Skinboats and the Yakut ’xayik’

In this paper it is argued that the proliferation of ethnographic genres is the result of deliberate textual inventions by postmodernists, on the one hand, and a natural consequence of the method of participant‐observation by experiential ethnographers, on the other. This implies that experimental and experiential ethnographies are distinct approaches to doing and writing fieldwork and culture. Consequently, experiential ethnographies have to be reclaimed from the textualist lock‐in to which some experimental ethnographers have led the discipline. Distinguishing between the two types of ethnographies invites us also to puzzle about the role of rhetoric, empathy, and the dangers and uses of experimental and experiential ethnographies.     

When the Curtain Falls on a Fieldwork Project: The Last Chapter of a Gay Synagogue Study

Ethnographic texts preserve the historicity and losses of both the people observed and their observer. However, anthropologists rarely inform their readers about the circumstances of their departure from a fieldwork project. Without formally indicating the completion of their research goals, they usually move on to a new field and cease publishing on their former site. This procedure seemed natural enough when anthropologists conducted their studies in remote Third World locations. The constraints of distance, time, and budget made that abrupt separation seemingly inevitable and self-explanatory. But when anthropologists choose fieldwork sites that are close to home or easy to revisit, or conduct long-term research, their relationships with their subjects change radically, both during fieldwork and during the stages of writing and publishing the ethnographic text. Consequently, their eventual exit from the field involves a different process. Based on the experience of a fifteenyear engagement in the study of a gay synagogue in New York, this paper explores the latter process. The issue of exiting presents a methodological, emotional, and ethical problem meriting serious professional consideration.     

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]     

Groundwork for the Anthropology of Belgium: An Overlooked Microcosm of Europe

Like the European Union itself, the anthropology of Europe has been slowly developing for decades. Yet compared to their colleagues working at more conventional non-Western field sites, ethnographers studying present-day Europe are focusing on a region that still exists at the margins of the discipline. Thus far, anthropologists have largely neglected Belgium as an opportunity to understand the sociopolitical culture of the European continent as a whole. Through a detailed examination of historical processes that have shaped modern Belgian society, the present article highlights how this tiny nation stands as a microcosm of Europe's past, present, and potential futures. Proffering a wide-ranging analysis of the various regional and supranational spheres that Belgians inhabit, this paper outlines how ethnographic studies of belgitude (or ‘Belgianness’) can shed light on pan-European topics that are of interest to anthropologists.     

Human ecology and space age technology: Some predictions

Four predictions are made on the future of space age technologies in human and cultural ecology: first, remote sensing systems will generate a need for more fieldwork, not less; second, the services and skills of anthropologists will become essential to the interpretation of satellite data, especially as these relate to areas characterized by non-Western cultural practices; third, training in remote sensing and the use of geographic information systems will become a regular offering for anthropology students; and fourth, since these new systems and methods can be applied retrospectively to the re-analysis of earlier ethnographic works, space age technologies will be with us for some time to come.     

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.     

Telling the forest from the trees: Local images of national change in a Danish town

How can ethnographers see the ‘big picture’, while they are busy with everyday minutiae? Awareness of the local impacts of history and globalisation has revived debates about the pragmatics of fieldwork. Arguing that most fieldwork remains, for most practitioners, ‘local’, this paper explores how it is possible to apprehend change ethnographically. Something of how local people understand and experience change, as it happens to them and around them and as they contribute to it, can be grasped in ‘significant local imagery’, in this case, ‘significant people’, ‘significant things’, and ‘significant events’. These images are recognised in local discourse as indicative or ‘telling’ of change, and can be used to summarise analytically, and shed light on, wider vistas of change. This paper presents three local images deriving from fieldwork in a small town in mid-Jutland and uses them to tell a bigger story, a narrative about the modernisation of Danish society.     

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.     

EMOTIONS IN THE FIELD: WHAT ARE WE TALKING ABOUT?

In the anthropology of emotion, rival approaches – cultural relativism and a universalism based on common humanity or shared experience – imply different forms of engagement in the field. This article, a sceptical appraisal, suggests that ethnographers commonly fail to build the diversity of emotional practice into their accounts and have therefore provided a flawed basis for theorizing and comparison. With reference to two Indonesian cases – Nias and Java – I suggest that the domain of emotion is diversely bounded cross-culturally and is inconsistently constructed in particular contexts. This has critical implications for fieldwork methodology, cross-cultural comparison, and theories of human development.     

