A Still Practically Relevant AristotleReal Social Science: Applied Phronesis. Edited by Bent Flyvbjerg, Todd Landman, and Sanford Schram. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Abstract

fieldworker invests a great deal of time and effort to gain rapport and learn a language for which there is little or no written history and literature. My only regret in reading this wonderful collection of essays by mature scholars is that there were too few contributions by anthropologists who have combined multisited ethnography with long-term fieldwork in a single location during the course of a career. Starting in one place and changing to another is only one way of developing a comparative perspective in anthropology. Missing are accounts by anthropologists who have invested a great deal of time in one location with one group, done fieldwork in other places, and returned to the first field site with a fresh pair of eyes and ears and new theories. Those who have followed this trajectory have discovered new topics to explore, changed their ideas about the culture they thought they had fully understood, and learned how their informants interpret their historical experiences in unanticipated ways. An enjoyable aspect of all of these essays is the embrace of serendipity as a source of creativity. Changing life situations and chance encounters led to unanticipated discoveries in new locations for all of the contributors. I would hope, however, that the contributors’ embrace of serendipity does not mean that choosing new field sites according to some kind of plan is necessarily obsolete. It is interesting that Herzfeld, who presents one of the most coherent accounts of his professional trajectory, makes the most impassioned defense of serendipity. My impression from reading his essay and his work is that his earlier fieldwork on the Island of Rhodes and in Crete was the source of a vision that carried him through his ethnography of the state in Rome and in Thailand, which came about because of many chance encounters. The strength of this collection is that the contributors reveal how anthropologists face many personal challenges in their struggle to combine life and work: they have come up against institutional prejudices based on the area-studies focus in many universities; they have struggled, sometimes valiantly, to master new languages; and they have read pages of history, ethnography, and theory to prepare for fieldwork in a new place. These essays show rather than tell why there is no one best way to develop a comparative perspective in anthropology and how fieldwork, wherever it takes place, is our lifeblood.