A Long Way toward Life in the Wilderness : In What Sense is Fieldwork an Immediate Experience?(2013 Japanese Society of Cultural Anthropology Award Lecture)

• Sugawara Kazuyoshi

  Kyoto University

抄録

Based on research stretching across more than 30 years among the G|ui hunter-gathers of southern Africa, in this paper I consider in what sense fieldwork is an immediate or direct experience. My point of departure is GOFFMAN's notion of "immediate co-presence." Insofar as they pose a unique temporality, the works in FAULKNER's Yoknapatawpha Saga provide us with a clue for writing ethnographies utilizing past events. The strategy of ethnographic description that I pursue takes spoken language as a form of body gesture and seeks to clarify the bodily/emotional expressson of narrative. From six conversational analysis case studies, I have abstracted the following seven points as narrative expressions: (1) There is a non-substitutable linguistic expression that is conspicuous when kinship terms are used as interjections; (2) A habitus and inter-corporeality unique to the G|ui permeates places of co-presence; (3) Body configurations that sympolize the essence of ritual are enacted through narrators' bodily gestures; (4) The multifaceted countenance of reality is revealed through the cross-referencing of multiple narratives; (5) Narrator and researcher mutually, or with their referents, together cast nets of co-membership which change according to context; (6) "Narrative style" is regulated not just by individual narrators' rhetorical strategies but also by structures of interaction extending across multiple narrators. Based on this, the general attitudes of people coping bodily with existential problems are illuminated; (7) When exposing the fact that a narrator is forgetting some event, a mutual complementarity of memory and the links among facts ariese around that absence. Based on the above analysis, I argue that while ethnographies and novels share in depicting the forms of people's lives, they differ greatly in their relationships with the (real) world. Ethnographic accounts are founded on their indexical adjacency with the narrators/speakers (the originators of utterances) of actual conversations. The connectedness that engenders such adjacency itself constitutes the immediate co-presence of the researcher and the local people. In other words, the fountainhead of the life of ethnographies is in the inexhaustible "affluence" contained in the actualities of people's lives.

収録刊行物

• Japanese Review of Cultural Anthropology

  Japanese Review of Cultural Anthropology 15 (0), 5-31, 2014

  日本文化人類学会

キーワード

• immediate co-presence
• G|ui
• G||ana
• expressive gesture in narrative
• body configuration
• co-membership

詳細情報

• CRID: 1390282680764289664
• NII論文ID: 110009934928
• DOI: 10.14890/jrca.15.0_5
• ISSN: 24240494
• ISSN: 24325112
• 本文言語コード: en
• データソース種別:
  • JaLC
  • CiNii Articles
• 抄録ライセンスフラグ: 使用不可