Extraordinary Encounters

Authenticity and the Interview

Katherine Smith, James Staples, Nigel Rapport

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781785338175
• eBook ISBN: 9781782385905
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Given the anthropological focus on ethnography as a kind of deep immersion, the interview poses theoretical and methodological challenges for the discipline. This volume explores those challenges and argues that the interview should be seen as a special, productive site of ethnographic encounter, a site of a very particular and important kind of knowing. In a range of social contexts and cultural settings, contributors show how the interview is experienced and imagined as a kind of space within which personal, biographic and social cues and norms can be explored and interrogated. The interview possesses its own authenticity, therefore—true to the persons involved and true to their moment of interaction—whilst at the same time providing information on human capacities and proclivities that is generalizable beyond particular social and cultural contexts.

Table of contents

• Extraordinary Encounters
• Contents
• Introduction – The Interview as Analytical Category
• Chapter 1 – The Transcendent Subject?
• Chapter 2 – Using and Refusing Antiretroviral Drugs in South Africa
• Chapter 3 – An ‘Up and Down Life’
• Chapter 4 – Finding My Wit
• Chapter 5 – ‘Different Times’ and Other ‘Altermodern’ Possibilities
• Chapter 6 – Dialogues with Anthropologists
• Chapter 7 – Talking and Acting for Our Rights
• Epilogue – Extraordinary Encounter?
• Notes on Contributors
• Index