Fieldwork Is Not What It Used to Be

"This is an extended, provocative reflection on the nature of anthropological fieldwork under the crowded, mobile, cyber-speed, science-dominated, neoliberal conditions of twenty-first-century modernity. At once pedagogical and epistemological, it reconfigures new researchers' bafflement before the weighty traditions of the Malinowskian hermeneutic as, instead, a creative adaptation. These authors present something vitally new while managing to remain respectful of approaches to field research that must now be radically reordered or recontextualized. Representing the liveliness and fecundity of 'Rice anthropology' during at least the past two decades, they venture beyond necessary but by now almost hackneyed forms of critique to show what kinds of originality the new contexts of research may now be expected to demand."—Michael Herzfeld, Harvard University, author of Evicted from Eternity: The Restructuring of Modern Rome
"Fieldwork is Not What It Used to Be is an indispensable text for students, teachers, and for ethnographers of all stripes. Passionate, personal, and yet highly sophisticated , the volume shares with the wider intellectual community the methodological and theoretical orientation that has long defined the 'Rice School' of the ethnography of the contemporary. For many years the editors and contributors have been at the forefront of reimagining the methods and promise of ethnographic research in a postsocial world. Here they share their insights with characteristic candor. The result is a surprisingly synthetic view of the way forward."—Annelise Riles, Cornell University