Doing Fieldwork warrants our attention because its message, bolstered by the editor’s new introduction, is that the 1930s heralded a paradigm shift in anthropology, and further that this shift in fact addressed the same contentious issues raised in today’s so-called crisis of representation.
The “crisis of representation,” to take up the latter first, asserts that the efforts of anthropologists to describe the people they work with, or historians to portray the past, flounder upon the naive assumption that the ethnography or the monograph are capable of such representations. Instead, critics insist, both genres more accurately reproduce the hegemonic control the two disciplines have over their subject matter. The philosophical position that what is “out there,” people or past, remains forever hidden from the investigative eye—if it is not old hat, at the least strikes a familiar chord. The present “crisis” is unique mainly in its shrill indictment of our disciplinary...
