Writing Friendship: A Reciprocal Ethnography

ISBN-13: 9783030265441 / Angielski / Miękka / 2020 / 189 str.

Paloma Gay Y. Blasco; Liria Hernández

Spis treści

A note on fonts, terms and anonymity

Chapter 1: Sister of my Soul

Chapter 2: Breaking Away

Chapter 3: Two girls

Chapter 4: Writing Friendship

Chapter 5: Those Who Surround Us

Chapter 6: About God, and About Anthropology

Epilogue: Afterwards

Appendix: Devising a Reciprocal Genre

Acknowledgements

O autorze

Paloma Gay y Blasco is a social anthropologist teaching at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, UK.

Liria Hernández lives and works in Madrid, Spain.

Blurb

This book tells the remarkable story of the friendship between Liria Hernández, a Roma woman from Madrid, and Paloma Gay y Blasco, a non-Roma anthropologist. In this unique reciprocal experiment, the former informant returns the gaze to write about the anthropologist, her life and her environment. Through finely crafted and deeply moving text, Hernández and Gay y Blasco suggest new ways of doing and writing anthropology.

The dialogue between Hernández and Gay y Blasco provides a courageous account of the entanglements and rewards of anthropological research. Drawing on letters, conversations, and fieldnotes gathered over twenty-five years, each of the authors talks about herself, the other, and the impact of anthropology on their two lives. They examine their intertwined trajectories as Spanish women and reflect on the challenges of devising their own reciprocal genre. Blending ethnography, life story and memoir, they undermine the dichotomy between author and subject around which scholarship still revolves.