E-Book Overview
What happens when anthropologists lose themselves during fieldwork while attempting to understand divergent cultures? When they stray from rigorous agendas and are forced to confront radically unexpected or unexplained experiences? In Extraordinary Anthropology leading ethnographers from across the globe discuss the importance of the deeply personal and emotionally volatile ecstatic” side of fieldwork.
Anthropologists who have worked in communities in Central America, North America, Australia, Africa, and Asia share their intimate experiences of tranformations in the field through details of significant dreams, haunting visions, and their own conflicting emotional tensions. Their experiences demonstrate the necessary fluidity of research agendas, the value of going beyond an accepted (and safe) cultural and academic vantage point, and the inevitability of wrestling with tension and unhappiness when faced with irreconcilable cultural and psychological dichotomies. The contributors explore ways in which conventional research methods can be adapted to creatively engage the intellectual, ethical, and practical dimensions of these dislocations and capitalize on them. Unsettling and revealing, Extraordinary Anthropology will spark debate and reflection among anthropologists for years to come.
(20080506)
E-Book Content
Extraordinary Anthropology
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Extraordinary Anthropology Transformations in the Field
edited by and
Jean-Guy A. Goulet
Bruce Granville Miller
with a preface by
Johannes Fabian
u niv ersity of ne bras ka p re s s li nc oln & londo n
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Portions of “On Puzzling Wavelengths” originally appeared in Journeys to the Edge: In the Footsteps of an Anthropologist by Peter M. Gardner, by permission of the University of Missouri Press. © 2006 by the Curators of the University of Missouri. “Moving Beyond Culturally Bound Ethical Guidelines” was first published in 2004 as “Une question éthique venue de l’autre monde: Au-delà du grand partage entre nous et les autres,” in Anthropologie et Sociétés 28 (1): 109–26. © 2007 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Catalogingin-Publication Data Extraordinary anthropology : transformations in the field / edited by Jean-Guy A. Goulet and Bruce Granville Miller ; with a preface by Johannes Fabian. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn-13: 978-0-8032-5992-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) isbn-10: 0-8032-5992-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Ethnopsychology. 2. Dreams. 3. Ecstasy. 4. Ethnology—Field work. I. Goulet, Jean-Guy. II. Miller, Bruce G., 1951– gn502.e98 2007 305.8—dc22 2006036210
To Victor Turner and Edith Turner, who have inspired so many within anthropology and beyond
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Contents
Preface
ix
Johannes Fabian Acknowledgments
xiii
Map of communities discussed
xviii
Embodied Knowledge: Steps toward a Radical Anthropology of Cross-cultural Encounters 1 Jean-Guy A. Goulet and Bruce Granville Miller part o n e: Beyond Our Known Worlds 15 1. On Puzzling Wavelengths 17 Peter M. Gardner 2. On Presence 36 Petra Rethmann 3. Reveal or Conceal? 53 Barbara Wilkes part t wo: Entanglements and Faithfulness to Experience 85 4. Recursive Epistemologies and an Ethics of Attention 88 Deborah Bird Rose 5. Ethnographic Rendez-vous: Field Accounts of Unexpected Vulnerabilities and Constructed Differences 103 Anahí Viladrich 6. When the Extraordinary Hits Home: Experiencing Spiritualism 124 Deirdre Meintel 7. Prophecy, So