ANTH 202 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Aissawa, Research Question, Nonperson
8 Jun 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Socio-Cultural Anthropology ANTH 202
Class 5 – Rabinow doing anthropology & reflexivity
ANTHROPOLOGICAL APPROACH
1. Attention to everyday life – familiar becomes strange: question what is taken for
granted → Ethnographic Approach
2. Connections between observations and larger sys / ideas / theories
3. Self-reflexive, critical – asking quest, understanding complexity
4. Different perspectives & understandings of the world
5. Academic / Applied / Activist - Engaged
Making sure to involve the positionalities of every person involved.
Fieldwork = central methodology:
- Can be anywhere
- Not only marginal / “less developed” groups, everyone
- PERCEPTIONS, understanding place-pased practices
- Important to have local people participating
- Mixed methods including surveys, interviews…
o PAUL RABINOW – Geertz’s student, fieldwork in 1968 for Berkeley
Importance of fieldwork yet no one looks at the process → use of “data” for a more objective
analysis
Is mainstream theory really ≠fieldwork?
Knowledge about cult is produced through experience of culture during fieldwork
→
product of
social interactions and interpretations of events
• Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco – Rabinow, 1974
Process of fieldwork and how anth knowledge is produced through ethnography
- Ethnography as lived experience, linked to knowledge
- Emergent social relations in context of ethnographic fieldwork
- Ethnography = learning about “self” through the other
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Ethnographic writing - “Thick Description” - place & people
- Location, Setting, Context
Cultural meaning of landscape → mapping
Ex: Leacock building: private offices, no common space of interaction: that influences how
people interact with each other
Classroom: not sitting in a circle, the professor is the one talking in front of everyone else:
hierarchy
- Actors and social relations
How people are located and place themselves, how they move and interact
Describing the nature of relationships between different ethnic groups.
- History
Historical context → colonialism, tribal conflict, how all these historic issues shape
contemporary relations
HYBRIDIZATION OF TRADITION AND MODERN
Mapping Examples:
Slide 16: 4 different lineages living in different parts of the village → Mapping social groups
Work with the people to build a social map and locate diverse ethnic groups and their respective
locations: Participatory Mapping!
Slide 19: Instead of looking at the entire community, looking at a particular piece of land and
studying relations and special distribution within that specific zone.
All these methods allow anthropologists to understand social / gender relations based on space
Prof. McAllister’s work (Northern Laos)
Socioecological space: linguistic & cosmological
Thammasat = people as part of land
Pa = forest; different meanings → place not domesticated, conception of a space outside of
people’s habitation
Talaleo = symbol for every ethnic group; marking the space between farms and undomesticated
land, protecting from bad spirits
How people understand and interpret space
Khmu → spirit gates, again separating wild forest from inhabited areas: protection from spirits;
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Class 5 rabinow doing anthropology & reflexivity. Making sure to involve the positionalities of every person involved. Not only marginal / less developed groups, everyone. Important to have local people participating: paul rabinow geertz"s student, fieldwork in 1968 for berkeley. Importance of fieldwork yet no one looks at the process use of data for a more objective analysis. Knowledge about cult is produced through experience of culture during fieldwork product of social interactions and interpretations of events: reflections on fieldwork in morocco rabinow, 1974. Process of fieldwork and how anth knowledge is produced through ethnography. Ethnography as lived experience, linked to knowledge. Emergent social relations in context of ethnographic fieldwork. Ethnography = learning about self through the other. Ethnographic writing - thick description - place & people. Ex: leacock building: private offices, no common space of interaction: that influences how people interact with each other.
