Comments on: Some final thoughts on studying…up? over? sideways?

By: Sideways: from who and what to how | Savage Minds

Sideways: from who and what to how | Savage Minds — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 04:49:43 +0000

[…] year Julian discussed projects of studying up or sideways as hinging on how “ethnographers relate to their […]

By: Strong

Strong — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 11:42:23 +0000

I really liked the way you laced Rabinow’s comments into your on-going blogging. It may be obvious, or maybe it isn’t, but what I wanted to do in juxtaposing Strathern and Rabinow’s quotes was to call into question Rabinow’s version of what counts as ‘contemporary’. There is a big irony in the discussion in /Designs/ about how Writing Culture exposed (along with a few other works) the representational politics of ethnographic writing, and especially the way that customary ethnography often seemed to place its subjects ‘out of time.’ This is evidently to be criticized — yet when Rabinow comments on Strathern-New Guinea-molecular biology, ‘molecular biology’ is part of the ‘contemporary world’ and New Guinea is what? When I ran across Strathern’s piece, she seems to understand or imply that there is a shift in anthropology or a slippage between contemporary/us and old/them, and wants to resist it. I just thought that Rabinow inadvertantly revealed a sensibility that essentially reinscribes or reperforms the very ‘sin’ the old ethnographers of moka and the tambaran had allegedly committed.

This is why I find Strathern-derivative work in biotechnology & medicine to be in some ways much more appealing than some other contemporary stuff, because it is boldly comparative. I’m thinking here of Bamford’s book Biology Unmoored or Monica Konrad’s Nameless Relations and so on (to say nothing of Dame Marilyn’s own Reproducing the Future and other works).

(This comment to be tagged under: ‘young fogies’)

By: Sean

Sean — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 18:17:53 +0000

Something than Angela Ho missed in her ethnography is that “studying up” as L. Nader wrote about it in Reinventing Anthropology, was actually put forward as studying up, down, and sideways — point being an adequate ethnography shouldn’t only study up.

By: Joshua

Joshua — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 13:11:19 +0000

Thanks for this insightful post. One of the earliest ‘studying up’ ethnographies that addresses much of these questions and themes is Sally Weaver’s ‘Making Canadian Indian Policy: the hidden agenda 1968-1970’. It is superbly done and stands as a great model for people looking to do ethnographic work on policy, bureaucracy etc. Thanks-

By: Jwalk

Jwalk — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 16:54:19 +0000

I have enjoyed your thoughts on this. Thank you!

By: John McCreery

John McCreery — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 12:03:10 +0000

Julian, thanks for the opportunity to learn what you have been up to. Have a site where we can follow further developments?