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Conclusion
- University of Wisconsin Press
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201 Con clu sion re becca har din and ka mari max ine clarke In itially of fered as talks at Yale Uni ver sity, the es says in cluded here were orig i nally prompted (and, at times, chal lenged) by ques tions from stu dents who were cu ri ous about eth no graphic prac tices and fa culty en gaged in the de vel op ment of a range of new field pro jects in volv ing trans na tional, multi sited, or new in sti tu tional pro jects. Their con cerns came from both within and be yond the field of anthro pol ogy and were not only in tel lec tual but also pro fes sional and ex pe ri en tial in na ture. Many were seek ing anthro po log i cal knowl edge for pro jects be yond the con fines of ac a demic anthro pol ogy. They prompted us, how ever, to re think what is under stood by eth no graphic knowl edge. Eth nog ra phy, as a major com po nent of “what anthro pol o gists do,” still evokes what MichelRolph Trouil lot (1991) has called the “sav age slot” that dis tin guishes the topic of study for so ci ocul tu ral anthro pol o gists from those top ics stud ied by other so cial sci en tists. This is sur pris ing, given the new di rec tions sketched in the es says in this vol ume. The per sis tence of prac tices in clud ing eth no graphic field work and pro duc tion of mono graphs within the field of anthro pol ogy seems al most anach ron is tic, yet these are still cru cial cri te ria for mem ber ship in the “tribe of anthro pol ogy.” At the same time that such tra di tional eth no graphic stud ies and prod ucts per sist, anthro pol ogy has under gone un prec e dented change in re cent decades. Those trans for ma tions have been sum mar ized in this vol ume in terms of ethnography ’s top ics, tech niques, and in creas ing ten den cies to inter ro gate its own ob jec tiv ity or ad vo cacy. As we have argued in our intro duc tion and dem on strated in our chap ters, eth nog ra phy is now used more widely and in more ways than be fore, be yond the con fines of ac a demic schol ar ship. This is true de spite its re cent in fu sion with re flex ive, crit i cal en er gies. These en cour age its prac ti tion ers to con sider its 202 rebecca hardin and kamari ma xi ne clarke far-reaching con se quences, even as they sur ren der to its em brace of in ti macy and im me diacy in re search de sign. Sid ney Mintz chal lenged us with humor and an in ge ni ous use of that most del i cate of prac tices, car i ca ture, to dis tin guish between the travels and writ ing of an eth nog ra pher, a TV re porter, a tour ist, and a nov el ist. What, in this day and age, dis tin guishes eth nog ra phy from other inter cul tu ral ex pres sions and en coun ters? Most ac a demic eth nog ra phers are acutely con scious of the fact that their field places them out side of the emerg ing po lit i cal econ o mies of large grant-driven re search and writ ing in so cial and nat u ral sci ence. Nor, how ever, are we gen er at ing the ory as we used to; de bates rage about whether the ory emerges at all from our ac tiv i ties, and from where. One such de bate, cat a lyzed by ar gu ments in the re cent book The ory from the South: How Euro-America is Evolv ing To ward Af rica (Co mar off and Co mar off 2011), was pub lished in the Cul tural Anthro pol ogy on line forum.1 Its “bloggy” im me diacy re minds us of how often anthro pol o gists these days con trib ute to jour na lis...