Just to quickly add something. Ever since I started studying anthropology I’ve attempted to employ what I’ve learned in my everyday life. To invoke the core (and often paradoxical) tenets of anthropology–those of cultural relativity, participant observation, and holism–I’ve found it tremendously difficult to apply them appropriately in my own life. This process, which I feel helps me become more “human”, has been hard and, indeed, personally transformative.

What you’re getting at here is something I’ve been highly interested in myself. To respond to several posts at once; I agree that reflextivity is both a useful concept and a possible intellectual trap which can lead right to that navel-gazing crap. I also think that ckelty is spot on in calling anthropologists tools. Realizing how one is effected by their experiences is valuable in not only creating a certain sense of empathy with whatever people are being observed, but also in offering validity to research. If for instance, one realizes that they are superimposing their own beliefs onto a event than it is easier to step back and look at it from a different angle. The same applies to reading ethnographies… I always find it helpful to understnad WHO the author is, not just WHAT they wrote.

The battle between anthropology as strictly objectivist or highly relfexive just reminds of a quote by Kroeber: “Anthropology is the most humanistic of the sciences and the most scientific of the humanities”.

Dave

Frederic W. Gleach fwg1 {at} cornell(.)edu and
Vilma Santiago-Irizarry vs23 {at} cornell(.)edu

do. They have been pillars of the section and are both terribly nice people. Wouldn’t hurt to ask.

My immediate response to Jason’s query was to recommend a look at

(1) Ruth Behar’s _The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Can Break Your Heart_ or

(2) the winners of the Society for Humanistic Anthropology’s Victor Turner Prize.

Am I alone in suspecting that for many of us “Anthropology” refers to the parts that we happen to be familiar with, given our own training and fieldwork?

LFB — I think you are right that the ‘objectivity’ crowd kicked hard against late eighties work on reflexivity. But perhaps it also made professing a certain kind of transformative experience necessary in all ethnography? I always have a feeling people are simply not allowed to confess that they didn’t particularly care for the people they did their research on. So maybe it polarized the field into camps, one of which focused on objectivity, the other of which instituted mandatory love and respect for field communities?

That’s probably too diagrammatic — one thing about 80s reflexivity is that it often focused on the ambivalence of field relationships. But hey, I’m brainstorming.

As for authenticity in tourism and fieldwork — its a good insight. This is what Simon Harrison calls a ‘mimetic conflict’: anthros feel anxiety that tourists are becoming (imitating, hence ‘mimesis’) them too much. Interesting.

Not coincidentally, with the rise of mass tourism in the 80s peaking in the 90s, suddenly there were all sorts of amateur ethnographers visiting “natives” in previously obscure locations, photographing natives, having sex with natives, etc and writing guidebooks, articles and eventually blogs about how transformative living in another culture is. I suspect (but have no evidence) that not gushing too much about how fieldwork changed our lives also keeps us from looking amateurish at a time when anyone whose ever done a study abroad program in college or spent a week on a safari in Kenya fancies himself/herself an anthropologist.