~ a group blog on a variety of topics related to anthropology, sociology, and ordinary people ~
– guest blog by Valerie Miller –
Returning is a problematic word for anthropologists. To turn is to go around, go another direction, move to a different position. But REturning would then mean to stay right where you are (by turning again), realizing the full circle. It is movement from A to B to A, movement from home to field to home. What happens when “returning home” no longer makes sense because field becomes home, or vice versa?…
With the Ethnography.com website’s updated ‘modern’ look and my ‘mysterious’ long-term disappearance from America, you may be wondering about the site’s header photos, and what the heck is going on over here? Maybe call this ‘flash ethnography’ mixed with ethnographic photography. Here are five short stories…
^ THIS IS THE CHURCH COURTYARD at the ethnographer’s primary Fulbright research site. It is an important Pentecostal church in town that is also a small community.…
Life as an Insect Inside a Glass Jar:
Language Learning Through Immersion
(Sic Semper, Malinowski and the Tropical Beach…)
What does it feel like to live as an insect inside a glass jar? The praying mantis was removed from its environment suddenly, and plopped into a clean, bright glass vessel, along with other things that resembled its original home– a few sticks, pebbles, and an ant to nibble on. I think people who struggle to learn a language through immersion in a very different culture know best what it might feel like to be the praying mantis you captured when you were a child, or to become that child again.…
One of my favorite anthropology books is The Innocent Anthropologist: Notes from a Mud Hut by Nigel Barley. It is a memorably written story of Barley’s experience doing fieldwork in rural Cameroon. The strength of the book is that it includes the personal problems that emerge out of the frustrations, boredom, tribulations, and mis-interpretations that emerge in the context of “doing ethnography.” In this sense it is much different than the dispassionate, theoretical, and scientific ethnography typically assigned undergraduates in which the ethnographer somehow always ends up being always erudite, and insightful. …