Secretsharers: Intersecting Systems of Knowledge and the Politics of Documentation in Southwesternist Anthropology, 1880-1930

This dissertation examines shifting relationships between Anglo anthropologists and indigenous informants in the Southwestern United States, 1880–1930. Through an in-depth study of Southwesternist anthropological fieldwork, this dissertation explores the politics of ethnographic documentation, presenting anthropologists’ strategies and motivations for obtaining certain sorts of ethnographic data, and the management of ethnographic inquiry by indigenous communities that hosted (or tolerated) anthropologists. Southwesternist ethnographers pioneered fieldwork immersion in the 1880s and 1890s, but soon found that both Pueblo and Navajo social restrictions on the free flow of knowledge complicated attempts to produce ethnographic documentation of ceremonial practices. Ethnographers, in response to resistance to public documentation, forged more intimate, even clandestine, relationships with select informants to obtain novel and “secret” information. Despite the idea that modern anthropology is rooted in participant observation, Secretsharers reveals a turn away from it in the early twentieth century, toward tactics that isolated individual informants to provide in-depth cultural information on sensitive issues about which an Anglo (or any outsider) could not openly ask. Southwesternist ethnographers grappled with the professional tensions of discretion and disclosure in their inquiries among Pueblo and Navajo communities. On the one hand, anthropologists needed to practice discretion regarding the sensitive components of sacred events and the identities of their informants. On the other hand, scientific standards demanded disclosure of ethnographic documentation to be considered a contribution to “scientific” knowledge. Even as anthropologists sought indigenous “secrets,” they worked to keep their ethnographic publications “secret” from the communities they presumed to describe. The disjunction between scientific epistemological standards and Pueblo and Navajo beliefs in the importance of contextualized, situated knowledge spotlights the unforeseen consequences of information accumulation and dissemination within scientific knowledge production—the presumption that the science of humankind has a “right to know,” regardless of risks to “secretsharing” informants or to the integrity of sacred, situated knowledge systems.PHDHistoryUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/146056/1/afjhnsn_1.pd

Southeast Asian Anthropologies

Anthropology is a flourishing discipline in Southeast Asia. This book makes visible the development of national traditions and transnational practices of anthropology across the region. The authors are practising anthropologists with decades of experience in the intellectual traditions and institutions that have taken root in the region. Three overlapping issues are addressed in these pages. First, the historical development of traditions of research, scholarship, and social engagement across diverse anthropological communities of the region, which have adopted and adapted global anthropological trends to their local circumstances. Second, the opportunities and challenges faced by Southeast Asian anthropologists as they practise their craft in different political contexts. Third, the emergence of locally-grounded, intra-regional, transnational linkages and practices. The book contributes to a 21st-century, world anthropologies paradigm from a Southeast Asian perspective

Extraordinary experience in modern contexts

Vivid dreams, visions, hearing voices, premonitions, kinaesthetic sensations, relationships with invisible entities have long been the subject of anthropological inquiry, as for example, in studies of shamanism and spirit possession. Most such studies are carried out in societies unlike our own located in faraway locales. This book looks at such phenomena as they are experienced in contemporary modern settings where they are not generally considered legitimate sources of knowledge.Introduction / Deirdre Meintel, Véronique Béguet and Jean-Guy A. Goulet ; Extraordinary Experience as Ways of Being in the World / Véronique Béguet ; Modernity’s Defences / David J. Hufford ; Science, Superstition, and the Supernatural: Exploring the Tension between Skepticism and Experiences with Spirits / Scott Habkirk ; The Quest for Evidence: Scientism, Doubt, and Paranormal Investigation in England / Michele Hanks ; “Feeling as One” during Fieldwork : The Anthropologist as Phenomenological Subject / Géraldine Mossière ; Spirit Mediumship and the Experiential Self / Jack Hunter ; Extraordinary Experience, Intersubjectivity and Doubt in Fieldwork: Studying Urban Spiritualists / Deirdre Meintel ; Epilogue: Three (Ir)Rational Ways of Being an Anthropologist in the Field / Jean-Guy A. Goule

Ethnomusicology Matters:Influencing Social and Political Realities

This book gathers international voices from the field of ethnomusicology discussing the socio-political relevance of the discipline. The articles draw from contemporary discourses that take into account the role of music and dance in shaping social and political realities. An important field connected to political relevance is heritage, either in connection with the UNESCO or with archives. Ontologies of indigenous groups and their relevance in knowledge production is discussed in ethnomusicology nowadays as well as the possibilities of decolonising the discipline. Two articles from ethno-choreology explore dance from the gender perspective and in the post-socialist political structures. Different approaches from applied ethnomusicology deal with social justice, participatory dialogical practice, and the socio-political relevance of performance. Forced migration is seen as comprehensive topic for future ethnomusicology. The contents of the book mirror influential discourses of ethnomusicology today that will definitely shape the future development of the discipline

Nearly Perfect: Notes on the Failures of Salvage Linguistics

This dissertation examines the salvage era of American linguistics (c.19101940) and its focus on the extraction of knowledges and cultural artifacts from Indigenous groups whose civilizations were believed in peril. Through close readings of historical archives and published materials, I imbricate the history of these scientific collection practices through the interpretive frames of Science & Technology Studies (STS), deconstructive criticism, and postcolonial theory. I centre the project on the career of linguist-anthropologist Edward Sapir, seizing upon his belief that linguistics was more nearly perfect than other human sciencesthat linguistic methods were more akin to those of the natural sciences or formal mathematics. I employ Sapir as the chief focalizer of my work to map the changing topography of the language sciences in North America over these pivotal decades of disciplinary formation. Failure, here, offers a heuristic device to interrogate the linear logics of science and success which buttress that desire for perfection. Both conceptually and historically, the dialectics of failure and success throw into relief the vicissitudes of fieldwork, the uncertainty of patronage relationships, and the untenable promise of salvage that characterized these years. Through this approach, I present linguistics instead as a kairotic sciencefrom the Greek kairos, suggesting opportunitynot perfect, but situated vividly in the world, bound by space, identity, and time. I examine how linguists conducted their collection work through the extension of a scientific network (Chapter 1), their construction of a scientific identity to the gradual exclusion of amateurs and the reduction of informant contributions (Chapter 2), and the development of an experimental system within the temporalities of fieldwork (Chapter 3). My dissertation hence invites a critical intervention within the history linguistics to re-encounter the sciences disregarded past and re-think its shared responsibility toward Indigenous communities in the present

Ethnomusicology Matters

This book gathers international voices from the field of ethnomusicology discussing the socio-political relevance of the discipline. The articles draw from contemporary discourses that take into account the role of music and dance in shaping social and political realities. An important field connected to political relevance is heritage, either in connection with the UNESCO or with archives. Ontologies of indigenous groups and their relevance in knowledge production is discussed in ethnomusicology nowadays as well as the possibilities of decolonising the discipline. Two articles from ethno-choreology explore dance from the gender perspective and in the post-socialist political structures. Different approaches from applied ethnomusicology deal with social justice, participatory dialogical practice, and the socio-political relevance of performance. Forced migration is seen as comprehensive topic for future ethnomusicology. The contents of the book mirror influential discourses of ethnomusicology today that will definitely shape the future development of the discipline