Bibliographic Information
Title
Being There: The Fieldwork Encounter and the Making of Truth
Editor(s)
Borneman, John, and Hammoudi Abdellah
Year of Publication
2009
Publisher Name
University of California Press
Publisher Location
Berkeley, California
Web Address (URL)
Additional Information
Language
English
Source Type
Book
Notes
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.
Taxonomies
Topics & Issues
- Archaeological Ethics - Other
- Collaboration in Archaeology (i.e. Communities, Non-Archaeologists, etc.)
- Community Archaeology and Participatory Research
- Decolonizing Archaeology
- Ethical Dilemmas
- Ethical Responsibilities of Archaeologists
- Ethnography
- Globalization and global perspectives
- Human Rights and Social and Economic Inequalities
- Indigenous Archaeology: Perspectives and Issues