Millie Creighton
Although a renewed call for scientism in anthropology may be more
and more often heard, as reflected in the orientations of some of the
texts reviewed earlier, other methods’ texts indicate that Wolcott’s
view is not unique. Also drawing on John Berger’s work in Ways of
Seeing, Anna Grimshaw focuses on the idea of vision and seeing as an
anthropological metaphor. She contends that there is not one view of
what anthropology is (or should be) but contrasting ways of seeing
the discipline and seeing within the discipline. She writes:
There are a number of kinds of anthropological visuality or ways
of seeing making up the modern project.... Indeed, anthropology
is characterized by what I call its distinctive ways of seeing....
For, as we will discover, the modern project has different visions
contained within it. It is sometimes conceived to be about the cu-
mulation of scientific knowledge, a process by which the world is
rendered knowable; but in other cases it may be concerned with
ethnographic understanding as a process of interrogation, a means
of disrupting conventional ways of knowing the world; or, modern
anthropology might be considered to involve transformations, in-
tense moments of personal revelation. (Grimshaw 2001 , 7 )Other approaches to methods likewise argue for multiple possibilities
of interpreting the anthropological project. Claire ( 2003 ) provides in-
sights to novel approaches to methods, defining them as “expressions
of ethnography” rather than as tools of fact collecting. Czarniaws-
ka’s ( 2004 ) work places renewed emphasis on the role of narratives
as a method of social science research. Then there are others, such as
Aunger ( 2004 ) who argues for a return to anthropology as science,
but, in doing so, attempts to bring together reflexive analysis to com-
bine empirical forms of data collecting with postmodern objectives
through reflexive realism.
Through a “more and more scientistic” orientation (Grimshaw 2001 ,
7 ) we have managed to demystify anthropology. Perhaps it is time to
allow some of the mystery and some of the magic back into the art of
managing meaningful fieldwork in the pursuit of knowledge. I am not
suggesting that we revert to the “fieldwork is like childbirth” anal-
ogy that says “you can’t really figure out what it is like until you’ve