Departmental News

Posted:  Mar 03, 2020 - 12:00pm

Dr. Louise Lamphere (UNM) and Dr. Maria Luisa Achino-Loeb (NYU) guest edited the first 2020 issue (Volume 76, No 1) of the Journal of Anthropological Research (JAR), which focuses on Omissions and Silences in Ethnographic Fieldwork. 

In her article Silence/Salience, A Fluid Reality, and the Promise of Fieldwork: Introduction to the Special Issue,  Dr. Achino-Loeb writes: "This special issue of the Journal of Anthropological Research stems from a session on “Omissions and Silences in Anthropological Fieldwork: Revisiting Earlier Research”  at the 2018 American Anthropological Association meeting in San Jose and gives testament to the vitality of the Association of Senior Anthropologists which sponsored it.  All our contributors share a belief in the inevitability of silence in fieldwork given the multiplicity of intentions, orientations, tasks, and avenues of access it involves. Yet all of them display a degree of contrition or annoyance for the particular silences they see as having marred their own fieldwork. Whether by means of avoidance, omission, or suppression, they show us how the knowledge they have derived from fieldwork was shaped by the various silences in which it was embedded."  Access the full issue here

Other articles in the special issue include:

Discretionary Ethnography: Eliding the Personal and the Political in Two Latin American Research Settings  (Jim Weil)

Field Research in a Revolutionary Setting: Overlooking Sexuality in 1978-1979 Iran  (Mary Elaine Hegland)

Walking Alongside Wisahketachak: Fieldwork, A Retrospective Exercise that Takes a Long Time  (Regna Darnell)

Omissions and Silences in My Navajo Fieldwork: From Kinship Studies to Gendered Life Histories  (Louise Lamphere)

Priming Ethnography: The Theoratical and Largely Unconscious Guides Structuring More than Half a Century of Andean Research  (William P. Mitchell) 

Comments on Omissions and Silences in Ethnographic Research  (Sydel Silverman)