The Myth of the Male Ethnographer and the Woman's World

It is here argued that the traditionally accepted view regarding the inaccessibility of the woman's world to male ethnographers is largely a rationalization that justifies not collecting information about women, glosses over the fact that much such information is readily attainable, makes the questionable assumption that this information will be so distorted as to be useless, and erroneously implies that there are no comparable problems for male ethnographers working with the man's world.     

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.     

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.     

Samoyedic Diary: Early Years of Visual Anthropology in the Soviet Arctic

This article describes Georgii and Ekaterina Prokofiev's expedition to the Bol'shezemel'skie Nenets and their experience in filming documentary chronicles. Their records form a unique part of the visual anthropology of the Samoyedic peoples. From extant archival documents it is assumed that the chronicles were filmed with funding from the cooperation agreement that was signed by Franz Boas and Vladimir Bogoras in New York in 1928. The article offers a reconstruction of Prokofiev's fieldwork experience and his accounts of the early history of collectivization. In this regard the filmed chronicles and a collection of photos taken in the field are treated as a visual conceptualization. Available studies of visual anthropology in the USSR suggest that the documentary chronicles by the Prokofievs, made in 1929–30, are the first cinematic records to be produced by ethnographers in the Soviet Arctic.     

My Father’s Daughter: Becoming a ‘Real’ Anthropologist among the Ubang of Southeast Nigeria

This article explores some of the complexities of fieldwork for ethnographers conducting research in the ethnographic settings of significant ‘others’. The fieldwork in question took place in the rural, geographically isolated community of Ubang, in Obudu, Nigeria, where I was following in the footsteps of my anthropologist father. Drawing on personal experience, I attempt to candidly examine the challenges inevitably faced in this situation, including acceptance by the community as a bona fide researcher, pressure to fulfill the expectations of others familiar with my father’s work, and the struggle to carve out a professional identity distinct from my father’s. An earlier version of this paper, bearing the same title, first appeared in the Anthropology Matters Journal, 2007, vol 9(1). The paper is dedicated to the memory of my father, HRH Eze (Prof.) V.C. Uchendu, whose untimely death occurred after the final editing of the article, on December 7, 2006.     

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.     

Going like Gangbusters: Transnational Tobacco Companies "Making a Killing" in South America

This article reports on the recent growth of transnational tobacco companies (TTCs) in South America. Although some scholarly attention has been directed toward such growth in Asia and eastern Europe, South America has also been targeted by the TTCs' aggressive expansionist practices in recent years. Fighting "Big Tobacco" is entirely different from combating most public health problems. Unlike cigarettes, most infectious diseases and maternal and child health problems never provide profits to transnational corporations and governments. Also, most public health problems (with alcohol being another notable exception) are not exacerbated by extensive advertising campaigns that promote the cause of the health problems. Supported by data gathered during three months of fieldwork in Ecuador, Peru, Chile, and Argentina in 1997, this article suggests that the TTCs' marketing strategies override cultural differences in the choices people make regarding smoking and health. Combining critical medical anthropology and public health, this article concludes that unless dramatic actions are taken, an avoidable outbreak of tobacco-related diseases will eventually reach epidemic proportions on the South American continent. It is also a "call to arms" for more medical anthropologists to investigate tobacco-related matters around the world.     

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.     

Do "illegal" im/migrants have a right to health? Engaging ethical theory as social practice at a Tel Aviv open clinic

As the notion of a "right to health" gains influence, it is increasingly deployed in ways that are diverse, contextually variable, and at times logically inconsistent. Drawing on extended fieldwork at an Israeli human rights organization that advocates for "illegal" migrants and other vulnerable groups, this article contends that medical anthropologists cannot simply rally behind this right. Instead, we must take it as an object of ethnographic analysis and explore bow it is invoked, debated, and resisted in specific contexts. Critical ethnographies of right to health discourse and practice can enlighten us, and help us enlighten scholars in other fields, to the complexity, messiness, and "mushiness" (Sen 2009) of this right, especially in the context of advocacy on unauthorized im/migrants' behalf. It can also deepen understanding of the complicated and sometimes tense relationships among human rights, humanitarianism, and other contemporary idioms of social justice mobilization, especially in the health domain.