recent growth in the proportion of physical anthropologists in anthropology departments who claim some aspect of biomedical anthropology as a research interest. Increasingly, physical anthropologists are focusing their research on cardiovascular disease, the leading cause of death in America. These distinct trends are partially a result of the nature of physical anthropology and its unique biocultural perspective. However the growth of applied anthropology, the present academic marketplace, and the availability of research funds are probably also contributing factors. The emergency of biomedical anthropology holds promise for the future of physical anthropology and for its current employment crisis. Careers with academic and nonacademic organizations engaged in biomedical research appear to be a viable alternative to careers in departments of anthropology, for biomedical anthropologists. This will entail some reorientation of graduate training for physical anthropologists. More emphasis will have to be placed on substantive biomedical subjects, research methods, and data management and analysis.     

‘It was maendeleo that removed them’: disturbing burials and reciprocal knowledge production in a context of collaborative archaeology

Recent decades have witnessed a growth in approaches to research and writing across anthropology's four fields that emphasize the need to respect alternative narratives and constructions of history, and to engage with anthropology's ‘publics’. These developments have generated more ethically responsible research and more inclusive writing practices. Nevertheless, the actual doing of cross‐cultural collaboration and knowledge production remains a challenge. In this three‐field (cultural, biological, and archaeological anthropology) study, we aim to capture, in writing, a process of collaborative fieldwork with Samburu pastoralists in northern Kenya that experimentally integrated ethnographic self‐scrutiny with a bio‐archaeological excavation involving human remains. In the process, we highlight the reciprocal knowledge production that this cross‐subdisciplinary, transcultural fieldwork produced.