ABSTRACT
This book is forced to confront two tenacious anthropological prejudices: one which continues to prioritise the exotic at the expense of the supposedly familiar, the other which continues to be suspicious of research data produced outside the classic ethnographic fieldwork method of sustained participant-observation within a spatially-bounded, preferably small-scale ‘culture region’. Despite decades of reflexivity and auto-criticism, the discipline remains reluctant to abandon what are, after all, still perceived to be its defining characteristics. Is an anthropology such as I present here – one concerned with Western, cosmopolitan conceptions of identity and belonging in mobile and fragmented contexts that provide little opportunity for long-term ‘dwelling’ with informants – still anthropology? Certainly Malinowski would have difficulty recognising it as such since it evidently does not conform to the ‘proper conditions for ethnographic work’ he took such pains to delineate and which remain defiantly canonical: living ‘among the natives’, ‘camping right in their villages’ (1953: 6; cf. Geertz 1988: 78-101). The real issue is, of course, whether anthropology is more concerned with preserving its distinctive identity within the academy, securing its own particular claim on professional authority, or whether the discipline takes seriously its own critique and attempts to adapt to a world (and worldview) very different from that from which it emerged. Perhaps, ultimately, the discipline will have no choice. As Vered Amit argues, a greater threat is posed to the discipline’s credibility if it does not succeed in becoming more heterodox in its methodological approach and therefore able to engage with a broader, more complex, range of social and cultural phenomena.
