Retrospective Oral Presentation Session

Reviewed by: American Ethnological Society

Of interest to: Practicing and Applied Anthropologists, Students

Primary Theme: Exchange

Secondary Theme: Inequality

(5-0920) To Be or Not to Be There: Reflections on Fieldwork’s Shifting Significance in the Ethnographic Landscape, in Honor of Daniel Bradburd

In 1998, our friend and colleague, Daniel Bradburd, wrote Being There, an account of the fieldwork he – and his wife and fellow anthropologist, Ann Sheedy Bradburd – had conducted some twenty years earlier among Komachi nomads in Iran. In that account, Dan stresses the importance of sharing space with others, challenging the view that fieldwork reveals more about the observer than about living persons. In addition, as an economic anthropologist, Dan focused on the lived experience of class relationships, particularly as embedded in global vectors of material production and profit-making. Thus, in his study of drugs, he wrote about how colonized people have been subject to drastically unequal relations of trade, exchanging commercially valuable products for addictive substances. And, how workers, including those laboring in dangerous mines, have sought drugs to numb their bodily pain. Indeed, Dan’s research demonstrated that such exchanges, whether putatively symmetrical or blatantly asymmetrical, established problematic, even destructive, legacies of entitlement and obligation. Unfortunately, Dan’s concern with the asymmetries and legacies of entitlement and obligation ended prematurely, just as he began probing the “dark side” of Mauss’s gift. Oriented by Dan’s core concerns, our papers draw upon experiences of “being there” in settings including Melanesia, Europe, and North America. All recognize that fieldwork is a method deeply embedded in theory and that the best theory is ethnographically grounded, a lesson exemplified in everything Dan wrote.

Organizer(s)

• Deborah Gewertz

  G. Henry Whitcomb Professor of Anthropology
  Amherst College

Chair(s)

• Deborah Gewertz

  G. Henry Whitcomb Professor of Anthropology
  Amherst College

Presenter(s)

• Deborah Gewertz

  G. Henry Whitcomb Professor of Anthropology
  Amherst College

• Annegret Staiger

  Clarkson University

• Jane Nadel-Klein

  Trinity College

• Frederick Errington

  Distinguished Professor, Emeritus
  Trinity College

• Rena LEDERMAN

  Professor
  Princeton University

• Nancy Lutkehaus

  University of Southern California

• William Jankowiak

  University of Nevada Las Vegas

Presentations:

• 2:00 PM - 2:15 PM

  Be Prepared: The Study of Scouting in Faraway Places
  Deborah Gewertz – Amherst College
• 2:15 PM - 2:30 PM

  Fieldwork Relationships - Gifts, Obligations, and Moral Spheres
  Annegret D. Staiger – Clarkson University
• 2:30 PM - 2:45 PM

  Growing Shade: Family Values, Nice People and Ambiguous Relations in the Green Industry
  Jane Nadel-Klein – Trinity College
• 2:45 PM - 3:00 PM

  Conversations across the Disciplinary Divide: Dan Bradburd's Political Economy
  Frederick Errington – Trinity College
• 3:00 PM - 3:15 PM

  Being With: Ethnography and the Evidence of Intersubjective Experience
  Rena LEDERMAN – Princeton University
• 3:15 PM - 3:30 PM

  On Not Being There: Manam Islanders' Displacement, Adaptation, and the “Dark Side” of the Neoliberal State
  Nancy C. Lutkehaus – University of Southern California
• 3:30 PM - 3:45 PM

  Labor Incentive or Labor Enhancers? What Ethnographers Can Tell us about Owners, Workers and Colonialist Dilemma.
  William R. Jankowiak – University of Nevada Las Vegas