Comments on: Lawrence of Arabia as anthropologist

By: Anthropology roundup: “Lawrence of Arabia as anthropologist…”Anthropologists Respond to Gender-Citation Disparity « Erkan's Field Diary

Sun, 29 Dec 2013 19:15:55 +0000

[…] Lawrence of Arabia as anthropologist […]

By: Anthropology roundup: “Lawrence of Arabia as anthropologist…”Anthropologists Respond to Gender-Citation Disparity | Erkan's Field Diary

Sun, 29 Dec 2013 19:13:46 +0000

[…] Lawrence of Arabia as anthropologist […]

By: John McCreery

John McCreery — Sat, 21 Dec 2013 02:50:33 +0000

People used to ask Ruth and me if we had suffered from culture shock in Taiwan. We answered, “Not culture shock, culture fatigue.” It wasn’t a physically difficult place to do fieldwork, rather cushy in fact. Back in 1969 a US$300 a month fellowship was enough to make us very well off in a market town in central Taiwan. But the constant status game-playing that made everyday life seem like an endless Rotary Club meeting was wearing after two years. Still, looking back, yes, we are still sweet on the place.

By: Rex

Rex — Fri, 20 Dec 2013 19:20:00 +0000

I was just reading Michael Smith’s “A Faraway, Familiar Place” (good read btw) and he confesses in there that his fieldwork in PNG — which was physically very difficult — was successful largely because he was driven by fear of failure and flunking out of his doctoral program. And yet he ended up returning there again and again, even when his life as a consultant made those trips very difficult. I wonder how many anthropologists got roped into the discipline for one reason or another, detested fieldwork, and planned afterwards never to go back? Or how many were like Mike and ended up all sweet on a place.

By: John McCreery

John McCreery — Fri, 20 Dec 2013 02:56:49 +0000

LoA is also a story of the power and importance of fulfilling a naive, unthinking, almost visceral need to lose one’s self in another way of life.

I wonder how many of us here would agree that their own engagement with anthropology was driven by this need? As opposed, for example, to finding our true selves in the liminal space between our native culture and the one(s) we study professionally?

By: Rex

Rex — Thu, 19 Dec 2013 04:15:57 +0000

You know, I painted LoA as a cautionary tale about the anthropological obsession with immersion, but Keith your story also points out the flip side: LoA is also a story of the power and importance of fulfilling a naive, unthinking, almost visceral need to lose one’s self in another way of life. It’s a story about both the power and the danger of that need. That’s why its so anthropological.

By: Keith Hart

Keith Hart — Wed, 18 Dec 2013 22:29:58 +0000

I agree with yiou about the greatness of the movie, Rex, and about its importance for anthropology and the fieldwork tradition. Lawrence also helped me with my doctoral fieldwork in Ghana. I had hepatatis after six months and was due to spend two weeks in hospital. I grabbed the three biggest paperbacks I could find in the university bookshop and one of them was The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Until then I had made almost no progress with language learning and was using a very literate analytical method with teacher. At one point Lawrence asks how can you pass for Arab when you are white? His answer (from memory) inspired me. Speak Arabic fluently and never mind how many mistakes you make. They will assume that you are just another Arab from over the next dune who doesn’t speak the language well. When I got out, I decided to abandon the analytical, words-on-cards approach and go in for oral memory with as much confidence as I could muster. Later Jack Goody paid me a visit and told me that he had never heard an anthropologists speak an African language so fluently…with a Manchester accent.

By: Kristina Killgrove (@DrKillgrove)

Kristina Killgrove (@DrKillgrove) — Tue, 17 Dec 2013 21:08:31 +0000

Interestingly, O’Toole may have been bad for classical archaeology: http://rogueclassicism.com/2013/12/17/peter-otombarolo/.