Abstract
Academic conferences are not in short supply at any time in any part of the globe. As researchers, we might wonder what substance, encounters and interactions we miss out on when not in attendance at these events. For those who did not attend the European Association of Social Anthropologists’ 8th biennial meeting that took place in Vienna, Austria, in 2004, this 14-part edited volume provides glimpses and insights into the substance of two workshops held at this conference. This book was born of these tandem workshops, and was produced under the editorial guidance of a team of three anthropologists from England, Norway and Sweden. This volume offers interesting contributions by 16 anthropologists, predominantly European-based scholars, who convened in Vienna to discuss, interrogate, and assess then current ethnographic practices in sociocultural anthropology.
The main assumption framing the inquiries in this book is that there are both internal and external tensions with, and challenges to, the practice of contemporary sociocultural anthropological ethnography. These challenges include, but are not limited to, migration of the approach into other disciplines; compressions in researcher time spent in the field; displacement of or changes to what constitutes the field; interdisciplinarity and fluidity of traditional disciplinary parameters; knowledge practices; and, training and mentorship of aspiring and junior ethnographers. This book represents neither a treatise on ethnography, nor an uncritical celebration of any particular ethnographic methodological practice. This is not a methods reader. The book instead offers rich, diverse, and relevant methodological, epistemological, and I suggest, ontological thinking points for ethnographic practitioners. There is a lot to savour and digest in this volume of generous length. Of particular commendation is the dedication of this collective of junior and senior anthropologists to thinking through and beneath the challenges and opportunities posed by current and future ethnographic practices.
This is a readable, coherent, and thought-provoking volume organized into 11 chapters, an introduction and companion epilogues. The book opens with a snapshot of the evolution of the ethnographic approach within anthropology. We are then invited to consider how the authors describe and reflect on their including implications of methodological practices for researchers and the researched, research settings, and the various (sub)disciplines and the production of knowledge more broadly. The first two chapters (Fabian, Okely) take the form of contemplative essays written in the first person that discuss the authors’ thinking practices and their implications. Chapters 3 and 4 (Widlock, Garsten) illustrate how ethnographic method and analysis can benefit from the integration of technologies within linguistics and translocal social connections made between flows of people and ideas, respectively. I suggest that Chapters 5 and 6 (Marcus, Macdonald) could be useful inclusions on college and university level syllabus. In Chapters 7 to 11, a variety of ethnographic practices are discussed and debated by authors whose case studies were carried out in various moments in time in Russia (Elfimov), England/Somalia (Talle), Cameron/Nigeria (Röscenthaler), Brazil (Bastos), and Greece (Gefou-Madianou). Central to these articles are explorations of ‘context’ in its various spatial and temporal forms. Through each of these five empirical projects, we gather insight into a key point made in this volume: despite the challenges and complexities with doing so, there is great ethnographic value in generating accounts of social happenings and processes as they occur in multiple settings across time and space.
The most avid audience for this book is likely to be students and scholars of sociocultural anthropology. There is something of value for persons schooled in Western and non-Western traditions, and Anglo-American and non Anglo-American anthropological traditions alike. This readership is well placed to reflect critically on its home discipline, and this book is testimony that there is such an interest in reflexive dialogue among peers. As Widlock emphasizes in Chapter 3, it is valuable to learn from practices in disciplines other than our own with the idea of extending possibilities for ethnographically informed knowledge. Sociocultural anthropologists might be interested to look laterally, into sociology, for example, for cases where innovative ethnographical strategies are employed in ways consistent with anthropological ethnography. Anthropologists are well positioned to take stock of the internal and external relations, debates, and schisms organizing their ethnographic practices; reflecting on how their practices have interacted with other social sciences in the time since the Vienna gatherings that informed this collection occurred.