berghahn New York · Oxford

Contents

List of Figures
Acknowledgements

Introduction: Anthropology and Ethnography are Not Equivalent
Irfan Ahmad

Chapter 1. Beyond Correspondence: Doing Anthropology of Islam in the Field and Classroom
Hatsuki Aishima

Chapter 2. Anthropology as an Experimental Mode of Inquiry
Arpita Roy

Chapter 3. Graphic Designs: On Constellational Writing, or a Benjaminian Response to Ingold’s Critique of Ethnography
Jeremy F. Walton

Chapter 4. Out of Correspondence: Death, Dark Ethnography and the Need for Temporal Alienation and Objectification
Patrice Ladwig

Chapter 5. Commitment, Correspondence, and Fieldwork as Non-volitional Dwelling: A Weberian Critique
Patrick Eisenlohr

Chapter 6. A New Holistic Anthropology With Politics In
Irfan Ahmad

Afterword
Tim Ingold

Index

Anthropology and Ethnography are Not Equivalent

Reorienting Anthropology for the Future

Edited by Irfan Ahmad
Afterword by TIm Ingold

172 pages, 6 illus., bibliog., index

ISBN 978-1-78920-988-4 Hb Published (January 2021)

eISBN 978-1-80539-450-1 eBook

Details

“It is a stimulatingly provocative and highly original study.” • David Parkin, Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford

“This is an interesting and welcome contribution to a scholarly debate that has triggered considerable attention among anthropologists and others over the last few years. It brings together six chapters that engage with Ingold’s intervention about ethnography vs anthropology by critically asking how Ingold’s views can be put into practice.” • Oskar Verkaaik, University of Amsterdam

In recent years, crucial questions have been raised about anthropology as a discipline, such as whether ethnography is central to the subject, and how imagination, reality and truth are joined in anthropological enterprises. These interventions have impacted anthropologists and scholars at large. This volume contributes to the debate about the interrelationships between ethnography and anthropology and takes it to a new plane. Six anthropologists with field experience in Egypt, Greece, India, Laos, Mauritius, Thailand and Switzerland critically discuss these propositions in order to renew anthropology for the future. The volume concludes with an Afterword from Tim Ingold.

Irfan Ahmad is Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious & Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen, Germany. He is author of Islamism and Democracy in India (Princeton University Press, 2009) and Religion as Critique: Islamic Critical Thinking from Mecca to the Marketplace (University of North Carolina Press, 2017).

Series: Volume 41, Methodology & History in Anthropology

Subject: Theory and Methodology

Area:

LC: GN25 .A576 2021

BISAC: SOC002010 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Anthropology/Cultural & Social; SOC019000 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Methodology