Anthropologists in a Wider World: Essays on Field Research

Abstract

Paul Dresch, Wendy James and David Parkin (eds.), Anthropologists in a Wider World: Essays on Field Research, New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2000, xiv + 310 pages.Reviewer: Ian CoshYork UniversityAs the editors of this volume remind us, times are tough for British anthropology, for reasons that will resonate with Canadians: neo-conservative budget priorities are making it to carry on the tradition of extended, open-ended fieldwork. From a certain managerial standpoint, anthropology's brand of research compares poorly with the rapid field assessment practices of other disciplines and corporations. In this context, it seems a token bit of money was granted to the Institute of Social and Cultural at Oxford University for a workshop on methods (held in 1997). To their credit, the Oxford faculty used the occasion to defend anthropological fieldwork as a patient engagement with the wider world. Since then, they have discussed, revised, and collected their papers into this volume, the seventh in a series on Methodology and History in Anthropology edited by David Parkin, Director of the Institute. The series abstract promises to offer timely reflections on the state of the discipline: Just as anthropology has had a significant influence on many other disciplines in recent years, so too has [sic] its methods been challenged by new intellectual and technological developments. This series is designed to offer a forum for debate... The intention is for critical essays to complement the intensive ethnolgraphic [sic] studies on which anthropology fundamentally depends.The critical intent of the present volume is declared in the introduction by Paul Dresch and Wendy James. They argue that recent trends in anthropology have neglected due to excessive concern with the of the fieldworker. Feminist arguments have been effective and powerful here, they observe (p. 3); but after this perfunctory bow (cf. Caplan, 1992:85) the volume speaks no more of feminism (until a parting nod on page 268), focusing instead on what the editors call a complementary mission: to redress the balance in favour of the realities of an intransigent historical world. Searching for a method for apprehending that world, Dresch and James survey a time-honoured trail through the imperatives of listening for the unsaid and looking for patterns behind events, arriving finally at the sine qua non of long-term fieldwork. Many--perhaps most--anthropologists are charting new routes through this territory. The editors, however, seem determined to go it alone. For example, they discover, without the aid of a single citation of their many fellow travellers, the challenge of connecting local field experience to global processes. Undeterred, they offer this methodological conclusion: cannot see the whole, however. One can only be on guard against self-centredness, and a certain cross-cutting of experience with history deserves noting (p. 18).One certainly cannot argue with that. More on history and self-centredness comes in a separate essay by Wendy James. Her reflection on a long fieldwork career in North East Africa is quite interesting in its own right. The narrative supports her strong conviction that fieldwork, far from being a singular encounter, is embedded in a dynamic historical process. Most readers will surely be convinced, if they were not already. Having established this point, James turns her critical attention to Clifford and Marcus' Writing Culture (1986), observing that the book promotes unhistorical approach to ethnography and a simplistic notion of 'culture' (p. 88). The source of both errors, she says, is overemphasis on personal experience. She concludes by contrasting the of postmodernism (and this passage is helpfully indexed: postmodernism: whimsies of, 89) to the humble, hard work invested in those analytical accounts of human life and experience which might outlast in their significance the emotional ups and downs of the author in producing them (pp. …