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Extraordinary Encounters

Authenticity and the Interview

Nigel Rapport editor James Staples editor Katherine Smith editor

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Berghahn Books

Published:1st Mar '15

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Extraordinary Encounters cover

Given the anthropological focus on ethnography as a kind of deep immersion, the interview poses theoretical and methodological challenges for the discipline. This volume explores those challenges and argues that the interview should be seen as a special, productive site of ethnographic encounter, a site of a very particular and important kind of knowing. In a range of social contexts and cultural settings, contributors show how the interview is experienced and imagined as a kind of space within which personal, biographic and social cues and norms can be explored and interrogated. The interview possesses its own authenticity, therefore—true to the persons involved and true to their moment of interaction—whilst at the same time providing information on human capacities and proclivities that is generalizable beyond particular social and cultural contexts.

“…a diverse group of scholars who have a broad range of experience as ethnographers and whose work with interviews, life stories and biography highlight the extraordinariness of social encounters.” · Tamara Kohn, University of Melbourne

“Each chapter is well written and has something interesting . . . to say about interviewing. . . All in all, a genuinely absorbing read which has prompted me to think about interviewing in new ways.” · Peter Collins, Durham University

ISBN: 9781782385899

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 454g

212 pages