Love in the Time of Ethnography: Essays on Connection as a Focus and Basis for Research (Anthropology of Well-Being: Individual, Community, Society)

ISBN 10: 1498543170 / ISBN 13: 9781498543170

Published by Lexington Books, 2017

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: Love in the Time of Ethnography: Essays on Connection as a Focus and Basis for Research (Anthropology of Well-Being: Individual, Community, Society)
• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Publication Date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1498543170
• ISBN 13: 9781498543170
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Love in the Time of Ethnography explores love – variously defined – as an important facet of human life and a worthy focus of study. The authors look at love in association with an Alevi and Sunni couple in Turkey, organizers of Mexican American and immigrant youth movements, Christian missionaries in China, an elderly man with dementia, two women “coming home” to queer identity, a White researcher working with Black women in the US, the common ground between Dogen’s Zen teachings and Habermas's critical theory, an Albanian Sufi community in Michigan and interactions between humans and the natural world. It also includes theoretical writing on the place of love in social analysis, whether this involves relationships between researchers and participants or the nature of human connection itself. The authors argue that social research is an affective process as well as a cognitive one, and that fellow feeling is an essential component of making sense of the world.

Along with more traditional scholarly forms, the contributors to this book use auto-ethnography, life stories, archival research and poetry, noting that style itself conveys information and emotion. Writing is always to some extent partisan. While anthropologists and other social researchers have explored this idea over the last few decades, they have more often explored it with an eye to critique than to the ideals underlying that critique. This is a collection of essays about what ethnographers are aiming for as well as the problems they address, and the authors discuss ethical principles like agape, hizmet and cariņo as rationales for ethnography and rationales for social change.

About the Author

Frances Trix is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at Indiana University and Distinguished Senior Scholar at the Center for the Study of the Middle East. She is based in Indiana, USA.