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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'Since the beginning of my career as an anthropology undergraduate in the mid-80s, and then as a PhD student in the early 90s at the London School of Economics, I have been aware of the issues raised by the so-called reflexive turn in the discipline. I was, in fact, particularly affected by the methodological and ethical concerns of what is known as ‘cultural critique’ or more generally the ‘politics of representation’: dismantling the power of the interpreter, the strategies of othering, as well as debunking the pitfalls of essentialism, the illusion of objective truth, and the partiality of ethnography (Clifford 1988; Fabian 1983; Marcus & Fisher 1987; Rosaldo 1989; Torgonvick 1991). I was equally exposed to some of the proposed solutions to these questions, such as the shift to embodied experience, and intersubjectivity in everyday life and in fieldwork research (Jackson 1983, 1989, 1998; Stoller 1989). My past interest and ongoing commitment to these issues in my current practice as a fieldworker, author, and lecturer also stem from personal, as well as professional motivations, choices, experiences and encounters which have brought me to anthropology.' (Introduction)
Notes
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Epigraph:
‘Start from your own story, from your own experience, what brought you here from far away and what you learnt.’ Keith Lapulung to the author, Milingimbi 1999.
‘Life as the product of life. However far man may extend himself with his knowledge, however objective he may appear to himself — ultimately he reaps nothing but his own biography.’ Friedrich Nietzsche, Human All Too Human, Section IX, ‘Man Alone with Himself’, aphorism 513.
