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ANTHROPOLOGY AND HUMANISM
VOLUME 23, NUMBER 2
DECEMBER 1998
SPECIAL ISSUE
In the Field and at Home: Families and Anthropology
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Compiled and Edited by Renate Fernandez and David Sutton
CONTENTS
Introduction
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David Sutton and Renate Fernandez
"Daddy, Let's Talk"
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Joseba Zulaika and Garatxi Zulaika
The piece consists of brief edited transcripts from taped conversations between an
anthropologist father, Joseba Zulaika, and his six-year-old daughter Garatxi. They are
real life dialogues. They are offered as an ethnographic instance of the experience of
anthropologists and members of their families shifting between field and home. In this
case, they concern the two worlds, the Basque Country in Spain as the fieldwork and native
country, and Reno, Nevada, the site of Zulaika's academic and adopted lifestyle. The
family moves back and forth almost annually from the U.S. to Spain. The extract below is
the raw stuff of the special issue, and is presented with no anthropological vocabulary.
We leave Garatxi's remarks for what they are.
Infants, Ancestors, and the Afterlife: Fieldwork's Family Values in Rural West
Africa
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Alma Gottlieb, Philip Graham, and Nathaniel Gottlieb-Graham
When Nathaniel, a six-year-old, Euroamerican boy, is assigned the identity of
Denju, a
revered village ancestor in a rural Beng village in Côte d'Ivoire, what does it mean--for
the child, for his parents, for his village friends, for the conduct of his mother's
anthropological research? Likewise, when Nathaniel's father, Philip Graham, learns in the
village the news of his own father's passing, what does it mean to Graham--and for the
writing of his novel-in-progress--to discover that his village neighbors are certain that
the soul of his deceased father has entered the Beng afterlife and has become friends with
Denju, the ancestor for whom his son has been named? How can such family sagas combine in
unexpected ways to shape Alma Gottlieb's field research project on the cultural
construction of infancy? Making use of the three distinct voices of mother/anthropologist,
father/writer, and son/student, this article explores how a range of cultural, literary,
political, and psychological issues intersected in unexpected ways during fieldwork,
recasting the experiences of one North American family of three people living in a rural
village in West Africa.
"He's too cold!" Children and the Limits of Culture on a Greek Island
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David Sutton
This paper explores how the presence of my son in the field led me to challenge some of
my most basic assumptions about the nature of culture, the workings of cultural
relativism, and the value of representing other peoples as bearers of cultural difference.
During fieldwork on the Greek island of Kalymnos I found that the islanders had an
"anthropological" tolerance and curiosity concerning cultural and religious
differences, but did not extend such tolerance to practices of childrearing. And
strangely, I found myself sharing their intolerance. This article explores the limits of
"culture," both for anthropologists and for their ethnographic subjects.
"Motherhood is Powerful": Embodied Knowledge from Evolving
Field-Based Experiences
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Constance Sutton
My experience of learning that "motherhood can be powerful" began with my
first field research in Barbados (1956-58) while I was married but childless and went to
the field by myself. The lesson was further elaborated when I gave birth to my son David
in 1963, and later during subsequent research in the Caribbean and with the Yoruba of
Nigeria (1976, 1977-1979). I went to Nigeria as an older wife and mother but without my
husband and child, except for a one month visit from David. Finally my visits to the Greek
island of Kalymnos in 1992 and 1993, where David was then doing his doctoral research with
his wife and baby son, dramatically shifted and further extended my experience of family
life as it grew more and more intertwined with anthropology. Thus my story is about how
family life and anthropology reciprocally informed each other in the unfolding of my
life--in the field and at home.
