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)
Author(s): Jean-Guy A. Goulet, Bruce Granville Miller, Johannes Fabian
Edition: 1
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Year: 2007
Language: English
Pages: 456
Contents......Page 8
Preface......Page 10
Acknowledgments......Page 14
Map of communities discussed......Page 19
Introduction: Embodied Knowledge......Page 20
Part One: Beyond Our Known Worlds......Page 34
1. On Puzzling Wavelengths......Page 36
2. On Presence......Page 55
3. Reveal or Conceal?......Page 72
Part Two: Entanglements and Faithfulness to Experience......Page 104
4. Recursive Epistemologies and an Ethics of Attention......Page 107
5. Ethnographic Rendez-vous......Page 122
6. When the Extraordinary Hits Home......Page 143
7. Prophecy, Sorcery, and Reincarnation......Page 177
Part Three: Epistemological and Ethical Thresholds......Page 202
8. The Politics of Ecstatic Research......Page 205
9. Moving Beyond Culturally Bound Ethical Guidelines......Page 227
10. Experiences of Power among the Sekani of Northern British Columbia......Page 256
Part Four: Keeping Violence and Conflict in View......Page 274
11. Don Patricio’s Dream......Page 277
12. Clothing the Body in Otherness......Page 302
13. Dog Days......Page 329
Part Five: Apprenticeship and Research Practices......Page 340
14. A Pathway to Knowledge......Page 342
15. Field of Dreams; Fields of Reality......Page 371
16. Dancing Lessons from God......Page 399
References......Page 438
List of Contributors......Page 466
Index......Page 472
