Being There

Challenges to ethnographic authority and to the ethics of representation have led many contemporary anthropologists to abandon fieldwork in favor of strategies of theoretical puppeteering, textual analysis, and surrogate ethnography. In Being There, John Borneman and Abdellah Hammoudi argue that ethnographies based on these strategies elide important insights. To demonstrate the power and knowledge attained through the fieldwork experience, they have gathered essays by anthropologists working in Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tanzania, the Canadian Arctic, India, Germany, and Russia that shift attention back to the subtle dynamics of the ethnographic encounter. From an Inuit village to the foothills of Kilimanjaro, each account illustrates how, despite its challenges, fieldwork yields important insights outside the reach of textual analysis.

John Borneman and Abdellah Hammoudi are both Professors of Anthropology at Princeton University. Borneman's most recent book is Syrian Episodes: Sons, Fathers, and an Anthropologist in Aleppo, and Hammoudi's is A Season in Mecca: Narrative of a Pilgrimage.

Acknowledgments

1. The Fieldwork Encounter, Experience, and the Making of Truth: An Introduction
John Borneman and Abdellah Hammoudi

2. Textualism and Anthropology: On the Ethnographic Encounter, or an Experience in the Hajj
Abdellah Hammoudi

3. The Suicidal Wound and Fieldwork among Canadian Inuit
Lisa Stevenson

4. The Hyperbolic Vegetarian: Notes on a Fragile Subject in Gujarat
Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi

5. The Obligation to Receive: The Countertransference, the Ethnographer, Protestants, and Proselytization in North India
Leo Coleman

6. Encounter and Suspicion in Tanzania
Sally Falk Moore

7. Encounters with the Mother Tongue: Speech, Translation, and Interlocution in Post-Cold War German Repatriation
Stefan Senders

8. Institutional Encounters: Identification and Anonymity in Russian Addiction Treatment (and Ethnography)
Eugene Raikhel

9. Fieldwork Experience, Collaboration, and Interlocution: The ""Metaphysics of Presence"" in Encounters with the Syrian Mukhabarat
John Borneman

10. Afterthoughts: The Experience and Agony of Fieldwork
Abdellah Hammoudi and John Borneman

Biographical Notes
Index