James T. Siegel’s “Objects and Objections of Ethnography” offers a compelling challenge to traditional anthropological approaches. This collection of essays, born from Siegel’s extensive fieldwork, shifts the focus from seeking commonalities to meticulously examining the unique particularities of diverse social landscapes. Drawing on examples ranging from university life to post-tsunami Aceh, Indonesia, Siegel analyzes how cultural responses manifest in unexpected forms objects, spaces, and even refuse each revealing distinct local meanings. Siegel pushes back against the tendency to flatten cultural differences, instead advocating for a deeper appreciation of the specific. The book expertly weaves ethnographic observation with insightful engagements with key thinkers like Derrida and Bataille, not to impose theoretical frameworks, but to sharpen the lens through which we perceive cultural phenomena. More than a field report, it’s a critical reflection on the very act of ethnographic interpretation, questioning how our assumptions shape what we see and understand. For students and scholars of anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies, this book provides a fresh perspective on understanding cultural difference. Its exploration into the ethnography of the “other” invites readers to examine familiar landscapes with new eyes, pushing for deeper, more nuanced understandings of social realities. This 188-page paperback, published by Fordham University Press, remains a significant contribution to contemporary anthropological discourse.
Objects and Objections of Ethnography
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The essays in this volume, in all their astonishing richness and diversity, focus on the question of the other. Brimming with whole flotillas of new ideas, they delineate subtle and various ways in which that question can be made the basis of an ethnographic project.
In them, the author responds to the invitations extended by a specific location rather than pursuing a codified method. And they examine many different socialities in many different locationsamong them the Cornell University campus in the late seventies, the former Muse de lHomme and the Quai Branly Museum in Paris, the
Indonesian province of Aceh in the wake of the tsunami of 2004, and contemporary Indonesia, in the liminal figures of the Jew and the Chinese. The author meticulously traces how the social and cultural responses in each location are astonishingly differentin the form, say, of gorges, faces, garbage, and fetishes.
Regrettably, these days anthropologists have a tendency to look for similarities rather than differences, to show how one phenomenon is just like another. This book stands determinedly against this trend, both in its ethnographic examinations and in how it takes up such figures as Kant, Derrida, Bataille, Simmel, and Leiris so as to illuminate not only the objects of ethnography but also differences among the perspectives
these thinkers represent.
This book will put the methods and objects of anthropology in an entirely new light. In addition, it will speak to the concerns of historians, political scientists, and scholars of area studies, literature, and art.
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Binding | |
| Condition | |
| ISBN-10 | 0823232751 |
| ISBN-13 | 9780823232758 |
| Language | |
| Pages | 188 |
| Publisher | |
| Year published | |
| Weight | 277 |
| Edition | 1 |
