ANTH 1001 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: The Sufis, Noble Savage, Jargon
10 Apr 2014
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Document Summary
Lecture 6: ethnography as interpretation and writing: method and experience continued. We have said last time that there is a strong tension between experience and method in anthropology, but also in other social and behavioral sciences, for example psychiatry. We have seen how one of the founders of modern anthropology, bronislaw malinowski, wrote an ethnography in which he described his fieldwork in a somewhat romanticized tone. If he said anything about his relations to the local people at all, he described these relations as friendly and himself as someone who was flexible and tolerant enough to mix and participate in their lives. Diaries, published 25 years after his death, however, gave a quite different impression: Malinowski suffered from loneliness, sexual longing for european women and trobriand women alike, hypochondria and a compulsion to read cheap novels to escape reality. It also turned out that he actually spent quite a lot of time in the company of other white men.
