The Anthropologist As Writer by Wulff Helena. Wulff Helena

Author:Wulff, Helena.,Wulff, Helena
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2016-07-28T16:00:00+00:00

REENGAGING THE POPULAR—JOINED SPACES

In contemporary times, I note that in the work of Amitav Ghosh, there is a reversal of this space. María Elena Martos Hueso considers that Ghosh’s aim is to reengage anthropological compartmentalization as a given through his work as researcher and novelist (2007: 55). As Padmini Mongia (2005: 78) notes, he also traverses genres of writing in his book, In an Antique Land, which is about an Indian slave, Bomma, and Ghosh, the student anthropologist some eight hundred years after the incident. The book incorporates his anthropological research, but also appears as travel-writing. Mongia’s point that the work pushes a rethinking of “traditional disciplinary forms from a post-colonial perspective” as messing with the limits in each genre suggests the subjective process that draws on the production of knowledge through experience as well as disciplinary knowledge conventions. María Elena Martos Hueso (2007: 55) notes the positionality of Ghosh as an “anthropologist from the inside” vis-à-vis knowledge debates about self/other and reflexive anthropology. James Clifford’s discussion of Ghosh’s work also signals the connectedness between the two domains without the same publicness of rigidly reasserting epistemic boundaries as he writes about Ghosh’s locatedness in the West and his subsequent reflections of this presenced positionality. This connectedness also comes out in Ghosh’s work: he discusses an ethnographic moment in the field where he is unable to answer his interlocutor’s question about his own circumcision and subsequently explores this issue in relation to a childhood memory (as cited in Mongia 2005: 88). This space that seems to be so effortlessly produced, where fiction co-resides or is an extension of the anthropologist’s activities, is one that also occupies newly privileged visibility. However, it takes on the processual spaces of what it means to be anthropological and the connections to life-writing.

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