Suchergebnisse

An honest statement to begin with would be that the place of anthropology in Russian society is something of a relativity puzzle. Some can define its place but are not sure what exactly anthropology is. Others can define what anthropology is but are not quite sure what place it occupies. A few suppose they know both. The majority are not aware that either exists.The issue is a complex one, and I do not have a handy equation to reduce it to a single meaningful set of answers, but I will try to delineate some of the facets that shape its general contours.

Interviews with four Russian anthropologists during the fall of 1995 reveal that the discipline in Russia is undergoing a crisis of identity. Due to changing political and cultural realities, there has been growing uncertainty about the aims, methods, and object of the discipline, as well as about its place within the human sciences. The author believes that Russian anthropology is at the moment unable to situate itself safely in the face of the changes and uncertainties.

As the new century unfolds, it becomes increasingly clear that contexts in which anthropology is practised as an established discipline, scholarly enterprise, applied endeavour, profession and intellectual pursuit keep changing, altering and transforming. The general aim in putting together this collection of essays was to test the state and condition of the relationship between anthropology and society in a number of countries where anthropological discourses and ethnographic activity have had a tangible presence in academia and beyond. Adopting a comparative approach – anthropology's long-term companion – that we hoped would once again allow us to highlight where things have developed differently and where they seemed the same (or indeed were only equally illusorily), we asked leading practitioners from Austria, Brazil, France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Russia, South Africa and the United States to ponder the same, rather broadly posed, set of questions.

In its assessment of the current "state of play" of ethnographic practice in social anthropology, this volume explores the challenges that changing social forms and changing understandings of "the field" pose to contemporary ethnographic methods. These challenges include the implications of the remarkable impact social anthropology is having on neighboring disciplines such as history, sociology, cultural studies, human geography and linguistics, as well as the potential 'costs' of this success for the discipline. Contributors also discuss how the ethnographic method is influenced by current institutional contexts and historical "traditions" across a range of settings. Here ethnography is featured less as a methodological "tool-box" or technique but rather as a subject on which to reflect