For Ethnography
Convenors: Sanjay Srivastava, Deakin University; Jonathan Marshall, University of Technology Sydney; Gillian Cowlishaw, University of Technology Sydney
Panel description: With ethnography both diminishing and expanding, emerging in new forms in new contexts (in corporations, across the internet, without demarcated place, as a form of autobiography, and in other disciplines), how does anthropology justify its claims to determine what ethnography should be? The papers in this panel explore the claims anthropology makes to ethnographic practice based in an essential relationship between intensive fieldwork and writing. What is the theory and practice of ethnography? Is there a role for an explicit psychology and epistemology, or a theory of imagining or of language in ethnographic practice? How could such reflection affect psychology, epistemology or linguistics, and how would it affect anthropology? We want to recognize ethnography for its desire to explore the complexities of the present, while avoiding simplistic representations of contemporary cultural, social and political dynamics, which assume either that it is just a method, that there is an ‘outside’, or that everything is merely ‘subjective’. We also wish to highlight examples of new kinds of ethnography which demonstrate its relevance to understanding the complexities of a globalising present. (Note: This session follows up a conference of the same title held at University of Technology Sydney on April 20th 2007 convened by Sanjay Srivastava and Gillian Cowlishaw.)
Abstracts
Christina L. Birdsall-Jones, John Curtin Institute of Public Policy, Curtin University of Technology - The Foreigner: Key Roles Within the Culture of Anthropology
Gillian Cowlishaw, University of Technology Sydney - Engaging the Present
Raymond Madden, Department of Anthropology, La Trobe University - Teaching Ethnography
Jonathan Marshall, University of Technology Sydney - Ethnography and Epistemology
Sanjay Srivastava, School of Communication and Creative Arts, Deakin University - Urban Spaces, Disney-Divinity and Moral Consumption in Delhi
Rosemary Wiss, Department of Anthropology, Macquarie University - In the Name of the Father: Foreignness and Paedophilia, Kinship and Incest (Sabang, Puerto Galera, The Philippines)
