What does a move from a village in the West African rain forest to a West African community in a European city entail? What about a shift from a Greek sheep-herding community to working with evictees and housing activists in Rome and Bangkok? In "The Restless Anthropologist", Alma Gottlieb brings together eight eminent scholars to recount the riveting personal and intellectual dynamics of uprooting one's life – and decades of work – to embrace a new fieldsite.
Addressing questions of life-course, research methods, institutional support, professional networks, ethnographic models, and disciplinary paradigm shifts, the contributing writers of "The Restless Anthropologist" discuss the ways their earlier and later projects compare on both scholarly and personal levels, describing the circumstances of their choices and the motivations that have emboldened them to proceed, to become novices all over again. In doing so, they question some of the central expectations of their discipline, reimagining the space of the anthropological fieldsite at the heart of their scholarly lives.
Reviews
"Much in the way of the development of new topics, new questions, and new variants on the classic method of anthropological fieldwork has depended on the nature and experience of a now characteristic break with the investments of early-career fieldwork projects. Alma Gottlieb's collection is the first in-depth treatment of these 'moments' in anthropological careers, which are crucial to the understanding of new developments, forms, and interests in anthropological research generally. All of the essays here are compelling, very readable as personal narratives, and successfully evocative" – George Marcus, University of California, Irvine
"One of the hallmarks for recent career trajectories in anthropology has been the development of new research projects in new sites; at times these draw upon the same theoretical concerns that motivated the first research, and at times they represent wholly new departures. 'The Restless Anthropologist' provides an engaging and appropriately heterogeneous set of accounts of the genesis, development, and afterlives of such second projects. It is a pleasure to read – informative about both the field and individual scholars who have figured centrally within it – and very good to think with" – Donald Brenneis, University of California, Santa Cruz
"The past fifteen years of reflection on the strengths and limitations of alternative modes of scaling-up (or -out) anthropological research practice – i. e, multi-sited fieldwork and other responses to contemporary questions about translocal phenomena – have converged around the distinctive vulnerabilities of early-career anthropologists. This volume offers seven thoughtfully substantive autobiographical essays by later-career anthropologists about the demands and opportunities inherent in continental-scale shifts in fieldsites. From one vantage, these essays help reconnect contemporary discourses on anthropological locations to earlier rationales and styles of scaling-up/-out: e. g., Evans-Pritchard's advocacy of disciplined first-hand comparativism as against undisciplined substitutions of new local points of view for anthropologists' equally local European folk models. From another vantage, these essays rework ethnographic practice by subtly undermining the trope of fieldwork as the anthropological tribe's 'central ritual': here recurrent returns give way to unanticipated transformations, not a few of them occasioned by the surprisingly liberatory effects of life cycle constraints. While continuities between earlier and later projects are evident in these seven accounts, critical paradigm shifts and creative lateral thinking – the simultaneity of personal and disciplinary reinvention – are evident throughout. This collection will both provoke and comfort early-career and later-career anthropologists while offering science studies scholars food for thought" – Rena Lederman, Princeton University
"Curiosity is a major anthropological virtue, and new field work is a wonderful way of keeping it alive and well. The lively and wise contributors to this book portray the delights of facing a new set of intellectual and personal challenges, and are equally clear about the varied domestic and institutional constraints they encounter along the way to a second (or third, or fourth... ) field. Read it, and you will see how anthropologists can enjoy long, productive careers!" – Ulf Hannertz, Stockholm University
"Alma Gottlieb has gathered some of anthropology's best storytellers and most accomplished fieldworkers to tell why and how they have come over the years to work in multiple regions and with a changing set of analytic problems. Their stories are richly rewarding accounts of the joys, trials, and puzzles of practicing this most undisciplined discipline. A turbulent and telling read" – Catherine Lutz, Brown University
"These restless anthropologists are intellectual nomads, fine writers and accomplished field hands. They understand that the knowable world is incomplete if seen from any one point of view. Curiosity, fate and opportunity made it possible for them to stay on the move. Happily, the reflexive turn in anthropology now allows them to narrate their stories and tell all about their peripatetic adventures" – Richard A. Shweder, University of Chicago
"'The Restless Anthropologist' is a rich, powerful, and compulsively readable collection of essays by anthropologists who look back at the multiple relationships between their serial fieldwork experiences and their lives. Illustrating the dense interweaving of the personal and the professional that is the hallmark of anthropology as a vocation, these essays are at once affectively deep reflections, and clear-eyed assessments, of lives often lived 'between here and there'. Alma Gottlieb's idea to stimulate these articles and bring together this collection was inspired" – Sherry Ortner, University of California, Los Angeles
