Anthropology Matters Journal, 2001.

Representing Rwanda: questions and challenges

Nigel Eltringham, SOAS

While members of the Rwandan political élite, both in power and in exile, do not deny that the 1994 genocide occurred, there are significant differences in how they explain its cause, and the degree of context they consider necessary for a ‘true’ representation of the conflict to emerge. Despite this, recent journalistic works on Rwanda present a monovocal, ‘factual’ narrative about the genocide. While such narratives are clearly attractive to a wider readership, anthropology’s concern to give voice to competing representations as a cause, rather than subsidiary feature of conflict places researchers in a sensitive and difficult position. To what extent do anthropological treatments of conflict necessarily oppose such ‘factual’ narratives, or can they be regarded as complementary?

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Ethical webs: some thoughts on writing up and publication

Karen Lüdtke, Linacre College, Oxford

The impact of research and publications on the communities studied by anthropologists raises crucial ethical issues. I discuss some of these issues here on the basis of my research experiences in Puglia. This Southern Italian region is sometimes described as a ‘landmark on the anthropological tourist map,’ due to the extensive interest that the curative tradition of tarantism, indigenous to this area, has attracted.

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Dressed for fieldwork: Sartorial borders and negotiations

Nayanika Mookherjee, SOAS

Deciding what to wear is one of the ways in which people try to pin down meaning, and control both presentations and interpretations of selfhood. This paper explores this negotiation of meaning in the context of the clothing practices of the ethnographer, and the judgements that are made by people in the field based on the former’s sartorial expressions. This brings to light the dialectic process of reification of identity that exists on both sides. The paper further argues that in order to understand how clothing relates to, or creates social identity, one needs to know how clothed bodies are located in a particular setting. Such an approach necessarily includes an interrogation of the clothing practices of the ethnographer.

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Far away, so close: Some notes on participant observation during fieldwork in Nepal and England

Mike Wilmore, UCL

Participant observation has been the subject of intense debate amongst anthropologists in recent years, but it continues to be the methodological foundation of research within our discipline. Little thought has been given, however, to the extent to which a researcher’s participation in a social milieu can be properly assessed. I examine this issue in the light of two periods of participatory research in contrasting social environments, that of academic archaeology in the UK and a rapidly modernising, urban community in Nepal. I argue that participation is not simply a matter of ‘acting like’ or ‘doing things like’ people of another society. Instead, a researcher’s participation is a concomitant of his or her own changing socio-political position, and must be compared with the diversity of subject positions within the host society if the character of this participation is to be properly understood.

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Anonimity, ethics and validity: Multi-sited fieldwork into Thai integral healing

Marco Roncarati, SOAS

The mainstay of my fieldwork, covering a one-year period until September 2000, revolved around the study of traditional healers and health care developments within the context of Thai Buddhism. This paper attempts to look at certain ‘challenges’ many anthropologists face when in the field and when ‘writing up’, particularly with regard to the identity of those studied, the validity of their experiences, and related ethical matters. With reference to a case study it is argued that, in order to enhance understanding, knowledge in its various forms needs to be contextualised, while consciousness is more usefully understood as capable of being developed to ‘higher’ levels beyond the ‘mental-rational’ level to more adequately reflect the reality of ‘supernatural’ phenomenon described by the anthropologist’s informants.

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Unsuitable subject, or the rise and fall of arctic dreams

Mari Hirano, SOAS

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Obituary - In memory of a friend - Justine Lucas (June 1968 - July 2000)

By Lindi Botha and Nayanika Mookherjee, SOAS.

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