Memories of Difference: From Lur to Anthropologist
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Agnes Loeffler
The author repeatedly accompanied her anthropologist-parents and her older sister to
Deh Koh, a mud village in Iran, in the time of the Shah as well as in post-revolutionary
times. The sites of her growing up thus shift between the German-speaking Austria of her
grandparents and of her own earliest years, the Luri-speaking village of her parents’
anthropological fieldwork--where "our [the sisters’] unreflected purpose in life
was to be Lurs"--and the US where she and her family now reside. Having
disconcertingly come to the recognition in her teens that she was more "other"
than the Lur she had considered herself to be as a small child, as well as neither
Austrian nor American, but a bit of "other" everywhere, she now regards herself
as tri-lingual and that this "not belonging anywhere" may even be the source of
security that enabled her to make the decision not to belong to one discipline
exclusively--rather to become a bi-professional in medicine and anthropology.
Making Mutual Sense: My Daughters and I in a Village in Iran
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Erika Friedl
Friedl, in keeping with her preferred low profile stance, tells of raising two
daughters in an Iranian mud village from infancy through early adulthood, their time in
the field distributed over a total of more than seven field years. Friedl, rarely
personally frustrated by having to adapt her Austrian/US academic middle class ways to a
strongly marked patriarchy in a physically and socially uncomfortable situation, is
perplexed at her own most "un-anthropological" stubborn refusal to accept
village ways for her own daughters. She comes to terms with her reaction by distinguishing
her own relatively uncostly adjustment, being an adult, from the heavy price in human
development that she feels would be paid by her daughters, were she not to insistently
prepare her daughters for a full cultural engagement with life in the western world.
Taxonomy and the Music of Failure
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Toni Flores
Making parenthood the central, organizing category forces us to examine what we are
actually doing and to look at the categories by and under which we (largely Western,
predominantly white, professional-class people who style ourselves anthropologists) are
operating. Examining her "failures" in the field through that perspective, the
author is led to consider the taxonomy of everyday life (for example, such distinctions as
personal/professional or home/career), the ways in which we have defined the field of
anthropology--often forgetting that the field is not the whole field, and the poetry
proper to both.
Interviews of the Unspoken: Incompatible Initiations in Senegal Fieldwork
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Mariette van Tilburg
Making parenthood the central, organizing category forces us to examine what we are
actually doing and to look at the categories by and under which we (largely Western,
predominantly white, professional-class people who style ourselves anthropologists) are
operating. Examining her "failures" in the field through that perspective, the
author is led to consider the taxonomy of everyday life (for example, such distinctions as
personal/professional or home/career), the ways in which we have defined the field of
anthropology--often forgetting that the field is not the whole field, and the poetry
proper to both.
Study in Archaeology (Poem "To My Daughter, Blythe")
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Beryle Williams
FICTION
The Knife (Honorable Mention, 1997 Competition)
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Paul Johnson
John Brown's Body
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Don Mitchell
POETRY
Holy Ghost People
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Adrie S. Kusserow
Three Notes on Politeness Formulae Reserve
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Ingrid Wendt
Our Fathers
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Rory Turner
BOOK REVIEWS
Blessing for a Long Time: A Circle of Stories (Blessing for a Long Time: The
Sacred Pole of the Omaha Tribe. Robin Ridington and Dennis Hastings.)
- Jeffrey D. Anderson
Clifford Geertz: His Critics and Followers, 1998 (The Fate of
"Culture": Geertz and Beyond.Sherry B. Ortner, ed.)
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Edward M. Bruner
The Not-So-New Social History at Colonial Williamsburg (The New History in
an Old Museum. Richard Handler and Eric Gable.)
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Catherine M. Cameron
Connecting "Auto" to "Ethno" in Writing Self and Other (Auto/Ethnography:
Rewriting the Self and the Social. Deborah E. Reed-Danahay.)
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Carolyn Ellis
Art Imitating Life; Fragmented Writing in a Fragmented World (The Fragmented
Novel in Mexico; The Politics of Form. Carol Clark D'Lugo.)
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Gregory G. Reck
They Spoke It First, a Long Time Ago (Wisdom Sits in Places; Landscape and
Language Among the Western Apache. Keith H. Basso. Winner of the Victor Turner Prize for
Ethnographic Writing.)
- Robin Ridington
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