Practicing Ethnography in a Globalizing World

An Anthropological Odyssey

By (author) June C. Nash

Publication date:

21 December 2006

Length of book:

304 pages

Publisher

AltaMira Press

ISBN-13: 9780759108813

In this book distinguished anthropologist June Nash demonstrates how ethnography can illuminate a wide array of global problems. She describes encounters with an urban U.S. community undergoing de-industrialization, with Mandalay rice cultivators accommodating to post-World War II independence through animistic pratices, with Mayans mobilizing for autonomy, and with Andean peasants and miners confronting the International Monetary Fund. Havin worked in a great variety of cultural settings around the world, Nash challenges us to expand our anthropological horizons and to think about local problems in a global manner.

4 Part I: Paradigms and Postures
5 When Isms Become Wasms: Paradigms Lost and Regained
6 The Notion of the Limited Good and the Specter of the Unlimited Good
7 Women in Between: Globalization and the New Enlightenment
8 Part II: Reflections in the Ethnographic Mirror
9 Multiple Perspectives on Burmese Buddhism and Nat Worship
10 Part III: Engagement in Social Movements Today
11 Social Movements in Global Circuits
12 Part IV: The Hobbesian World of Terror and Violence
13 The Export of Militarization: Counterinsurgency Warfare in the Periphery
14 At Home with the Military-Industrial Complex
15 The Limits of Naivete in Anthropological Fieldwork: The 1954 U.S. Instigated Coup in Guatemala
15 Interpreting Social Movements: Bolivian Resistance to Economic Conditions Imposed by the IMF

For the past fifty years June Nash has been consistently five or ten years ahead of her time. The topics on which she has made ground breaking interventions—feminist theory, local-global relations, ethnography of powerful institutions, consciousness and resistance, social movements, indigenous empowerment, militarization and empire, ethics and politics of research— document anthropology's major preoccupations since the 1950s. This volume offers a comprehensive record of Nash's achievements confirms her place as one of the most influential and accomplished anthropologists of our times. We are well advised to read closely, to appreciate how she has shaped our field, and to glean some clues about what is coming next.