Pre-textual Ethnographies: Challenging the Phenomenological Level of Anthropological Knowledge-making

254 Pages·2018·20.794 MB·English

by  Tomasz Rakowski (editor), Helena Patzer (editor)

Anthropologists often have fieldwork experiences that
are not explicitly analysed in their writings, though they R
nevertheless contribute to and shape their ethnographic a
k
understandings, and can resonate throughout their work for
o
many years. The task of this volume is precisely to uncover w
these layers of anthropological knowledge-making. s
k
Contributors take on the challenge of reconstructing the
i

ways in which they originally entered the worlds of research &

subjects – their anthropological Others – by focusing on P
a
pre-textual and deeply phenomenological processes of
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perceiving, noting, listening and sensing. Drawing on a wide z
e Pre-textual
range of research experiences – with the Dogon in Mali,
r
immigrant football players in Spain, the Inuit of the Far North,
Filipino transnational families, miners in Poland and students
Ethnographies
in Scotland – this book goes beyond an exploration of the P
development of increased ethnographic sensitivity towards r
words or actions. It also commences the foundational project e Challenging the phenomenological
-
of developing a new language for building anthropological t
works, one stemming from recurring acts of participation, e level of anthropological
x
and rooted primarily in the pre-textual worlds of the tacit,
t
knowledge-making
often non-visible, and intense experiences that exceed the
u
limitations of conventional textual accounts.
a
“These edifying essays lay the groundwork for an l

anthropology that not only overcomes old antinomies E
of body-mind, text-context, representation-reality, but t
h
encourages us to see how participatory method, social
attentiveness, and new forms of ethnographic writing can n
enhance our understanding of the affective, intersubjective, o
and conceptual complexities of life as lived.” g
Michael Jackson, Distinguished Professor of World
r
Religions, Harvard University a
p
Tomasz Rakowski is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Ethnology and
Cultural Anthropology, University of Warsaw. h
Helena Patzer is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Institute of Ethnology, i
e
Czech Academy of Sciences, in Prague.
s
tomasz rakowski
& helena patzer
Pre-textual ethnograPhies
First published in 2018 by
Sean Kingston Publishing
www.seankingston.co.uk
Canon Pyon
Editorial selection and introduction © 2018 Tomasz Rakowski and Helena
Patzer. Individual chapters © 2018 Anne Line Dalsgård, Laurence Douny,
Gheorghiţă Geană, Grzegorz Godlewski, Kirsten Hastrup, Andrew Irving,
Sonja Lenk, Juliane Müller, Helena Patzer, Tomasz Rakowski, Nigel Rapport.
The cover uses a cropped image by Ljuba brank, sourced from sl.wikipedia.
org/wiki/%C4%8Cimboraso#/media/File:19_Chimborazo_(19).JPG, under a
CC BY-SA 3.0 license
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means
without the written permission of Sean Kingston Publishing.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.
Ebook ISBN 978-1-912385-16-4
Pre-textual Ethnographies

Challenging the phenomenological level of
anthropological knowledge-making
Edited by Tomasz Rakowski and Helena Patzer
Sean Kingston Publishing
www.seankingston.co.uk
Canon Pyon

Acknowledgements

This book is a result of an intellectual journey begun ten years ago, when
we decided to convene a workshop at the EASA Biennial Conference in
Ljubljana, together with Anne Line Dalsgård. The main arguments of the book
were then molded in multiple intellectual encounters and discussions with
our colleagues across Europe. However, these were grounded in the way we
learned the anthropological craft in our academic circles at the University of
Warsaw and the University of Copenhagen.
We would like to thank those colleagues who participated in the original
workshop and also those who decided to join the project later on, and helped
us push our thinking forward. We are especially grateful to Anne Line
Dalsgård, who accompanied us in shaping the idea of the volume, and to Nigel
Rapport, for the generous support he gave to the project and for coming into
dialogue with our ideas in the Epilogue.
We owe a lot to our colleagues who read the different versions of the text,
and among them we would like to express our gratitude especially to Elżbieta
Drążkiewicz-Grodzicka, Ewa Klekot, and Zofia Sokolewicz. We would also
like to thank the anonymous reviewers for a thorough reading of the book.

