Ethnography As Commentary : Writing From the Virtual Archive / Johannes Fabian.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Fabian, Johannes, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Communication and culture.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (ix, 139 pages)

Other Title:

Ethnography As Commentary

Place of Publication:

Durham : Duke University Press, 2008.

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

The Internet allows ethnographers to deposit the textual materials on which they base their writing in virtual archives. Electronically archived fieldwork documents can be accessed at any time by the writer, his or her readers, and the people studied. Johannes Fabian, a leading theorist of anthropological practice, argues that virtual archives have the potential to shift the emphasis in ethnographic writing from the monograph to commentary. In this insightful study, he returns to the recording of a conversation he had with a ritual healer in the Congolese town of Lubumbashi more than three decades ago. Fabian's transcript and translation of the exchange have been deposited on a website (Language and Popular Culture in Africa), and in Ethnography as Commentary he provides a model of writing in the presence of a virtual archive. In his commentary, Fabian reconstructs his meeting with the healer Kahenga Mukonkwa Michel, in which the two discussed the ritual that Kahenga performed to protect Fabian's home from burglary. Fabian reflects on the expectations and terminology that shape his description of Kahenga's ritual and meditates on how ethnographic texts are made, considering the settings, the participants, the technologies, and the linguistic medium that influence the transcription and translation of a recording and thus fashion ethnographic knowledge.

Contents:

Introduction. Closing House

A Late Ethnography

Chapter 1. An Event: Closing the House

Chapter 2. A Text: Made, Not Found

Chapter 3. Kahenga's Work

Chapter 4. Kahenga's World

Chapter 5. Kahenga's Thoughts

Chapter 6. Endings and Ends.

Notes:

CC BY-NC-ND

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9781478090113

1478090111

OCLC:

1444142147