Jean-Guy A. Goulet and Bruce Granville Miller(Creighton, Goulet, Miller, and Wilkes). Twelve other like-minded colleagues have gra-
ciously agreed to contribute their own original work to this book.
2. In this respect, beyond Fabian’s reminder that “autobiography is a condition of eth-
nographic objectivity” ( 2001 , 12 ), the titles and contents of recent publications is reveal-
ing. See the works listed in the bibliography by Amit ( 2000 ), Behar ( 1996 ), Coffey ( 1999 ),
De Vita ( 2000 ), Dewalt and Dewalt ( 2002 ), Jackson and Ives ( 1996 a), Okely and Callaway
( 1992 ), Reed-Danahay ( 1997 ), Smith and Kornblum ( 1996 ), and Wernitznig ( 2003 ). This
constant stream of papers that transcend the “false dichotomy” between the personal and
the professional self (Bruner 1993 ) demonstrate that contemporary anthropologists are more
likely than their predecessors to report their dreams in their work, as noted by B. Tedlock
( 1991 ) and Goulet and Young ( 1994 ). Nonetheless, E. Turner and colleagues’ observation
( 1992 ) that ethnographers are generally embarrassed to use their own dreams and visions
in their work is apparently as accurate today as it was thirteen years ago.
3. In this introduction, as in chapter 8 , the expression lifeworld is used as defined by
Schutz and Luckmann ( 1973 , 3 ) as “that province of reality [as opposed, for instance to
the province of reality of art, science, or religion] which the wide-awake and normal adult
simply takes for granted in the attitude of common sense [as opposed, for instance, to the
attitude of the artist, of the scientist, or of the mystic].” See Rogers ( 1983 , 47 – 66 ) for a
comprehensive examination of this concept central to phenomenology.
4. This is the view espoused by Fabian in 1979 , in the context of a series of papers or-
ganized around “the ideal of anthropology as interpretive discourse” (Fabian 1979 b, 27 ).
The choice of this key concept to organize a collection of essays is built upon Foucault’s
view of discourse as a type of event about which one may ask “how is it that one particu-
lar statement appeared rather than another?” (Fabian 1979 b, 28 ). This theoretical view,
which avoided equating culture and linguistic expression (or speech acts), also carried
“connotations of activity in space and time, of unfolding in a process of internal differen-
tiation, and of openness to response and argument from audience” (Fabian 1979 b, 29 ).
Discourse is not even listed in the index of Anthropology with an Attitude ( 2001 ). Fabi-
an’s recent collection of critical essays continues nonetheless to deal with praxis, openness,
and transformation. The index includes many entries that are central to the sixteen essays
presented in this book: authenticity, autobiography and ethnography, body, embodiment,
confrontation and communication, ecstasis/ecstatic, ethnography and authority, intersub-
jectivity, memory work, narration and narrativity, recognition and alterity, understanding
and misunderstanding.
5. This paper was presented at the international and pluridisciplinary colloquium So-
cial Sciences in Mutation, held in Paris in May 2006 and organized by the Center for Soci-
ological Analysis and Intervention (cadis). See http://www.ehess.fr/cadis/english/index.html for
the program of the conference.
6. My translation from the French version of this paper, Geertz 2006 b, 5. “L’étude de
la religion... devrait s’opérer a partir, comme on dit, du ‘point de vue de l’indigène’”
(Geertz 2006 , 6 ).
7. My translation from the French version of Geertz 2006 b, 6. “Et pour cela nous avons
besoin... d’une combinaison d’analyses phénoménologiques, à même de nous mettre en
contact avec les subjectivités humaines en jeu, avec ce que les croyants pensent et ressen-
tent vraiment.”
8. For examples of this kind of ethnotheory, see De Boeck 1998 , Feld and Basso 1996 ,
Lovell 1998 , and Kawano 2005.