Premium
Home‐town Anthropology
Author(s) -
Madden Raymond
Publication year - 1999
Publication title -
the australian journal of anthropology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.245
H-Index - 25
eISSN - 1757-6547
pISSN - 1035-8811
DOI - 10.1111/j.1835-9310.1999.tb00024.x
Subject(s) - dialectic , representation (politics) , sociology , relation (database) , similarity (geometry) , anthropology , history , epistemology , political science , law , philosophy , database , artificial intelligence , politics , computer science , image (mathematics)
As I undertake fieldwork in my home‐town area, I experience the familiar and the unfamiliar colliding, overlapping and interrelating in a critically productive, yet tense, dialectic. Questions arise for me such as: What is the field? What is home? When am I an anthropologist? When am I a local? By looking at the relationship between Aboriginal and non‐Aboriginal people in my home‐town area, I am able to briefly explore these questions and come to a position where 1 sense the need for anthropology to look to comparative strategies (whereby difference and similarity are seen in relation to each other). This I see as a corrective to an overly contrastive approach which prioritises the representation of difference between cultural groups.