Younger Scholar’s
Forum
When Communication Comes
to an End…
Convenors:
Penny Harvey, University
of Manchester
Thomas Fillitz,
University of Vienna
Since the times of
Malinowski, anthropologists have assumed
that the quality of
ethnographic evidence depends on the quality
of interaction and
communication with our interlocutors, i.e. the
building of relationships
over time, language proficiency, as well
as sustained engagement
with people in their daily lives.
This panel wants to
scrutinize this taken-for-granted assumption
by looking at the
“discomfort of proximity“. By this notion we
refer to the many
fields/times in which ethnographers may
feel the need to distance
themselves from those they seek to
understand, such as in
research among those who hold radical
beliefs with which they
profoundly disagree, or in situations of
violent conflict. The panel
asks researchers to reflect on what
can be learnt from the
radical disjunctures that often appear
between ethnographers and
their interlocutors during fieldwork.
Recent work on mimetic ways
of knowing has discussed how
hunters and shamans avoid
total identification while seeking
to approximate another way
of being. Participant observation
as a method also entails
the drawing together of proximity and
distance. How do such ways
of knowing help ethnographers to
approach beliefs and
practices from which they simultaneously
wish to keep their
distance?
Possible topics to be
addressed include:
- Contexts in which the
truth claims of the interlocutors are in
conflict with the
ethnographer’s experience;
- Contexts in which the
ethnographer resists close relationships
and feelings of empathy.
- Contexts in which the
ethnographer deploys the interconnection
of proximity and distance
as suggested by other mimetic ways
of knowing.
Anthropology and
Ocularcentrism
Rane Willerslev, University
of Aarhus
Dirt, Disgust and
Desire: Creating Distance on the Doorstep
Gillian Evans, Brunel
University
Doing Fieldwork
Barak Kalir, University of
Amsterdam
Atheist Anthropologists.
Believers and Non-believers in
Anthropological
Fieldwork
Ruy Llera Blanes,
University of Lisbon