Podcasts from the SfAA

This session was sponsored by the Society for Humanistic Anthropology

Session abstract: Anthropologists come home from the field with amazing stories brimming with passion, excitement, pathos, humor, and drama. Academic publication requirements, however, often flatten out the stories, strip the ethnography of the excitement, and fail to convey the rich texture of everyday life. The papers in this session invite you to share in an infusion of anthropology with life, half as exciting as fieldwork. Alongside academic ethnography and its requirements there are other ways to write about justice, ethics and the practice of anthropology in genres that are informed by our fieldwork and anchored in ethnographic concerns. The papers in this session, which include SHA Fiction Award winners, open up an exhilarating and stirring humanistic anthropology to a wider audience. aemt@mail.rochester.edu (F-35)

CHAIR: EMMETT, Ayala (U Rochester)

In the City of Jerusalem.

Local Palestinian and Jewish women’s struggle for peace that I describe in my ethnography Our Sisters’ Promised Land has so far not materialized. Informed by my fieldwork, the short story “In the City of Jerusalem” follows the shocking disappearance of a journalist and revisits heartbreaking questions about ethics, identity, suffering and human rights. aemt@mail.rochester.edu (F-35)

ANGROSINO, Michael V. (U S Florida) (paper read by Ayala Emmett)

The Shrine

Written as an experiment in fictionalized ethnography, “The Shrine” is a short story that explores the impact of “modernization” and “globalization” on a small village in the West Indies. Using the techniques of literary narrative enables the author to personalize these conceptual abstractions and also to dramatize his own relationship to a community that he has studied for more than four decades. angrosin@cas.usf.edu (F-35)

TRACHTENBERG, Barbara (Boston University)

The Right Documents

Each week, after taping immigrant Central American mothers, Julia, an ethnographer, wrote her field notes in her car under the overhead light, the neighbors probably wondering. The women—having achieved a motherhood Julia had never been able to garner for herself—and their lives, stayed with her in the years ahead. This creative non-fiction story captures Julia’s conversations with the women, represented by one composite character, an immigrant mother in a relationship with Julia. The story brings to light an ethnographic process of reaching deeper into oneself by reaching out to those who so generously share their lives with the anthropologist. (F-35)

CHIERICI, Rose-Marie (SUNY-Geneseo)

I Was Born on the Side of the Road as My Mother Was Going to the Market: The Amazing Story of My Colleague

Anthropologists seldom have the opportunity to tell the stories of the remarkable individuals we meet. My friend and colleague Thony introduced himself with the above words, then thoughtfully and carefully crafted a narrative that revealed how his life’s trajectory unfolded. Born in a remote village, he is now the medical director of a burgeoning community health program. Shaking off the requirements of intellectual discourse and the confines of formal writing, I share Thony’s story to illustrate the bonds we create with our co-workers, the insights we gain in the course of fieldwork, and the many layers of complexity that a life history unveils. chierici@geneseo.edu (F-35)

Associate Professor and Chair
Department of Anthroplogy
State University of New York at Geneseo

CHIN, Nancy (U Rochester)

Notes Home to My Family From Field Work in a Tibetan Village.

I co-direct Project Drolma, a community health improvement project on the Tibetan Plateau in a village I refer to as “Drokpa.” We have made a ten-year commitment to work with the villagers, returning annually to work on projects with them. Fieldwork has been invigorating, exasperating and rewarding as we keep trying to implement health programs amidst logistical constraints, infrequent communications, and unpredictably inclement weather. Notes I wrote to my family capture the multiple challenges, confusions, exasperations and rewards of fieldwork and give the project’s dilemmas unfiltered vibrancy of lived experience. nancy_chin@urmc.rochester.edu (F-35)

DISCUSSANT: SIMONELLI, Jeanne (Wake Forest U)

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Session took place in Santa Fe, NM at the 69th Annual Meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology in March 2009.