Issue Details: First known date: 2014... 2014 ‘Start By Telling Your Own Story’ : On Becoming An Anthropologist and Performing Anthropology
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

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

  • 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.

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Ngapartji Ngapartji, in Turn, in Turn : Ego-histoire, Europe and Indigenous Australia Vanessa Castejon (editor), Anna Cole (editor), Oliver Haag (editor), Karen Hughes (editor), Acton : Australian National University Press , 2014 8146885 2014 selected work criticism essay

    ''These are stories, histories. They emerged in part from encounters between scholars from Australia and Europe that offered a transnational way to think about culture, class, ethnicity, identity, inbetweenness and whiteness in Australian Indigenous studies. Our intention was to weave together professional and personal accounts of studies that have Australia and Indigeneity at their heart. The origins of this book lie in a discussion between Anna Cole and Vanessa Castejon that took place after a European Australian Studies conference at the Universitat de Barcelona’s Centre d’Estudis Australians in 2008.' (Source: Introduction)' (Source: Introduction)

    Acton : Australian National University Press , 2014
    pg. 93-108
Last amended 19 Oct 2017 07:41:46
X