Dispatches from the Field : Neophyte Ethnographers in a Changing World

Penned by advanced graduate students amidst their dissertation fieldwork, these provocative essays capture the challenges and intricacies of that anthropological rite of passage. The collection s authors frankly portray the mistakes they made in the field, their struggle to analyze the events unfolding before their eyes, the psychological and emotional frustration seemingly endemic to "doing" ethnography, and the ethical complexities of researching living people. The authors present these essays not as models of ideal fieldwork or as a series of lessons about how to overcome potential hurdles one faces in the field, but rather as a window into the complexities of "being" an ethnographer in the contemporary world. Against a backdrop of subject populations increasingly informed about global relations of power and, more specifically, informed about the topography of American imperialism, these humanistic essays vividly reflect recent shifts in both the focus and methods of anthropological research, as well as the dilemmas underlying the construction of anthropological knowledge. They are meant to spark discussion and debate. While tailored to an audience relatively new to ethnographic fieldwork (and intended as a teaching tool), this collection should appeal to anthropologists and ethnographers at all points in their career.

Titles of related interest also from Waveland Press: Anderson, Around the World in 30 Years: Life as a Cultural Anthropologist (ISBN 9781577660576); Anderson, First Fieldwork: The Misadventures of an Anthropologist (ISBN 9780881334913); Barley, The Innocent Anthropologist: Notes from a Mud Hut (ISBN 9781577661566); Bohannan-van der Elst, Asking and Listening: Ethnography as Personal Adaptation (ISBN 9780881339871); DeVita, Stumbling toward Truth: Anthropologists at Work (ISBN 9781577661252); and Lenkeit, High Heels and Bound Feet: And Other Essays on Everyday Anthropology, Second Edition (ISBN 9781478637684).

"One of the most engaging and provocative contributions of this book is the emphasis on the ethnographer as an emotional being. While this is not a novel concept in ethnography, the originality of these pieces lies in their seeming unfinished and rough-hewn qualities. And, indeed, they are depictions of fieldwork in progress and not the nuggets of `lessons learned' in the field . . . these are fledgling scholars trying to make sense of themselves, their relationship to the people they study and, most important, to a general audience, to anthropology itself. At times they seem courageous, other times naïve. Yet like the up-close-and-personal head shot on television, they draw the reader in and keep their attention riveted." -- International Review of Modern Sociology (Spring 2007)