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What is this Thing called “Ethnography”?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Richard Tapper
Richard Tapper*
Affiliation:
School of Oriental and African Studies, London
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Extract

A Multi-Volume, Multi-Author Encyclopaedia Such as this is a Desktop library; but, more than any library, it represents a set of conscious editorial decisions. The basis of these decisions (if, as is common, the editors do not make it explicit to the reader) may be inferred not just from the choice of topics, but from the balance between them, and from the length and nature of entries. In every case, choice and balance must be largely determined by the availability of previous research: if someone is known to be the world expert on X, then it makes sense to invite them to give a reasonable summary of their findings, even if in the grander political and cultural scheme it might be hard to justify. Bizarre—but delightful—anomalies are bound to result: among many in this encyclopedia, I would single out Willem Floor's two-page entry on DUNG; it is shorter, more approachable, and more inviting to the casual reader than, for example, the anomalous chapter on lizards that occupies a full 70 pages of the first volume of The Cambridge History of Iran.

Type
Articles
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 31 , Issue 3-4: A Review of the “Encyclopaedia Iranica” , Summer Fall 1998 , pp. 389 - 398
Copyright
Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 1998

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References

1. Anderson, S. C. “Zoogeographic analysis of the lizard fauna of Iran,” in Fisher, W. B. ed., The Land of Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 305-71.Google Scholar

2. Barth, Fredrik Nomads of South Persia (London: Allen and Unwin, 1961).Google Scholar As Spooner notes, there were several earlier studies, all on tribal peoples, including Barth's books on Iraqi Kurds and on Swat Pathans.

3. In an inaccurate and distorted review of a limited section of the ethnographic literature, Brian Street (“Orientalist discourse in the anthropology of Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan,” in Fardon, Richard ed., Localizing Strategies: Regional Traditions of Ethnographic Writing, [Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, and Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990])Google Scholar focuses on a concern with “the segmentary lineage principle” as the dominant issue; see Barth's response, “Method in our critique of anthropology,” Man 27, 175-77Google Scholar, and comment by Salzman, Philip Carl “Understanding tribes in Iran and beyond,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 1, 399-403.Google Scholar

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10. Eickelman, Dale F. The Middle East: an Anthropological Approach, 2nd edition (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1989), 39Google Scholar, referring to Smith, William Robertson Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967, orig. 1885).Google Scholar