This Article Full Text (PDF) References Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Similar articles in Web of Science Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to Saved Citations Download to citation manager Request Permissions Request Reprints Add to My Marked Citations Citing Articles Citing Articles via HighWire Citing Articles via Google Scholar Citing Articles via Scopus Google Scholar Articles by Warren, K. B. Search for Related Content Social Bookmarking                         What's this?

Repositioning without Capitulation

Discussions with June Nash on Identity, Activism and Politics

Brown University, USA, Kay_Warren{at}brown.edu

June Nash’s work spans 50 years of anthropology and reflects important transformations in geopolitics, economic globalization, anthropological theory, and the people and societies we study. Nash’s creativity reveals itself as inherently oppositional, even when she has written within major research paradigms. I argue that if we use the concept of ‘repositioning’ to examine the life work of an anthropologist, the notion of stable schools, paradigms and languages of analysis falls away to reveal a much more dynamic picture of anthropological practice. Based on interviews in 2002, this article examines the ways in which Nash has geographically and institutionally repositioned her ethnographic studies as an engaged anthropologist. It traces the ways her intellectual agenda and commitment to social justice have informed her research and ethnographic writing. The article is concerned with the living dimension of ethnographic knowledge, with Nash’s fashioning of oral narratives that remember and reconsider her earlier fieldwork - as her published texts inevitably become historical artifacts. In the process, the article poses the question: how can we make ethnographic writing a more dynamic way of representing the human cost of the currents of change we seek to understand?

Key Words: anthropology across the Cold-War/post-Cold War transition • critiques of postmodernism • engaged anthropology • ethnographic writing and creativity • June Nash • repositioning

Critique of Anthropology, Vol. 25, No. 3, 217-228 (2005)
DOI: 10.1177/0308275X05055205


CiteULike    Complore    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter    What's this?

This article has been cited by other articles:

				K. Warren Writing gendered memories of repression in Northern Ireland: Begona Aretxaga at the doors of the prison Anthropological Theory, March 1, 2007; 7(1): 9 - 35. [Abstract] [PDF]