The juxtaposition between reliance on Noah’s anthropological skills and the presumed lack of relevance this discipline has to broader society ultimately makes for good comedy. Reading the subtext in this relationship we see the value which Noah brings. Without Noah’s anthropological skills, Archer would never be Pirate King. I would even go so far as to suggest that Noah’s anthropological training, including his linguistic skills, are why he alone, amongst the rest of his research vessel crew, is alive, and still enslaved by the pirates.
Fieldwork Reflections
Lost in Quantification: The Microtechniques of Evaluation
“Look at the numbers!” Who hasn’t heard or even said that phrase during a debate? Does your company evaluate your work with performance indicators? We tend to take these indicators for granted, but things are not that simple.
Apprenticing Elsewhere
For the apprentice...who does not have the initial skills necessary to participate as a full member of a specific sporting practice, how are they to obtain the embodied knowledge of their interlocutors and understand what that knowledge says about their practice? This is where the concept of “apprenticeship elsewhere” comes into play.
The Weight of History: Doing Fieldwork as an Ethnic Chinese Researcher
I have been asked about my research in China as a researcher from Taiwan by my colleagues in the US. One of them commented: “It’s not common for someone from Taiwan to do research in China.” I have attributed this sudden recognition of my ethnocultural and legal identity as a Taiwanese and the subsequent framing of my actions as uncommon to the pandemic and its impact on the tensions in current international politics. identity with global geopolitics and how these geopolitical forces have real-life impact on my research and social life.
Breath-taking
Himalayan travelogues are full of stories. For the most part, those stories fall into a specific genre, one that I tend to refer to as “my magical adventure in an exotic land.” Mustang, especially, has this reputation. In fact, multiple coffee table books easily available from booksellers everywhere pay homage to the “Lost Kingdom of Tibet,” the “Lost World of Lo,” and the “real Shangri-La.” Unfortunately, these books and pamphlets on high altitude travel are equally full of popular orientalist tropes of “pure” cultures and “innocent” people who somehow exist “out of time” despite being just as familiar with and a part of the “modern” world as anyone else is. But the impetus to see Mustang (and the Himalayas generally) as “magical” place filled with “spiritual” people is a hard one to resist. Most especially because the illusion is not just conjured up by Euro-American travel agencies or National Geographic specials but by Nepalis and Tibetans themselves, many of whom rely on the trekking and tourism industry for their livelihoods in a land politically marginalized between China, Kathmandu, and India.
Jathilan Dance: Experiencing the Spirits
yelling, crawling and rolling. Later, they begin to show some animal-like behavior: hissing, roaring and moving on all fours. This is my fieldwork. The place is Java, the Special Region of Yogyakarta. Pawang is a kind of ritual specialist believed to be capable of controlling animals, spirits, and other invisible forces. But more commonly, or so it seems, pawangs apply their powers in controlling possession or inducing and then ending the state of trance during jathilan dance. This dance is the focus of my attention. And this research is my second shot at trying to have an academic career. I came a long way: from the field as abstract as the history of Western philosophy and the land as distant as Russia. Running away from minimal wages, long teaching hours, and impossibly high expectations about presenting and publishing, I found my new passion as far away from the notions of enlightened modernity or cynical postmodernity as possible.
Ethnographic Poetry and Academic Writing: A Reflection
“Whatever your eye can see, it's vecik.” This line resonated with me while I was conducting my fieldwork in Taiwan with the indigenous Paiwan village known as Paridrayan. Good friend and prolific artist, Etan Pavavaljung, once mentioned to me this Paiwan concept known as vecik. The concept, briefly speaking, implies an interconnectedness that links all tangible things with each other. From humans, rocks, and trees to winds and words, they are connected to each other through vecik...“However,” he added, “something like poetry can be vecik.”. He continued, “let’s take for example, a village elder reciting a poem about his childhood. He recites verses about his flower garden from his childhood home as well as reminiscing his childhood days. These words become vecik.”
Holding Belief in Suspense
Some months ago, I went for an early morning run with a mate at my fieldsite. After a short trot together, she left for work, and I decided – against all advice from my adopted Aboriginal family and many others – to put off my fieldnotes and continue a few more kilometres on the road alone. A short way up, I saw in the distance a lone figure seemingly dancing about on the road. I was all at once entranced, curious, astonished, and frightened. I turned and returned speedier than ever before!
The Fallible and the Untrustworthy: Writing Culture as the Unreliable Narrator
The notion of the Unreliable Narrator is, for me, not a critique of the perceived moral failings of the anthropological project, but a methodological narrative construct integral to the work of writing culture. The question of unreliability is not a question of believability but of what parts of a complex and convoluted truth we the readers are willing to sign on to and invest in. It reflects an understanding and acceptance that no single truth is wholly accurate but also that no individual account is without some measure of reality.
Blurred lines and dead chooks in fieldwork
My own fieldwork experience, like many others, demonstrates a blurring in what is ‘professional’ and ‘personal’, what is ‘leisure’ and ‘work’, whether you are researcher, student, or known by another identity. While researchers may strive to draw boundaries, distinctions in field research are blurry, because the nature of fieldwork means an element of the unknown and the out-of-control, and the intersection of different people, things, position, gender, power, knowledge and culture. As feminist geographers and anthropologists note, fieldwork is messy.
The Familiar Strange 