Inside African Anthropology offers an incisive biography of the life and work of South Africa's foremost social anthropologist, Monica Hunter Wilson. By exploring her main fieldwork and intellectual ...projects in southern Africa between the 1920s and 1960s, the book offers insights into her personal and intellectual life. Beginning with her origins in the remote Eastern Cape, the authors follow Wilson to the University of Cambridge and back into the field among the Mpondo of South Africa, where her studies resulted in her 1936 book Reaction to Conquest. Her fieldwork focus then shifted to Tanzania, where she teamed up with her husband, Godfrey Wilson. In the 1960s, Wilson embarked on a new urban ethnography with a young South African anthropologist, Archie Mafeje, one of the many black scholars she trained. This study also provides a meticulously researched exploration of the indispensable contributions of African research assistants to the production of this famous woman scholar's cultural knowledge about mid-twentieth-century Africa.
Focusing on the crucial contributions of women researchers, Andrew Bank demonstrates that the modern school of social anthropology in South Africa was uniquely female-dominated. The book traces the ...personal and intellectual histories of six remarkable women through the use of a rich cocktail of new archival sources, including family photographs, private and professional correspondence, field-notes and field diaries, published and other public writings and even love letters. The book also sheds new light on the close connections between their personal lives, their academic work and their anti-segregationist and anti-apartheid politics. It will be welcomed by anthropologists, historians and students in African studies interested in the development of social anthropology in twentieth-century Africa, as well as by students and researchers in the field of gender studies.
Among Unknown Tribes Broyles, Bill; Eek, Ann Christine; La Farge, Phyllis ...
05/2014
eBook
Internationally renowned as an exciting guide to unknown peoples and places, Norwegian Carl Lumholtz was a Victorian-era explorer, anthropologist, natural scientist, writer, and photographer who ...worked in Australia, Mexico, and Borneo. His photographs of the Tarahumara, Huichol, Cora, Tepehuan, Southern Pima, and Tohono O’odham tribes of Mexico and southwest Arizona were among the very first taken of these cultures and still provide the best photographic record of them at the turn of the twentieth century. Lumholtz published his photographs in several books, including Unknown Mexico and New Trails in Mexico, but, because photographic publishing was then in its infancy, most of the images were poorly printed, badly cropped, or reworked by “illustrators" using crude techniques. Among Unknown Tribes presents more than two hundred of Lumholtz’s best photographs—many never before published—from the archives of the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo, Norway. The images are newly scanned, most from the original negatives, and printed uncropped, disclosing a wealth of previously hidden detail. Each photograph is fully identified and often amplified by Lumholtz’s own notes and captions. Accompanying the images are essays and photo notes that survey Lumholtz’s career and legacy, as well as what his photographs reveal about the “unknown tribes." By giving Lumholtz’s photographs the high-quality reproduction they deserve, Among Unknown Tribes honors not only the Norwegian explorer but also the native peoples who continue to struggle for recognition and justice as they actively engage in the traditional customs that Lumholtz recorded.
Research design is concerned with procedures employed in a research paradigm. This article discusses literature on qualitative case study research design, and its related approaches. The article ...discuses case study approach and its sampling techniques, data gathering techniques and methods of data analysis. The article further points out the notion of trustworthiness including triangulation and its various forms. The advantages and disadvantages of case study are also discussed, and the article summarises the commonalities and differences between collective, intrinsic and instrumental case studies.
Social media practices and technologies are often part of how ethnographic research participants navigate their wider social, material and technological worlds, and are equally part of ethnographic ...practice. This creates the need to consider how emergent forms of social media-driven ethnographic practice might be understood theoretically and methodologically. In this article, we respond critically to existing literatures concerning the nature of the internet as an ethnographic site by suggesting how concepts of routine, movement and sociality enable us to understand the making of social media ethnography knowledge and places.
Knowing how to know Halstead, Narmala; Hirsch, Eric; Okely, Judith
2008., 20080515, 2008, 2008-05-01, 20080101, Volume:
9
eBook
This volume examines some crucial issues in the conduct of fieldwork and ethnography and provides new insights into the problems of constructing anthropological knowledge. How is anthropological ...knowledge created from fieldwork, whose knowledge is this, who determines what is of significance in any ethnographic context, and how is the fieldsite extended in both time and place? Nine anthropologists examine these problems, drawing on diverse case studies. These range from the dilemmas of the religious refashioning of the ethnographer in contemporary Indonesia to the embodied knowledge of ballet performers, and from ignorance about post-colonial ritual innovations by the anthropologist in highland Papua to the skilled visions of slow food producers in Italy. It is a key text for new fieldworkers as much as for established researchers. The anthropological insights developed here are of interdisciplinary relevance: cultural studies scholars, sociologists and historians will be as interested as anthropologists in this re-evaluation of fieldwork and the project of ethnography.
The Marshall Islands have an active community of competitive players of checkers (jekab) who use a rule set that is particular to the region. This game is featured in tournaments held during cultural ...celebrations on multiple islands in the archipelago, while the activity is considered an integral part of public life as it is witnessed on the islands. Marshallese checkers is shown to create a liminoid space in which a diversity of players in terms of age, language and socioeconomic circumstances interact across the playing board. Marshallese checkers supports the idea of board games as social lubricants that helps to explain how board games cross these borders so effortlessly historically as well as contemporaneously. The public presence, the rules and the diversity of players exhibited in the Marshall Islands point to a rich history of and a continuing future for abstract board games in the Pacific Islands.
Fieldwork in South Asia is a valuable attempt to listen and learn from the memories and significant moments of fieldwork done by anthropologists, sociologists, and even historians from South Asia. ...The essays lead towards a deeper understanding of concerns of fieldwork located in various field sites across South Asia without assuming or applying fixed normative rules for the whole region. In the process, the volume allows the reader to have an option to locate or relocate ethnographic or other forms of texts in the context of growing methodological contours and dilemmas in the social science.Above all, this is a book about relationships—multi-layered relationships among people encountered in the field, the ethnographic relationship itself, with all its personal raw edges, and relationship with the land and even non-human realms.
