Returnee from the Field: The Conceptual Ideal and the Operative Possibilities of Dialogue in an Ethnographic Paper Cover Image

Povratnik s terena: Konceptualni ideal i izvedbene mogućnosti dijaloga u etnografskom tekstu
Returnee from the Field: The Conceptual Ideal and the Operative Possibilities of Dialogue in an Ethnographic Paper

Author(s): Ines Prica
Subject(s): Cultural Essay, Political Essay, Societal Essay
Published by: Institut za etnologiju i folkloristiku
Keywords: dialogue; field; interdisciplinarity

Summary/Abstract: The paper deals with the question of creation, i.e., writability of the (field) dialogue in an ethnographic text, aiming at the problem of the loud announcement of "the return to the field" as the basic ethnological (anthropological) activity. The silent instruction on the repressing of the majority of the "non-field" problems that, by the way, occupy this discipline in the course of last decades, is not perceived as rescuing. This paper therefore discusses somewhat overused issues of the relationship between the field and the theory, and in the first instance in their curious form, in which they occur after the return from the field. The issue here is the cleft stick between the paradox of the dialogue as the new (writing-totalitarian) paradigm, i.e., serious problems of writing, the textual manageability of the so-called dialogue ethnography on the one hand and what we can call the recent revival of almost untouched imperative of the fieldwork research on the other. This paper does not aim at presenting the audience with any stable solutions. Instead it suggests the repeated discussions not only of the concepts of the dialogue and the field, but also the untouchable ideal of the interdisciplinarity (theoretical competence over the "lower" scholarly strata) that can blur and even falsify the already enough problematic nature of their mutual relations.

  • Issue Year: 37/2000
  • Issue No: 2
  • Page Range: 47-66
  • Page Count: 19
  • Language: Croatian