Today’s Inside Higher Ed features an interview with AAA members James D Faubion (Rice U) and George E Marcus (UC Irvine) on their new edited volume Fieldwork Is Not What It Used to Be: Learning Anthropology’s Method in a Time of Transition.
In the interview, Faubion and Marcus discuss their early fieldwork experiences and how the Internet is providing a new “array of objects and subjects of anthropological inquiry” in addition to new modes of inquiry. They describe the ways in which pedagogy based on previous forms of anthropology may no longer be relevant today, at a moment of innovation in how we understand anthropological subjects, questions and methods.
The messy, busy, intermingling world in which we currently live turns out to permit of new anthropological discoveries everyday. It’s just a matter of observing it for what it is, and not through the lens of older, outdated assumptions about what the proper subjects of proper anthropological inquiry are or should be.
For information on the book and its authors, or to download selected portions of the book, visit the Fieldwork Is Not What It Used to Be blog. Marcus and Faubion have also recently collaborated with Paul Rabinow and Tobias Rees in Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary (2008).
Filed under: Anthro in the Media
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