The Ethnographic Moment

The first fifty years of the twentieth century were a time of ferment in American anthropology. American ethnographic work evolved from the "salvage" work of professionals affiliated with museums who undertook to document with artifacts and testimony the threatened traditional way of life among the Native American tribes, to the establishment of anthropology as a science, represented in university departments, that sought to describe the "ethnographic present" of isolated primitive peoples, often in distant parts of the world. By the beginning of the 1950s, cultural anthropology discovered the peasant. Robert Redfield, himself a leading figure in this paradigm shift, challenged anthropology's focus on a static model of the isolated primitive community, pointing out the dynamic nature of the "little communities" he studied in Mesoamerica. These were not isolated communities, but rather local, traditional cultures located well within the sphere of a complex urban culture. In order to distinguish the "great tradition" deriving from urban centers from the "little tradition" of a more primitive culture, Redfield believed anthropology needed to refer to other disciplines, such as theology, philosophy, economics, and sociology. In other words, anthropology had to develop from the collection of material artifacts to a concern with the immaterial realm of values and ideas. This collection of essays and previously unpublished papers, The Ethnographic Moment, tells the story of a remarkable chapter in Redfield's pioneering efforts on what was then an anthropological frontier. The present volume covers the years from 1952 to 1958, the last of Redfield's life. It focuses solely on his study of peasant communities. At the core of the book is his correspondence with the philosopher-humanist F. G. Friedmann, who played an important role in Redfield's conceptualization of the complex urban-rural continuum that characterizes the peasant's world. The volume also includes an autobiographical introduction by Friedmann that illuminates both his own writings and the humanistic background that motivated his study of peasantry.

Asia is changing. Socio-political shifts in the world economy, technological advances of monumental scales, movements of people and ideas, alongside ongoing post-colonization projects across the region have created an emerging Asia – one confident and assertive of its place in the contemporary geopolitical sphere. As political and economic powers reassert Asian sovereignty in opposition to perceived Northern dominance, and dramatic and rapid development in the region shift the relationship between the centre and the periphery, new renderings and imaginations of hierarchies of identity and power come to the fore. This changing environment leads to emerging challenges for anthropologists working in the region: both those who have been working there for years, and new scholars entering the field. This volume considers these changes, and the implications of this on our practice. By focusing on Asia as a site of enquiry, the contributors to this book discuss tensions and opportunities arising in their ethnographic fieldwork in light of a changing Asia. Drawing on personal reflections on Asia’s global positioning in this contemporary moment, the contributors consider how fieldwork is being negotiated within the changing dynamics of anthropology in the region. This book then, is a discussion on the shifting landscape of field sites and the resultant emerging research methodologies, and is aimed at those who are already deeply immersed in fieldwork as well as those who are seeking ways to undertake it.

First Published in 2000. This book, a collection of ethnographic studies of Chinese schooling, aims to take the reader into Chinese schools and provide a picture of students and teachers as actors who practice culture. The case studies also provide a means by which ethnography is explored as a central methodological focus and concern. This book explores the meaning of ethnography, both in describing Chinese schools and in the broader context of the defined purposes and practices of research. This self-reflexive approach to school ethnography in China includes issues of cultural translation and the connections between the process of ethnographic work, the emergence of a text, and the construction of a theory.

In Ethnographic Explorations: Surrender and Resistance, Whitaker and Atkinson, two experienced ethnographers, explore the complexities of fieldwork, analysis and writing from new perspectives. It takes the opportunity to reflect on Ethnography not just as a methodological perspective, but at a fundamental level. In general terms, Ethnography is seen not just in terms of a set of data-collection methods, but as a more profoundly transformational perspective. The book explores a series of tensions and differences in the conceptualisation and conduct of ethnography, among them: Surrender and Catch; Strangeness and Familiarity; Intimacy and Distance; amd Romanticism and Modernism. It emphasises disruptions and interruptions rather than an idealised model of smoothly untroubled research. The book covers a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives, illustrated with research in many social settings. The book is intended for researchers at postgraduate and postdoctoral levels and at experienced researchers who want to read a different, sometimes challenging, take on ethnographic research and its outcomes.

This book provides an inventory of modes of inquiry for ethnographic research and presents fieldwork as an act of relational invention. It advances contemporary debates in ethnography by arguing that the empirical practice of anthropology is and has always been an inventive activity. Bringing together contributions from scholars across the world, the volume offers an expansive vision of the resourcefulness that anthropologists unfold in their empirical investigations by compiling inventive social and material techniques, or field devices, for anthropological inquiry. The chapters seek to inspire both novel and experienced practitioners of ethnography to venture into the many possibilities of fieldwork, to demonstrate the essential creative and inventive practices neglected in traditional accounts of ethnography, and to invite anthropologists to confidently engage in inventive fieldwork practices.

What are the relationships between the self and fieldwork? How do personal, emotional and identity issues impact upon working in the field? This book argues that ethnographers, and others involved in fieldwork, should be aware of how fieldwork research and ethnographic writing construct, reproduce and implicate selves, relationships and personal identities. All too often research methods texts remain relatively silent about the ways in which fieldwork affects us and we affect the field. The book attempts to synthesize accounts of the personal experience of ethnography. In doing so, the author makes sense of the process of fieldwork research as a set of practical, intellectual and emotional accomplishments. The book is thematically arranged, and illustrated with a wide range of empirical material.

Focusing on the problem of time—the paradox of time's apparent universality and cultural relativity—Carol J. Greenhouse develops an original ethnographic account of our present moment, the much-heralded postmodern condition, which is at the same time a reflexive analysis of ethnography itself. She argues that time is about agency and accountability, and that representations of time are used by institutions of law, politics, and scholarship to selectively refashion popular ideas of agency into paradigms of institutional legitimacy. A Moment's Notice suggests that the problem of time in theory is the corollary of problems of power in practice.Greenhouse develops her theory in examinations of three moments of cultural and political crisis: the resistance of the Aztecs against Cortes, the consolidation of China's First Empire, and the recent partisan political contests over Supreme Court nominees in the United States. In each of these cases, temporal innovation is integral to political improvisation, as traditions of sovereignty confront new cultural challenges. These cases return the discussion to current issues of inequality, postmodernity, cultural pluralism, and ethnography.

In 1908, Arthur Maurice Hocart and William Halse Rivers Rivers conducted fieldwork in the Solomon Islands and elsewhere in Island Melanesia that served as the turning point in the development of modern anthropology. The work of these two anthropological pioneers on the small island of Simbo brought about the development of participant observation as a methodological hallmark of social anthropology. This would have implications for Rivers' later work in psychiatry and psychology, and Hocart's work as a comparativist, for which both would largely be remembered despite the novelty of that independent fieldwork on remote Pacific islands in the early years of the 20th Century. Contributors to this volume-who have all carried out fieldwork in those Melanesian locations where Hocart and Rivers worked-give a critical examination of the research that took place in 1908, situating those efforts in the broadest possible contexts of colonial history, imperialism, the history of ideas and scholarly practice within and beyond anthropology.