Being There

The Fieldwork Encounter and the Making of Truth

John Borneman, Abdellah Hammoudi, John Borneman, Abdellah Hammoudi

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780520257757
• eBook ISBN: 9780520943438
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Challenges to ethnographic authority and to the ethics of representation have led many contemporary anthropologists to abandon fieldwork in favor of strategies of theoretical puppeteering, textual analysis, and surrogate ethnography. In Being There, John Borneman and Abdellah Hammoudi argue that ethnographies based on these strategies elide important insights. To demonstrate the power and knowledge attained through the fieldwork experience, they have gathered essays by anthropologists working in Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tanzania, the Canadian Arctic, India, Germany, and Russia that shift attention back to the subtle dynamics of the ethnographic encounter. From an Inuit village to the foothills of Kilimanjaro, each account illustrates how, despite its challenges, fieldwork yields important insights outside the reach of textual analysis.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. The Fieldwork Encounter, Experience, and the Making of Truth: An Introduction
• 2. Textualism and Anthropology: On the Ethnographic Encounter, or an Experience in the Hajj
• 3. The Suicidal Wound and Fieldwork among Canadian Inuit
• 4. The Hyperbolic Vegetarian: Notes on a Fragile Subject in Gujarat
• 5. The Obligation to Receive: The Countertransference, the Ethnographer, Protestants, and Proselytization in North India
• 6. Encounter and Suspicion in Tanzania
• 7. Encounters with the Mother Tongue: Speech, Translation, and Interlocution in Post–Cold War German Repatriation
• 8. Institutional Encounters: Identification and Anonymity in Russian Addiction Treatment (and Ethnography)
• 9. Fieldwork Experience, Collaboration, and Interlocution: The “Metaphysics of Presence” in Encounters with the Syrian Mukhabarat
• 10. Afterthoughts: The Experience and Agony of Fieldwork
• Biographical Notes
• Index