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Hi everyone,
I'm glad to announce the latest issue of the Anthropology Matters
Journal! Please read and forward to anyone you know who might be
interested!
 

LATEST ISSUE OF THE
ANTHROPOLOGY MATTERS JOURNAL
 
* * * * * * * * NOW ONLINE * * * * * * * *
 
Anthropology Matters Journal, 2007, Vol 9 (1)
 
FIELDING EMOTIONS
http://www.anthropologymatters.com/journal/2007-1/index.htm 
 
Editor: Ingie Hovland
 
The latest issue of
the Anthropology Matters Journal explores the role of emotions in
anthropological research. Eleven authors present their experiences and
reflections on the role that emotions has played in their research,
tackling culture shock, falling in love, doing fieldwork in the shadow
of one’s father, doing fieldwork in a cemetery, researching
eye-glazing, attraction, effervescence, or despair, or even considering
the (un)emotional tone of PhD seminars. 
 
Take a look at:
http://www.anthropologymatters.com/journal/2007-1/index.htm  
 
Table of Contents:
 
Editorial: Fielding emotions: introduction (by Ingie Hovland, SOAS).
 
Culture shock: negotiating feelings in the field (by Rachel Irwin, University of Oxford). Culture
shock is the depression and anxiety experienced by many people when
they travel or move to a new social and cultural setting. Although many
anthropologist experience culture shock whilst in the field, this is a
subject that is rarely discussed in the academic setting…
 
Emotional apprenticeships: reflection on the role of academic practice in the construction of ‘the field’ (by Celayne Heaton Shrestha, University of Sussex). This
contribution is concerned with the ‘emotional regime(s)’ of academic
anthropology, and the processes and practices through which ‘the field’
continues to be constructed as an entity separate from everyday life.
In this article, I draw on my own changing emotions towards the
subjects of research during my postgraduate training to show how
particular feelings towards the subject of research were legitimised
and their expression and sensation encouraged - while others were
delegitimised and discouraged - through educational practices such as
seminars…
 
My life after death: connecting the field, the findings and the feelings (by Kate Woodthorpe, University of Sheffield). This
paper is an account of an emotional journey that took place alongside
an ethnographic study of the contemporary cemetery landscape. It seeks
to highlight the importance of conducting empirical research as a ‘rite
of passage’, leading to the role of a researcher, by examining the
connection between data, the human researcher, and the analysis…
 
Anthropology that warms your heart: on being a bride in the field (by Anna Cristina Pertierra, University College London). This
paper reflects upon the difficult entanglement of personal and
professional identities that I experienced when getting married during
doctoral fieldwork. In addition to producing insights for my
ethnographic data, the process of marrying, and the planning of a
wedding, transformed my understanding of my relationship to informants,
requiring me to re-examine my previously unconscious distance between
my ‘fieldwork life’ and my ‘real life’…
 
My father’s daughter: becoming a ‘real’ anthropologist among the Ubang of Southeast Nigeria (by Chi-Chi Undie, APHRC). This
article explores some of the complexities of fieldwork for
ethnographers conducting research in the ethnographic settings of
significant ‘others’. The fieldwork in question took place in Ubang,
Nigeria, where I was following in the footsteps of my anthropologist
father. Drawing on personal experience, I attempt to candidly examine
the challenges inevitably faced in this situation, including acceptance
by the community as a bona fide researcher, pressure to fulfil the
expectations of others familiar with my father’s work, and the struggle
to carve out a professional identity distinct from my father’s…
 
Encountering emotions in the field: an X marks the spot (by Anne Monchamp, Macquarie University). This
paper will examine the role of emotions in fieldwork by discussing the
dialogical nature of fieldwork as a research tool. It is argued that
fieldwork is based on information gathered through relationships, and
therefore the emotional elements of those associations are relevant to
the ethnographic writing that is produced. However, simply recognizing
that emotions are a part of fieldwork is possibly to underplay their
potentially more catalytic role in the learning process in as much as
it is often through our emotional reactions that we come to understand…
 
Eye-glazing
and the anthropology of religion: the positive and negative aspects of
experiencing and not understanding an emotional phenomenon in religious
studies research (by Edward Croft Dutton, University of Oulu). This
article will look at the phenomenon of ‘eye-glazing’ and the impact,
both positive and negative, that this unsettling phenomenon, sometimes
observed in religious studies research, has had on my own development
as an anthropologist working with Evangelical groups. It will examine
the experience of being unable to understand and structure a particular
‘culture shock’ in one’s own research, focussing on eye-glazing, and
will examine both the positive and negative consequences for the
anthropologist from a personal perspective…
 
Sharing in ritual effervescence: emotions and empathy in fieldwork (by Géraldine Mossière, University of Montreal).
In this paper I explore how the anthropologist’s mobilisation of
emotions during fieldwork might position her in relation or in
opposition to her informants, leading her to share or to resist the
ritual experience. I will argue that a circumstantial empathic stance
(Einfühlung) may be the only way to grasp the experiential and embodied
dimensions of religious behaviours. Getting access to the
congregation’s religious emotions through those non-verbal components
to ritual leads to other ways of producing knowledge through informal
and unintentional communication, which replaces spoken communication…
 
The politics and aesthetics of attraction in the Gran Poder festival: reflections on a ‘methodology of affect’ (by Nico Tassi, University College London). For
indigenous residents in Bolivia’s capital city, La Paz, the religious
festival of Gran Poder represents a fierce and proud expression of
cultural resistance to the practices of the dominant creole sectors,
and also an endeavour to entice the privileged other to the attractive
dynamics of the festival. If emotional involvement and sensorial
engagement are qualities often discouraged in our academic upbringing,
in this specific context they enabled me to bridge theory and practice
and to ‘understand in the flesh’ field dynamics…
 
Reflections on violence and suicide in South Yorkshire: (Dis-) United Kingdom (by Simon J. Charlesworth). This
paper addresses the personal consequences attendant upon the
post-Thatcher neo-liberal restructuring of the British economy. Its
focus is upon the way that increased economic insecurity created a
range of personally encountered problems, which constitute the most
immediate sense of being-in-a-world so disclosed. It tries to cast
light upon the increased anonymous violence that is a pervasive aspect
of British public life…
 
Beyond Sontag as a reader of Lévi-Strauss: ‘anthropologist as hero’ (by Tod Hartman, University of Cambridge). This
article traces mutations in the generalised image of the ‘heroic’
anthropologist since Susan Sontag’s interpretation of the work of
Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques in her 1963 essay, ‘The
anthropologist as hero’. Firstly, it is argued that a considerable
shift has occurred from the Lévi-Straussian ‘hard-won impassivity’ to
‘activist’ anthropology in which the anthropologist’s emotions are
acknowledged and legitimised as part of the ethnographic process. With
heroic activist anthropology comes the tendency to assume a single
Euro-American vision of rights…
 
All articles can be found at:
 
http://www.anthropologymatters.com/journal/2007-1/index.htm  
 
ABOUT ANTHROPOLOGY MATTERS
 
Anthropology
Matters is the official postgraduate arm of the Association of Social
Anthropologists in the UK and Commonwealth (the ASA). Anthropology
Matters runs a website (www.anthropologymatters.com), an open email list and an online journal. If you would like to join the email list, please sign up through the website.
 
The Anthropology
Matters Journal aims to promote innovative perspectives, critical
reflection and questioning of established anthropological boundaries.
We encourage submissions from PhD students and early-career
anthropologists. If you would like to submit a paper, please contact
the editor, Ingie Hovland ([log in to unmask]).
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