Auto-Ethnographies: The Anthropology of Academic Practices
© 2005
How has the "business" of higher education affected the environment in which academics work? Who should be able to hold anthropologists ethically responsible—the research institution that sponsors the fieldwork or the community of people being studied? What happens when academics step out of the ivory tower and into the public realm? Why and how, do some anthropologists come undone by the challenges of the academy?
These are some of the questions posed in this innovative collection of essays. Accessibly written, ethnographically grounded, and theoretically informed, this volume faces contentious issues with honesty, integrity, and the occasional bout of humour. It touches on issues of ethics, teaching, the politics of peer review, and the ironies involved in attempting to make anthropology relevant in wider circles. It offers rare insight into the challenges and dilemmas that mark contemporary scholarship.
Product Details
- World Rights
- Page Count: 255 pages
- Dimensions: 6.0in x 0.5in x 9.0in
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Reviews
Auto-Ethnographies is a lively and generally appreciative collection of perspectives on the practices that constitute academic and professional anthropology. [...] For students of ethnography and the academic practice of anthropology, this collection offers a thoughtful set of reflections and 'conversations' on what is surely the most 'vocational' of disciplines.
Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology
An extraordinarily rich, provocative, and engaging conversation; one that invites--in fact demands--our participation.
Don Brenneis, University of California, Santa Cruz
Every reader will find something of particular interest in these unforgettable, unputdownable chapters. [...] The skill with which the volume has been edited and the astute manner in which contributors have addressed the most complex, and in some cases the most devastating, aspects of ethnographic research, with humour and irony, make their insights supremely important. This book will be useful not only for undergraduates, but for all anthropologists, and all who inhabit institutions of higher learning.
Joan Vincent, Barnard College, Columbia University -
Author Information
Anne Meneley is a professor in the Department of Anthropology at Trent University.
Donna J. Young is at the University of Toronto, Scarborough and has written on issues of memory, trauma, and personhood. -
Table of contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Auto-ethnographies of Academic Practices, Donna J. Young and Anne Meneley
Part I: Initiations
1. Loyalty and Treachery in the Kalahari, Renée Sylvain
2. Doctors With Borders, Lesley Gotlib
3. Who Wears the Trousers in Vanuatu?, Maggie Cummings
Part II: Collaborations
4. Gatekeeper or Helpful Counsel? Practices and Perceptions in Academic Peer Review, Stephen Bocking
5. Teaching and Learning Across Borders, Julia Harrison and Anne Meneley
6. Ethnographys Edge in Development, Pauline Gardiner Barber
Part III: Interventions
7. Anthropologist and Accomplice in Botswana, Jacqueline Solway
8. The Torso in the Thames: Imagining Darkest Africa in the United Kingdom, Todd Sanders
9. White Devil as Expert Witness, Ted Swedenburg
Part IV: Disciplining the Academy
10. Team Diversity: An Ethnography of Institutional Values, Bonnie Urciuoli
11. Censorship, Surveillance, and Middle East Studies in the Contemporary United States, David A. McMurray
Part V: Departures
12. The Auto-ethnography That Can Never Be and the Activists Ethnography That Might Be, David Graeber
13. Writing Against the Native Point of View, Donna J. Young
14. An Anthropologist Undone, Camilla Gibb
Afterword: Our Subjects/Ourselves: A View from the Back Seat, Michael Lambek
List of Contributors
Index
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Subjects and Courses
