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  • Notes On (Field) Notes: Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology. Roger Sanjek, Ed. Cornell University Press. 1990

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    Field Notes

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    Notes On (Field) Notes: Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology. Roger Sanjek, Ed. Cornell University Press. 1990

    Uploaded by

    Luisa Ciro

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Flag for inappropriate content
    Download as pdf or txt
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    Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology.


    Roger Sanjek, ed. Cornell University Press.
    1990.
    JAMES CLIFFORD

    Notes on (Field)notes

    This essay aims to complicate and decenter the activity of descrip­


    tion in ethnography. It begins with three scenes of writing, photo­
    graphs printed in George Stocking's Observers Observed. 1 The first, a
    recent photo by Anne Skinner-Jones, catches the ethnographer Joan
    Larcom glancing down at her notes while seated on a straw mat
    among women and children on the island ofMalekula, Vanuatu. It is a
    moment of distraction. Larcom seems preoccupied with her notes.
    Two women look to the left, beyond the frame, at something that has
    caught their attention. Two boys stare straight into the camera. An­
    other child's gaze seems riveted on the ethnographer's pen. The second
    image is a photograph from I 898 showing C. G. Seligman, Malinow­
    ski's teacher, in New Guinea. He is seated at a table surrounded by half
    a dozen Melanesian men. One of them sits rather tentativel y on a chair
    drawn up to the table. Various ethnographic objects are scattered
    there. Seligman is intently writing in a notebook. The third scene,
    featured by Stocking on his volume's cover, finds Malinowski work­
    . ing at a table inside his famous tent in the Trobriands. He has posed
    himself in profile, turned away from a group of men who are looking
    on from just beyond the tent flaps.
    , 'iSee Stocking 1983: 179, 82, IOI. The volume contains other revealing scenes of
    }iddwork, more or less posed, which might be compared to the genre in realist
    j,ainting which portrays the artist with model(s) in the studio.

    47

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