Francois Bouchetoux / Franocois Bouchetoux
A call for new strategies for integrating and writing the field of anthropology, this book explores the nature of anthropological knowledge in general and the conditions of integration and communication with people in particular. Starting with an analysis of anthropologists’ guilt, which originates from both lacks and excesses of integration into communities of adoption, Bouchetoux addresses issues of reflexivity, reciprocity, honesty, and respect. He then builds on this critique to evaluate the process through which researchers generate knowledge. Using fieldwork in Europe, Africa, and Asia as inspiration, he harks back to positions explored in the 1980s when interactions between anthropology, literary studies, and philosophy were most intense. Parallels between these experiences and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea lead to an understanding of fieldwork as a malaise whose symptoms (boredom, solitude, miscommunication) contain the seeds of its cure, unveiled in the eroticism of contingency and the possibility of an anthropology through emotions, not discourse.
