Ethnography in Unstable Places

by Greenhouse, Carol J.; Mertz, Elizabeth; Warren, Kay B. B.

• ISBN13: 9780822328483
• ISBN10: 0822328488
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-03-01
• Publisher: Duke Univ Pr

Summary

""Ethnography in Unstable Places" is a profound exercise in ethnographic reflexivity. It seeks to consider new possibilities, new challenges, new horizons--at once conceptual, political, ethical--for an old anthropological method by taking it precisely where it was not designed to go: into everyday worlds radically transformed by hitherto unimaginedsocial conditions, unimaginable political circumstances, altered states, economies, subjectivities. Expansive in their scope, provocative in their theoretical implications, even poetic in their treatment of human lives, the essays in this volume show 'where past has gone, where the future will come from';the past and future, that is, of both anthropology and the worlds with which it concerns itself."--John Comaroff, University of Chicago

Table of Contents

Introduction: Altered States, Altered Lives	1	(36)
Carol J. Greenhouse
Part One. Law against Culture
Ghettos in the Holocaust: The Improvisation of Social Order in a Culture of Terror	37	(24)
Carroll McC. Lewin
Unsettled Settlers: Internal Pacification and Vagrancy in Namibia	61	(24)
Robert J. Gordon
Judges without Courts: The Legal Culture of German Reunification	85	(28)
Howard J. De Nike
Part Two. Ethnographies of Agency in the Fissures of the State
Ethnography in/of Transnational Processes: Following Gyres in the Worlds of Big Science and European Integration	113	(33)
Stacia E. Zabusky
The Composite State: The Poor and the Nation in Manila	146	(32)
Phillip C. Parnell
Domestic Matters: Feminism and Activism among Palestinian Women in Israel	178	(32)
Elizabeth Faier
``Best Interests'' and the Repatriation of Vietnamese Unaccompanied Minors	210	(39)
James M. Freeman
Nguyen Dinh Huu
Part Three. Resistance and Remembrance
Beating the Bounds: Law, Identity, and Territory in the New Europe	249	(27)
Eve Darian-Smith
``Honest Bandits'' and ``Warped People'': Russian Narratives about Money, Corruption, and Moral Decay	276	(40)
Nancy Ries
Trance against the State	316	(39)
Judy Rosenthal
Part Four. Conclusion
The perfidy of Gaze and the Pain of Uncertainty: Anthropological Theory and the Search for Closure	355	(24)
Elizabeth Mertz
Toward an Anthropology of Fragments, Instabilities, and Incomplete Transitions	379	(14)
Kay B. Warren
Contributors	393	(2)
Works Cited	395	(32)
Index	427