i On Puzzling Wavelengths
Even seasoned anthropologists run headlong into things they find paradoxical, extraordinary, shocking, or baffling when they are engaged in fieldwork.1 I had several experiences like this in the course of a study during the 1970s, and they all had to do with communication. They entailed surprising interaction between humans almost unbelievable understandings between dogs and their masters people dealing with forces they called power, with extraordinary consequences and, finally, my perception...
Beyond Our Known Worlds
We begin with three descriptive accounts of unanticipated participation in events that directly confronted ethnographers with dimensions of life that drew them beyond the parameters of their immediate research agenda and taken-for-granted epistemological assumptions. In the process, we discover how anthropologists transcended their initial predilection for this or that theoretical perspective and came to work and to learn beyond the vantage point from which they thought they would carry out all...
Acknowledgments
The idea for this collection of papers first came to mind in the course of a conversation we had at the annual meeting of casca Canadian Anthropological Society Soci t canadienne d'anthropologie , in Montreal, in 1994. Bruce and I were meeting for the first time, soon after the publication of Being Changed by Cross-cultural Encounters The Anthropology of Extraordinary Experiences. As we talked, we shared the conviction that experiences such as those presented in Being Changed and those...
Romanticism
In the year 2000, I published an article in American Ethnologist entitled, Skins of Desire Poetry and Identity in Koriak Women's Gift Exchange. The article, from what I projected as the Koriak point of view, dealt with such mundane and everyday affairs as the sewing and tanning of animal skins and hides, in particular, those of reindeer, but with the aesthetics and exchange practices. The theme of this article had emerged out of two particular experiences. First, since my arrival in Tymlat, I...
Embodied Knowledge Steps toward a Radical Anthropology of Crosscultural
jean-guy a. goulet amp bruce granville miller In Ethnographic Objectivity Revisited From Rigor to Vigor, the opening chapter of Anthropology with an Attitude Critical Essays, Fabian maintains that much of our ethnographic research is carried out best when we are 'out of our minds,' that is, while we relax our inner controls, forget our purposes, let ourselves go. In short, there is an ecstatic side to fieldwork which should be counted among the conditions of knowledge production, hence of...