26. Ethnographic Practice in the Present (Invited Workshop)
Convenors:
George E. Marcus,
Rice University
Helena Wulff,
University of Stockholm
Discussants:
Simon Coleman, University of Durham
Douglas Holmes, Binghamton University
dholmes@binghamton.edu
Fieldwork is often hailed as the
distinguishing feature of the discipline of anthropology, and anthropologists
are well aware that it is a method which generates theoretical insights that
could not have been generated in any other way. But as the grounds for social
life are shifting, so is our ethnographic practice. How then is fieldwork
defined within anthropology? And no less importantly: how do we de facto
conduct fieldwork today? For at the same time as there is an anxious debate in the discipline about emerging
methods such as mobile and multi-local fieldwork, there is an obvious shift
towards more flexible forms and methodological pluralism. Importantly,
traditional fieldwork - with one year of more or less uninterrupted participant
observation in a village or an urban neighbourhood as a unit – is still
there, but it is being complemented by other strategies in a wider
methodological repertoire including the notion of polymorphous engagements.
This invited workshop will present critical papers on past and present
ethnographic practice in relation to questions of mobility, time and place, as
well as to the local and the global. Contributors will discuss demarcations of
´the field´, also with respect to the possibility of studying
temporary and travelling fields, and circumstances that shape ethnographic
practice from research interests and agendas, research councils´ politics
and other funding issues to departmental milieux, and different generations and
traditions in European anthropology.
Johannes
Fabian, University of Amsterdam
johfabian@t-online.de
Fieldwork as Free Association and Free Passage
Judith Okely, University of Hull
J.M.Okely@hull.ac.uk
Fieldwork in the
Age of Mechanical Accountability
Sharon
Macdonald, University of Sheffield
s.j.macdonald@sheffield.ac.uk
Christina
Garsten, University of
Stockholm
christina.garsten@socant.su.se
An Emerging
Pedagogy for the Design of Multi-Sited Fieldwork as Dissertation
Research
George E.
Marcus, Rice University
marcus@rice.edu
Unlimited
Universes and Other Limitations: Fieldwork in the Anthropology of Medicine
Cristiana Bastos, University
of Lisbon
c.bastos@ics.ul.pt
Dilemmas of
Ethnographic Practice: A View from Russian Anthropology
Alexei Elfimov, Russian
Academy of Sciences
Ethnography
in Motion: Shifting Fields on Airport Grounds