The Anthropologist's Body or What It Means to Break Your Neck in the Field

Biddle, Jennifer Loureide

doi:10.1111/j.1835-9310.1993.tb00175.x

Cited by 11 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…Most Kardiya , it is generally assumed, would find the living conditions of many Yapa houses to be intolerable (Merlan 1998:177). As Biddle (1993) demonstrated in her fieldwork with Warlpiri, living ‘ Yapa‐piya’ , (1993:195) the Yapa way, can entail corporeal risks from the perspective of a white, middle‐class body. Beyond cohabitation, most Kardiya staff rarely enter Yapa houses.…”

Section: The Community In the Projectmentioning

confidence: 99%

Intra‐Action in a Central Australian Community Development Project

Anderson

2022

Oceania

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Service providers commonly understand development projects in Indigenous Australia to play out at the intersection of a pre‐existing binary between Indigenous and non‐Indigenous groups. It follows that effective development practice is seen to depend on building partnerships across the ‘intercultural’ divide. Instead of taking this assumption as a baseline from which analysis proceeds, I draw on Karen Barad's theory of ‘intra‐action’ to show how an Indigenous/non‐Indigenous binary is continually produced in the context of a development NGO working in Central Australia. Based on fieldwork as a volunteer within this NGO, I demonstrate how the ‘intra‐action’ of community development process produces forms of difference and relatedness for non‐Indigenous NGO staff, and for the Aboriginal community. I argue that in spite of calls for deeper engagements, the community development apparatus continually performs separateness as the ethical framework on which the project proceeds. The paper contributes to debates around ‘intercultural’ anthropology and presents a non‐normative account of development practice in Australia.

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Section: The Community In the Projectmentioning

confidence: 99%

Intra‐Action in a Central Australian Community Development Project

Anderson

2022

Oceania

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“…240-241). While breakdowns have been discussed fairly widely in anthropology (see, for instance, Biddle, 1993;Davies & Spencer, 2010;Jackson, 2009;Throop, 2010), much of it owing an explicit debt to phenomenology, there has been a tendency to focus on serious breakdowns associated either with fieldwork in radically unfamiliar environments or with the shocks and suffering associated with war, disease and other traumatic events. During my fieldwork on the intersections of tourism and pilgrimage in India and Nepal, what caught my attention were the innumerable "light breaks" that took place in practical, everyday situations, such as eating, bathing, interacting with locals, and finding one's way around.…”

Section: Out Of Practice: Embodied Learning Through "Light Breaks"mentioning

confidence: 99%

Out of Practice: Foreign Travel as the Productive Disruption of Embodied Knowledge Schemes

Howard

2015

Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology

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This paper explores foreign travel as an affective experience, embodied practice and form of learning. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork on tourism and pilgrimage in the Himalayan region, the phenomenological notions of "home world" and "alien world" are employed to discuss how perceptions of strangeness and everyday practices are shaped by enculturation and socialisation processes. It is shown that travellers bring the habitus and doxa acquired in the home world to foreign situations, where these embodied knowledge schemes and abilities for skilful coping can break down. In a home world, cultural patterns offer actors "trustworthy recipes for interpreting the social world" (Schütz, 1944, pp. 501-502) that allow everyday experience to go largely unnoticed and unquestioned. In alien worlds, however, travellers-as strangers-encounter differences and disturbances that disrupt experience and cause things normally overlooked to become "lit up". Using Husserlian and Heideggerian notions of "light breaks" and Dewey's theory of challenge, the author argues that foreign travel generates a form of embodied learning. This occurs first on the level of the pre-reflexive body that is affected and solicited by the new and unfamiliar demands of an alien world. Ultimately, through continuous adjustment of habits and practices in foreign environments, an embodied cosmopolitanism is generated via accumulated travel experience. This calls attention to the role of the lived body in travel experience, as well as the role of place and environment in shaping human practices, perceptions and modes of dwelling.

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“…But this foreignness infects the candidate herself, she suffers from homesickness (Taussig I992:ch 9) and other diseases, likewise unfamiliar, as exotic as the locale (T. ner 1967:96-97). And the ordeal of initiation necessitates this brush with exotic death (Biddle 1993), for the liminal space in the journey of the rite of passage is about the annihilation of self. Yet, even as the foreignness infects the candidate, as she becomes a stranger to her self and gives over to the unknown, she begins to see herself in a new light (Turner 1967: 102,105).…”

Section: Ethnography's Rite Of Passagementioning

confidence: 99%

Journeying Between Desire and Anthropology: A Story in Suspense

Lundberg

2000

Australian J of Anthropology

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Anthropology is a discipline based on the motif of the journey and ‘the myth of the eternal return’. This is the journey out to the ‘other’in order to return to constitute ‘self, and this movement is a movement of desire. The desire is for wholeness, for self‐presence, for a unified self. It is a desire for origins. And this desire is evident in anthropological practices as it is in myths and fairytales—all tell stories that speak of the desire for a separate, an original, self. Yet ‘the myth of the eternal return’reveals that the enactment of the story is itself originating. The origin is not a thing to be hunted down and appropriated—it is no thing. Like the archetypes which flow through stories, it is alive in the telling. The story I tell in this paper is about my own desires. It speaks of the desire to undergo the rite of passage of anthropology, and of how this journey was interrupted by the anthropologist who always journeys before me. And yet. it is through the inextricable relations with the writings of the “other‘ anthropologist that alluring moments of different desiring are fleetingly revealed. In the end. my relations with anthropology tell of a paradox: of the desire for a transcendental journey in order to constitute self and the seductive desire for immersion—to lose self, the story remains in suspense.

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The Anthropologist's Body or What It Means to Break Your Neck in the Field

Abstract: Today the rider wore no smiles. She was tired, or head‐achy, or involved in relationships with human beings. (Patrick White, The Tree of Man)

Cited by 11 publications

References 2 publications

Intra‐Action in a Central Australian Community Development Project

Intra‐Action in a Central Australian Community Development Project

Out of Practice: Foreign Travel as the Productive Disruption of Embodied Knowledge Schemes

Journeying Between Desire and Anthropology: A Story in Suspense

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