The Restless Anthropologist: New Fieldsites, New Visions

Product Description What does a move from a village in the West African rain forest to a West African community in a European city entail?  What about a shift from a Greek sheep-herding community to working with evictees and housing activists in Rome and Bangkok?  In The Restless Anthropologist, Alma Gottlieb brings together eight eminent scholars to recount the riveting personal and intellectual dynamics of uprooting one’s life—and decades of work—to embrace a new fieldsite.Addressing questions of life-course, research methods, institutional support, professional networks, ethnographic models, and disciplinary paradigm shifts, the contributing writers of The Restless Anthropologist discuss the ways their earlier and later projects compare on both scholarly and personal levels, describing the circumstances of their choices and the motivations that have emboldened them to proceed, to become novices all over again. In doing so, they question some of the central expectations of their discipline, reimagining the space of the anthropological fieldsite at the heart of their scholarly lives.   Review “Alma Gottlieb has gathered some of anthropology's best storytellers and most accomplished fieldworkers to tell why and how they have come over the years to work in multiple regions and with a changing set of analytic problems.  Their stories are richly rewarding accounts of the joys, trials, and puzzles of practicing this most undisciplined discipline.  A turbulent and telling read.” -- Catherine Lutz, Brown University Published On: 2011-12-16“The Restless Anthropologist is a rich, powerful, and compulsively readable collection of essays by anthropologists who look back at the multiple relationships between their serial fieldwork experiences and their lives.  Illustrating the dense interweaving of the personal and the professional that is the hallmark of anthropology as a vocation, these essays are at once affectively deep reflections, and clear-eyed assessments, of lives often lived ‘between here and there.’ Alma Gottlieb’s idea to stimulate these articles and bring together this collection was inspired.” -- Sherry Ortner, University of California, Los Angeles Published On: 2012-01-26“Curiosity is a major anthropological virtue, and new field work is a wonderful way of keeping it alive and well. The lively and wise contributors to this book portray the delights of facing a new set of intellectual and personal challenges, and are equally clear about the varied domestic and institutional constraints they encounter along the way to a second (or third, or fourth…) field. Read it, and you will see how anthropologists can enjoy long, productive careers!” -- Ulf Hannerz, Stockholm University Published On: 2011-12-13“These restless anthropologists are intellectual nomads, fine writers and accomplished field hands. They understand that the knowable world is incomplete if seen from any one point of view.  Curiosity, fate and opportunity made it possible for them to stay on the move.  Happily, the reflexive turn in anthropology now allows them to narrate their stories and tell all about their peripatetic adventures.” -- Richard A. Shweder, University of Chicago Published On: 2011-12-20“One of the hallmarks for recent career trajectories in anthropology has been the development of new research projects in new sites; at times these draw upon the same theoretical concerns that motivated the first research, and at times they represent wholly new departures. The Restless Anthropologist provides an engaging and appropriately heterogeneous set of accounts of the genesis, development, and afterlives of such second projects. It is a pleasure to read—informative about both the field and individual scholars who have figured centrally within it—and very good to think with.” -- Donald Brenneis, University of California, Santa Cruz Published On: 2011-12-13“These delightful accounts of fieldwork are both intellectual reflections and personal memo