The Shadow Side of Fieldwork: Exploring the Blurred Borders between Ethnography and Life

"Important and invaluable ... .This book brings that totality out of the shadows and into the light. It is written in an accessible manner and should inform teaching of research methods at both an undergraduate and postgraduate level, being a core text in the latter. It should be a companion guide to us all." (Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, September 2009)

"There are some fabulous papers in here: thought provoking, stimulating, well-written, clever papers." (Anthropological Forum, July 2009)

"Eye opening, provocative, and politically charged, this timely volume will change the ways you think about objects of knowledge and the means and ethics of knowing."
João Biehl, Princeton University

"With a multi-faceted play on the concept of shadow, these fine essays together redeem and clarify the so-called reflexive turn in anthropology, showing how the deeply personal in fieldwork is integral to the kind of quirky curiosity on which ethnographic knowledge so distinctively depends."
George Marcus, University of California, Irvine

"With uncommon candor, the remarkable ethnographers of The Shadow Side of Fieldwork interrogate some of the most pressing ethical and theoretical issues of writing culture in the present moment. Their often moving accounts of close encounters with themselves in their fieldwork contexts, and their understanding of how these encounters shape anthropology’s project of ethical connection with persons and worlds beyond, and within, our own, invites the discipline into new realms of inquiry, and excites deeper engagement with the paradoxes and anxieties of intersubjective research. A remarkable undertaking, all told."
Debbora Battaglia, Mount Holyoke College