Description
Book Synopsis Transgression is the stock in trade of a certain kind of anthropological sensibility that transforms fieldwork from strict social science to something more engaging. It builds on Koepping’s idea that participation transforms perception and investigates how transgressive practices have triggered the re-theorization of conventional forms of thought and life. It focuses on social practices in various cultural fields including the method and politics of anthropology in order to show how transgressive experiences become relevant for the organisation and understanding of social relations. This book brings key authors in anthropology together to debate and transgress anthropological expectations. Through transgression as method, as discussed here, our understanding of the world is transformed, and anthropology as a discipline becomes dangerous and relevant again.
Table of Contents List of Figures
Klaus Peter Köpping
Introduction
Ursula Rao and John Hutnyk
PART I: FIELDWORKS
Chapter 1. Reflexivity Unbound: Shifting Styles of Critical Self-awareness from the Malinowskian Scene of Fieldwork and Writing to the Emergence of Multi-sited Ethnography
George Marcus
Chapter 2. News from the Field: the Experience of Transgression and the Transformation of Knowledge during Research in an Expert-site
Ursula Rao
Chapter 3. Soiled Work and the Artefact
Howard Potter
Chapter 4. Transgression for Transcendence? On the Anthropologist’s (Dis)engagement in the Politics of Meaning
Kaori Sugishita
Chapter 5. Running Out of Tricks: the Experience of Ethnography and the Politics of Culturalism
Thomas Reuter
PART II: PERFORMANCES
Chapter 6. Transcending Transgression with Transgression: Inheriting Forsaken Souls in Bali
Mary Ida Bagus
Chapter 7. The ‘Dance of Punishment’: Transgression and Punishment in an East Indian Ritual
Burkhard Schnepel
Chapter 8. Divine Play or Subversive Comedy? Reflections on Costuming and Gender at a Hindu Festival
Beatrix Hauser
Chapter 9. Between Meaning and Significance: Reflections on Ritual and Mimesis
Alexander Henn
Chapter 10. Animism on Stage: Tracing Anthropology’s Heritage in Contemporary African Dance in Europe
Nadine Sieveking
Chapter 11. Transgression and the Erotic
Vincent Crapanzano
PART III: INFRINGEMENTS
Chapter 12. Michel Leiris: Master of Ethnographic Failure
Peter Phipps
Chapter 13. Boundary Confusion in Anthropology and Art: Pablo Picasso and Michel Leiris
Judith Weiss
Chapter 14. The Concatenation of Minds Klaus
Peter Buchheit
Chapter 15. Transgressions of Fieldwork/Filed Works: Method in the Madness
John Hutnyk
Notes on Contributors
Index
