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The village field-site as a key unit of analysis within ethnographic research has been held by critics to be an example of a disciplinary tendency to unduly privilege the study of face-to-face communities, inevitably construed as 'parochial' or 'traditional,' over the realities of political economy in a globalized world. Recently, however, the 'bounded' ethnographic field site has been returning to the forefront of anthropological inquiry in new, reconfigured forms: as experiential matrices of personal and collective identity, sites of cultural contestation, hubs of emergent social forms variously integrated within national and transnational networks, or as arbitrary locations in a reconfigured anthropological methodology.
This session inquires into the village as lived-in place and sacred topology, as aesthetic experience and moral idiom of belonging. It tracks the actual and often unexpected spatial configurations upon which villages are mapped, and examines possible reinventions of the old anthropological standard of village-based ethnography.
We invite papers that examine ethnographic research methodologies and modes of representation considered within a wider reappraisal of the value of the 'bounded' village community as an analytical category.
Papers that problematize the assumptions underlying classical
ethnographic fieldwork, consider its relative merits and demerits, and weigh these against available alternatives, are especially welcome, as are all papers that engage the broader issue of the end(s) of ethnography.
Please send abstracts by e-mail to asorge@upei.ca by Saturday, March 28, 2009. Session participants will be confirmed shortly thereafter.
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