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Delocalization of Fieldwork and (Re)Construction of Place: Doing Ethnography in Wartime Yemen

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2017

Marieke Brandt
Marieke Brandt*
Affiliation:
Institute for Social Anthropology, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, Austria; e-mail: [email protected]
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Extract

The period I have spent exploring tribal societies in Yemen's northernmost Saʿdah area spans—with interruptions—around fifteen years, and I can hardly imagine a more profound set of changes converging on and in one place. For an anthropologist, these changes are of a political, spatial, technological, and methodological nature, all of which are deeply intertwined.

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 49 , Issue 3 , August 2017 , pp. 506 - 510
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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References

NOTES

1 For an overview on anthropology's history of studying cultures at a distance, see Robben, Antonius C. G. M., “Ethnographic Imagination at a Distance: An Introduction to the Anthropological Study of the Iraq War,” in Iraq at a Distance: What Anthropologists Can Teach Us about the War, ed. Robben, Antonius C. G. M. (Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 1–23 Google Scholar.

2 Robben, “Ethnograhic Imagination”; Gingrich, Andre, “When Ethnic Minorities are ‘Dethroned’: Towards a Methodology of Self-Reflexive, Controlled Macrocomparison,” in Anthropology, by Comparison, ed. Gingrich, A. and Fox, R. G. (New York: Routledge, 2010), 229 Google Scholar.

3 de Regt, Marina “Noura and Me: Friendship as Method in Times of Crisis,” Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development 44 (2015): 43–70 Google Scholar. On the importance of empathy both as a methodological technique to grasp the Malinowskian native point of view and as an epistemological approach to understand people's subjectivity, see Sluka, Jeffrey S. and Robben, Antonius C. G. M., “Fieldwork in Cultural Anthropology: An Introduction,” in Ethnographic Fieldwork: An Anthropological Reader, ed. Sluka and Robben (Malden: Blackwell, 2007), 22 Google Scholar.

4 On the disintegration of the former home–field binary, see, for example, Kraemer, Jordan “Doing Fieldwork, BRB: Locating the Field on and with Emerging Media,” in eFieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology in the Digital World, ed. Sanjek, Roger and Tratner, Susan W. (Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 113–31Google Scholar.