Contents
List of contributors ix
Introduction Pre-textual ethnography and the challenge of 1
phenomenological knowledge-making
Tomasz Rakowski and Helena Patzer
PART I – SETTING THE PERSPECTIvE
Chapter 1 Feet on the ground 25
The role of the body in pre-textual ethnography
Anne Line Dalsgård
Chapter 2 The phenomenological programme and 40
anthropological research
A mutual mirroring
Gheorghiţă Geană
Chapter 3 Beyond the textual bias, towards pre-textual 58
experience
Therapeutic guidelines
Grzegorz Godlewski
PART II – REvEALING FIELD-KNoWLEDGE
Chapter 4 A pre-textual path 75
Revealing the field in a closed-down mining centre in
south-west Poland
Tomasz Rakowski
Chapter 5 A praxeology and phenomenology of Dogon landscape 94
Fieldwork practice, kinesthetic experience and
embodied knowledge
Laurence Douny
Chapter 6 Muscular consciousness 116
Knowledge-making in an Arctic environment
Kirsten Hastrup
viii
PART III – FoLLoWING THE ExPERIENCE
Chapter 7 Sport as common ground in fieldwork 141
On apprenticeship, habitus and habituation
Juliane Müller
Chapter 8 Meeting the pre-textual 156
Intersubjective knowledge of long-distance care
in the Philippines
Helena Patzer
Chapter 9 The epoché, mindfulness and the body 171
Dynamics of a phenomenological experience
in the field
Sonja Lenk
Chapter 10 To journey near and far 196
The dis-illusion of perception, knowledge and the body
Andrew Irving
Epilogue The organ of human perception and a supra-cultural 218
knowledge of human being
Nigel Rapport
list of contributors
Anne Line Dalsgård is Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology,
Aarhus University. She is the author of the book Matters of Life and Longing
(2004). Dalsgård has many years of research commitments in Brazil, where
she has studied reproductive health, poverty, youth and temporalities in the
north-east region. Presently, she is engaged in research on the experience and
use of literature in reading groups in Denmark.
Laurence Douny is a Research Associate at the Lamc (ULB) and Honorary
Research Fellow at UCL Department of Anthropology. Since 2001 she has
conducted research in West Africa on the socio-symbolic construction of the
landscape and, more recently, on wild silk production. She is the author of Living
in a Landscape of Scarcity: Materiality and Cosmology in West Africa (2014).
Gheorghiţă Geană is Senior Researcher in the ‘F.I. Rainer’ Institute of
Anthropology at the Romanian Academy, and Professor of Anthropology
in the Faculties of Philosophy and Sociology at the University of Bucharest.
He has conducted fieldwork in several areas of Romania. He has published,
in Romanian and international publications, on demography, rituals, the
epistemology of anthropology and the anthropology of art. He is the author of
Antropologia Culturală: Un Profil Epistemologic [Cultural Anthropology: An
Epistemological Profile] (2005).
Grzegorz Godlewski is Professor at the Institute of Polish Culture, University
of Warsaw. His research areas include the anthropological theory of culture
and the anthropology of the word. Recently he published: Luneta i Radar.
Szkice z Antropologicznej Teorii Kultury [Telescope and Radar: Studies in
Anthropological Theories of Culture] (2016).
Kirsten Hastrup is Professor at the Department of Anthropology, University of
Copenhagen. She has conducted extensive field research in Iceland and more
recently in north-west Greenland, where she has worked with hunters who are
facing major changes in their High Arctic habitat. She has published numerous
books and articles on the social-natural entanglements in both regions.
Andrew Irving is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Manchester.
His research areas include sensory perception, time, illness, death, urban
anthropology, experimental methods, film and multi-media. His recent books