How Do We Know?

How Do We Know?
Author: Liana Chua
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2008
Genre: Social Science
ISBN:

Since its inception, modern anthropology has stood at the confluence of two mutually constitutive modes of knowledge production: participant-observation and theoretical analysis. This unique combination of practice and theory has been the subject of recurrent intellectual and methodological debate, raising questions that strike at the very heart of the discipline. How Do We Know? is a timely contribution to emerging debates that seek to understand this relationship through the theme of evidence. Incorporating a diverse selection of case studies ranging from the Tibetan emotion of shame to films of Caribbean musicians, it critically addresses such questions as: What constitutes viable â oeanthropological evidenceâ ? How does evidence generated through small-scale, intensive periods of participant-observation challenge or engender abstract theoretical models? Are certain types of evidence inherently â oebetterâ than others? How have recent interdisciplinary collaborations and technological innovations altered the shape of anthropological evidence? Extending a long-standing tradition of reflexivity within the discipline, the contributions to this volume are ethnographically-grounded and analytically ambitious meditations on the theme of evidence. Cumulatively, they challenge the boundaries of what anthropologists recognise and construct as evidence, while pointing to its thematic and conceptual potential in future anthropologies.

Ethnography & the Production of Anthropological Knowledge

Ethnography & the Production of Anthropological Knowledge
Author: Yasmine Musharbash
Publisher:
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2011
Genre: Aboriginal Australians
ISBN: 9781921666964

Professor Nicolas Peterson is a central figure in the anthropology of Aboriginal Australia. This diverse collection provides reflections on his legacy as well as fresh anthropological insights from Australia and the wider Asia-Pacific region.

Regimes of Ignorance

Regimes of Ignorance
Author: Roy Dilley
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2015-10-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1782388397

Non-knowledge should not be simply regarded as the opposite of knowledge, but as complementary to it: each derives its character and meaning from the other and from their interaction. Knowledge does not colonize the space of ignorance in the progressive march of science; rather, knowledge and ignorance are mutually shaped in social and political domains of partial, shifting, and temporal relationships. This volume’s ethnographic analyses provide a theoretical frame through which to consider the production and reproduction of ignorance, non-knowledge, and secrecy, as well as the wider implications these ideas have for anthropology and related disciplines in the social sciences and humanities.

Ethnography & the Production of Anthropological Knowledge

Ethnography & the Production of Anthropological Knowledge
Author: Yasmine Musharbash
Publisher: ANU E Press
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2011-02-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1921666978

Professor Nicolas Peterson is a central figure in the anthropology of Aboriginal Australia. This volume honours his anthropological body of work, his commitment to ethnographic fieldwork as a source of knowledge, his exemplary mentorship of generations of younger scholars and his generosity in facilitating the progress of others. The diverse collection produced by former students, current colleagues and long-term peers provides reflections on his legacy as well as fresh anthropological insights from Australia and the wider Asia-Pacific region. Inspired by Nicolas Peterson’s work in Aboriginal Australia and his broad ranging contributions to anthropology over several decades, the contributors to this volume celebrate the variety of his ethnographic interests. Individual chapters address, revisit, expand on, and ethnographically re-examine his work about ritual, material culture, the moral domestic economy, land and ecology. The volume also pays homage to Nicolas Peterson’s ability to provide focused research with long-term impact, exemplified by a series of papers engaging with his work on demand sharing and the applied policy domain.

Africanizing Anthropology

Africanizing Anthropology
Author: Lyn Schumaker
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 398
Release: 2001-07-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780822326731

DIVAn innovative cultural study of a major site of British anthropology, done with methods from the history of science, detailing the development of methods, practices, and work culture in the colonial context./div

Social Experience and Anthropological Knowledge

Social Experience and Anthropological Knowledge
Author: Kirsten Hastrup
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 342
Release: 2003-12-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1134843887

Anthropology poses an explicit challenge to standard notions of scientific knowledge. It claims to produce genuine insights into the workings of culture in general on the basis of individual social experience in the field. Social Experience and Anthropological Knowledge traces the process from the ethnographic experience to the analytical results, showing how fieldwork enables the ethnographer to arrive at an understanding, not only of `culture' and `society', but also of the processes by which cultures and societies are transformed. The contributors challenge the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity, redefine what we should mean by `empirical' and demonstrate the complexity of present-day epistemological problems through concrete examples. By demystifying subjectivity in the ethnographic process and re-emphasizing the vital position of fieldwork, they do much to renew confidence in the anthropological project of comprehending the world.

Knowing How to Know

Knowing How to Know
Author: Narmala Halstead
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2008-05-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0857450697

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.

Money

Money
Author: Stefan Senders
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 148
Release: 2007-09-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1845207513

Papers first presented at the 2004 meeting of the American Ethnological Society in Atlanta, Georgia, in a session on "Encounters with Money."

The Ethics of Knowledge Creation

The Ethics of Knowledge Creation
Author: Lisette Josephides
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2017-06-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1785334050

Anthropology lies at the heart of the human sciences, tackling questions having to do with the foundations, ethics, and deployment of the knowledge crucial to human lives. The Ethics of Knowledge Creation focuses on how knowledge is relationally created, how local knowledge can be transmuted into ‘universal knowledge’, and how the transaction and consumption of knowledge also monitors its subsequent production. This volume examines the ethical implications of various kinds of relations that are created in the process of ‘transacting knowledge’ and investigates how these transactions are also situated according to broader contradictions or synergies between ethical, epistemological, and political concerns.

Experimental Collaborations

Experimental Collaborations
Author: Adolfo Estalella
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2018-04-24
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1785338544

In the accounts compiled in this book, ethnography occurs through processes of material and social interventions that turn the field into a site for epistemic collaboration. Through creative interventions that unfold what we term as “fieldwork devices”—such as coproduced books, the circulation of repurposed data, co-organized events, authorization protocols, relational frictions, and social rhythms—anthropologists engage with their counterparts in the field in the construction of joint anthropological problematizations. In these situations, the traditional tropes of the fieldwork encounter (i.e. immersion and distance) give way to a narrative of intervention, where the aesthetics of collaboration in the production of knowledge substitutes or intermingles with participant observation. Building on this, the book proposes the concept of “experimental collaborations” to describe and conceptualize this distinctive ethnographic modality.