Original scientific paper
RETURNEE FROM THE FIELD: THE CONCEPTUAL IDEAL AND THE OPERATIVE POSSIBILITIES OF DIALOGUE IN AN ETHNOGRAPHIC PAPER
Ines Prica
; Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Reseach, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
The paper deals with the question of creation, i.e., writability of the (field) dialogue in an
ethnographic text, aiming at the problem of the loud announcement of "the return to the
field" as the basic ethnological (anthropological) activity. The silent instruction on the
repressing of the majority of the "non-field" problems that, by the way, occupy this
discipline in the course of last decades, is not perceived as rescuing. This paper therefore
discusses somewhat overused issues of the relationship between the field and the theory,
and in the first instance in their curious form, in which they occur after the return from the
field. The issue here is the cleft stick between the paradox of the dialogue as the new
(writing-totalitarian) paradigm, i.e., serious problems of writing, the textual
manageability of the so-called dialogue ethnography on the one hand and what we can call
the recent revival of almost untouched imperative of the fieldwork research on the other.
This paper does not aim at presenting the audience with any stable solutions. Instead it
suggests the repeated discussions not only of the concepts of the dialogue and the field, but also the untouchable ideal of the interdisciplinarity (theoretical competence over the
"lower" scholarly strata) that can blur and even falsify the already enough problematic
nature of their mutual relations.
Keywords
dialogue; field; interdisciplinarity
Hrčak ID:
33384
URI
Publication date:
4.12.2000.
Visits: 1.907 *