Description
Book SynopsisDocuments how re-visiting fieldwork sites shapes anthropologists' interpretations
Trade ReviewOverall, this is a great collection of essays that hang together well and — for once! — address the common theme that the edited volume is ostensibly about. At the same time, each is strong enough that it could be read separately. If you are interested in the topic or the contributors, it is definitely worth picking up.
* savageminds.org *
This is an important book because we need a disciplinary conversation about our myths. . . . [I]s more always better? Are there limits to the value of returns to the field? What are the costs and who will bear them? Returns to the Field has done us the valuable service of allowing this conversation to begin.
* Social Anthropology *
[V]aluable insights can be gained by returning to the field—whether physically or intellectually—to reflect upon the inevitable shifts in the researcher's intellectual transformation, disciplinary trends, and even popular understandings of key events and narratives that have been documented. Summer/Fall 2014
* Oral History Review *
Table of ContentsPreface
Introduction \ Signe Howell and Aud Talle
Part 1. Change and Continuity in Long-term Perspective
1. Forty-five Years with the Kayapo \ Terence Turner
2. "Soon we will be spending all our time at funerals": Yolngu Mortuary Rituals in an Epoch of Constant Change \ Frances Morphy and Howard Morphy
3. Returns to the Maasai: Long-term Fieldwork and the Production of Anthropological Knowledge \ Aud Talle
4. Contingency, Collaboration, and the Unimagined over Thirty-five Years of Ethnography \ David Holmberg
5. Nostalgia and Neocolonialism \ Peter Metcalf
Part 2. Expansion in Time, Expansion in Space
6. Cumulative Understandings: Experiences from the Study of Two Southeast Asian Societies \ Signe Howell
7. Repeated Returns and Special Friends: From Mythic Encounter to Shared History \ Piers Vitebsky
8. Compressed Globalization and Expanding Desires in Marovo Lagoon, Solomon Islands \ Edvard Hviding
9. Widening the Net: Returns to the Field and Regional Understanding \ Alan Barnard
Afterword: Reflecting on Returns to the Field \ Bruce Knauft
List of Contributors
Index
