A Crack in the Mirror

Reflexive Perspectives in Anthropology

Jay Ruby

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press Anniversary Collection
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780812278156, 9780812278156
• eBook ISBN: 9781512806434
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Like Conrad's Marlow, whose tale of journeying into the "heart of darkness" gives us as much insight into one man's personality as it does into the mysteries of the dark world he explored, so the anthropologist's record of another culture contains more than objective, scientific data about his investigation. Embedded within it are clues to the "personality" of anthropology itself: the attitudes, approaches, even prejudices that at any given stage in history are inextricable from the ideology of the anthropologist. Therefore, the mirror he holds up to show us another culture can never be a perfect one. His own professional attitude toward his subject, as well as his choice of medium, are factors that create "cracks" in the mirror of anthropology through which we believe we view the life of other cultures.Hence, the concept of "reflexivity" and the striving to recognize how it warps in the portrayal of anthropological truth lie at the core of the twelve finely wrought essays collected in this volume. Wide ranging in geography as well as viewpoint, they highlight various methods and media (film, ethnography, text) through which an anthropologist chooses to portray a culture, and the various forms, such as art, theater, and ritual, through which a culture portrays itself. Recognizing the link between these two processes provides the key to cultural and methodological self awareness.Reflexivity is defined and clarified in the introduction and in three of the essays, and the remaining nine essays evince the principle through fieldwork and startling case studies. Essays by Jay Ruby and Eric Michaels shed new light on the enormous potential of film and video, showing how a form generally thought to be "nonscientific" can in fact give fresh insight into the scientific premises underlying the discipline's methodology. Essays by Barbara Babcock and Carol Ann Parssinen focus on the novel and ethnography, examining existing works.Anthropologists, as well as students of film, art, and theater, will find that this intriguing work begins to redefine traditional distinctions between science and the arts and brings to light fresh resources that are utilized in the search for anthropological truth. Contributors: Richard Schechner, Victor Turner, Barbara Myerhoff, Jay Ruby, Eric Michaels, Dennis Tedlock, George Marcus, Paul Rabinow, Barbara Babcock, Carol Ann Parssinen, and Dan Rose.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One. Performing Experience
• 1. Collective Reflexivity: Restoration of Behavior
• 2. Dramatic Ritual/Ritual Drama: Performative and Reflexive Anthropology
• 3. Life History Among the Elderly: Performance, Visibility, and Re-Membering
• Part Two. Visualizing Experience
• 4. Ethnography as Trompe I'Oeil: Film and Anthropology
• 5. How to Look at Us Looking at the Yanomami Looking at Us
• Part Three. Writing about Experience
• 6. Anthropological Hermeneutics and the Problem of Alphabetic Literacy
• 7. Rhetoric and the Ethnographic Genre in Anthropological Research
• 8. Masked I Go Forward: Reflections on the Modern Subject
• 9. Ritual Undress and the Comedy of Self and Other: Bandelier's The Delight Makers
• 10. Social Explorers and Social Scientists: The Dark Continent of Victorian Ethnography
• 11. Occasions and Forms of Anthropological Experience
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index