Anthropological Journeys : Reflections on Fieldwork

Contents: I. Introduction: 1. Rethinking anthropology anew/Meenakshi Thapan. II. Anthropological Questions: 1. Anthropological knowledge, alterity and the autobiographical voice/Veena Das. 2. The subject in fieldwork: Malinowski and Gandhi/Amrit Srinivasan. 3. Unlearning fieldwork: the flight of the Arctic tern/Savyasaachi. 4. Subjectivity in contexts of objectification: identity and structural imagery among the Warlis/Denzil Saldanha. III. The Self and the Other in the Anthropological Context: 1. Discovering Anthropology: a personal narrative/T.N. Madan. 2. How 'native is a native Anthropologist'?/Kirin Narayan. 3. Among my own in another culture: meeting the Asian Indian Americans/Maitrayee Chaudhuri. IV. Gendered Selves in Fieldwork: 1. Dialogue as method and as text/Saraswati Haider. 2. Gender in field research: experiences in India/Loes Schenk-Sandbergen. 3. Learning to take people seriously/Madhu Kishwar. Index.

"The collection of papers raises methodological issues and questions concerning the traditional nature of anthropology, and addresses current issues and debates in sociology and social anthropology.

As a discipline social anthropology grew out of the colonial interaction between western colonisers and the colonised 'others'. Increasingly, social anthropologists especially from the once colonised world have questioned the appropriateness of a discipline that objectifies the people it studies, and the validity of the data generated by such an approach.

Interacting with a different community--or even with the community of one's birth--raises problems of subjectivity and objectivity, the nature of a social science and so on. It also confronts the fieldworker with the problem of how the researched subjects are to be perceived, how their voices and views may be inscribed into the anthropological text, and how, also the researcher might, through the experience of fieldwork begin to perceive her/himself.

The essays in this volume, by well known anthropologists take up these and other issues arising out of their own fieldwork experience. The result is a rigorous and deeply moving analysis that leads to an unlearning of inappropriate and insensitive methods that obscure rather than explain the lives of people." (jacket)

[Meenakshi Thapan's books include Life at School : An Ethnographic Study and Embodiment Essays on Gender and Identity.]