The Encounter Never Ends

A reconsideration of the relationship between fieldwork and anthropological knowledge.

The Encounter Never Ends offers a thoughtful meditation on the relationship between fieldwork and anthropological knowledge through the analysis of Tamil ritual practice in a South Indian village. Isabelle Clark-Decès revisits field notes taken more than fifteen years earlier, and reveals what she intended when she took the notes, what she came to understand and record, and why she proceeded to ignore her ethnography until recently. Returning to these notes with fresh eyes and matured experience, Clark-Decès gains insight into Tamil rural society that complicates anthropological analyses of the Indian village. She realizes that the village she lived in was neither a community nor a "system" but rather a loose hodgepodge of caste groups and advises that the social order is not necessarily the best place to start looking for important insights into the ways in which cultures construe ritual action. Drawing on the recent work of Don Handelman to discuss the two Tamil ritual complexes recovered from her field notes, a drought "removal" ritual and a post-funeral ceremony, the author shows how they articulate complex notions regarding knowledge, reflexivity, and action. Throughout, the author shares her own story, including the mixture of frustration and fascination she felt while conducting fieldwork, illustrating how extraordinarily difficult ethnographic description is.

If your health care organization is typical, you were successful in getting your electronic medical record (EMR) system installed on time and within budget. You declared victory and collected some money from meaningful use. But very quickly, you realized you were not getting the expected return on your investment. So you started the "optimization"

A reconsideration of the relationship between fieldwork and anthropological knowledge.

Examining a wide range of ekphrastic poems, David Kennedy argues that contemporary British poets writing out of both mainstream and avant-garde traditions challenge established critical models of ekphrasis with work that is more complex than representational or counter-representational responses to paintings in museums and galleries. Even when the poem appears to be straightforwardly representational, it is often selectively so, producing a 'virtual' work that doesn't exist in actuality. Poets such as Kelvin Corcoran, Peter Hughes, and Gillian Clarke, Kennedy suggests, relish the ekphrastic encounter as one in which word and image become mutually destabilizing. Similarly, other poets engage with the source artwork as a performance that participates in the ethical realm. Showing that the ethical turn in ekphrastic poetry is often powerfully gendered, Kennedy also surveys a range of ekphrastic poets from the Renaissance and nineteenth century to trace a tradition of female ekphrastic poetry that includes Pauline Stainer and Frances Presley. Kennedy concludes with a critique of ekphrastic exercises in creative writing teaching, proposing that ekphrastic writing that takes greater account of performance spectatorship may offer more fruitful models for the classroom than the narrativizing of images.

The book introduces fresh concepts into the public debate about the origin of paranormal phenomena, the physical processes underlying consciousness, and the encounter between science and religion.

Contrasts different notions of the status of poetry in the work of MacPherson, Burns, Hogg, Scott, and Wordsworth.

Are religious women in the United States disappearing and finally dying out? Or is there any new way of religious life emerging? Conversations at the Well tries to respond to this question. In the twenty-first century of the global world, newly emerging religious life would be rooted with the Jesus Movement and develop in the spirit of collaboration, networking, and intercultural living. As the liminal space, religious life is located at the margins, subverting the existing social order and creating a new vision for the world. This book explores an alternative meaning of religious life within the context of the apostolic mission. In this new religious life, the concept of community is not limited to living as a community in the convent, but extended into collaborating friendship. Primarily, the apostolic religious life is deeply related to social justice, delinking the global capitalism in which many people suffer from human trafficking, immigration, and exile. The new leader of religious women would require skill in handling uncertainty, amplifying resources, and opening to the new reality. In this new religious life, spirituality would be articulated as freedom and liberation to let go of the old frame, as well as letting the new life become reality. In this way, as radical disciples, religious women in the twenty-first century embody the Jesus Movement, building bridges between different cultures and people.