Extraordinary Encounters: Authenticity and the Interview

Description

Given the anthropological focus on ethnography as a kind of deep immersion, the interview poses theoretical and methodological challenges for the discipline. This volume explores those challenges and argues that the interview should be seen as a special, productive site of ethnographic encounter, a site of a very particular and important kind of knowing. In a range of social contexts and cultural settings, contributors show how the interview is experienced and imagined as a kind of space within which personal, biographic and social cues and norms can be explored and interrogated. The interview possesses its own authenticity, therefore―true to the persons involved and true to their moment of interaction―whilst at the same time providing information on human capacities and proclivities that is generalizable beyond particular social and cultural contexts. Extraordinary Encounters Contents Introduction – The Interview as Analytical Category Chapter 1 – The Transcendent Subject? Chapter 2 – Using and Refusing Antiretroviral Drugs in South Africa Chapter 3 – An ‘Up and Down Life’ Chapter 4 – Finding My Wit Chapter 5 – ‘Different Times’ and Other ‘Altermodern’ Possibilities Chapter 6 – Dialogues with Anthropologists Chapter 7 – Talking and Acting for Our Rights Epilogue – Extraordinary Encounter? Notes on Contributors Index