In 1985 Johannes Fabian, while engaged in fieldwork in the Shaba province of Zaire, first encountered this saying. Its implications-for the charismatic religious movements Fabian was examining, for the highly charged political atmosphere of Zaire, and for the cultures of the Luba peoples-continued to intrigue him, though its meaning remained elusive. On a later visit, he mentioned the saying to a company of popular actors, and triggered an ethnographic brainstorm. "Spontaneously, they decided it would be just the right topic for their next play. On the spot they began planning-suggestions...
In 1985 Johannes Fabian, while engaged in fieldwork in the Shaba province of Zaire, first encountered this saying. Its implications-for the charism...
In this study, inquiry will be directed to the past, and it will, for many reasons, have to reach into a past which is rather remote from present-day Shaba Swahili. The author's principal concern remains with a contemporary situation, namely the role of Swahili in the context of work, industrial, artisanal, and artistic. When it was first formulated, the aim of my project was to describe what might be called the workers' culture of Shaba, through analyses of communicative (sociolinguistic) and cognitive (ethnosemantic) aspects of language use.
In this study, inquiry will be directed to the past, and it will, for many reasons, have to reach into a past which is rather remote from present-day ...
Explorers and ethnographers in Africa during the period of colonial expansion are usually assumed to have been guided by rational aims such as the desire for scientific knowledge, fame, or financial gain. This book, the culmination of many years of research on nineteenth-century exploration in Central Africa, provides a new view of those early European explorers and their encounters with Africans. Out of Our Minds shows explorers were far from rational--often meeting their hosts in extraordinary states influenced by opiates, alcohol, sex, fever, fatigue, and violence. Johannes Fabian...
Explorers and ethnographers in Africa during the period of colonial expansion are usually assumed to have been guided by rational aims such as the des...
What happens when anthropologists lose themselves during fieldwork while attempting to understand divergent cultures? When they stray from rigorous agendas and are forced to confront radically unexpected or unexplained experiences? In Extraordinary Anthropology leading ethnographers from across the globe discuss the importance of the deeply personal and emotionally volatile "ecstatic" side of fieldwork. Anthropologists who have worked in communities in Central America, North America, Australia, Africa, and Asia share their intimate experiences of tranformations in the field through details of...
What happens when anthropologists lose themselves during fieldwork while attempting to understand divergent cultures? When they stray from rigorous ag...
This book collects published and unpublished work over the last dozen years by one of today's most distinguished and provocative anthropologists. Johannes Fabian is widely known outside of his discipline because his work so often overcomes traditional scholarly boundaries to bring fresh insight to central topics in philosophy, history, and cultural studies. The first part of the book addresses questions of current critical concern: Does it still make sense to search for objectivity in ethnography? What do we gain when we invoke "context" in our interpretations? How does literacy change the...
This book collects published and unpublished work over the last dozen years by one of today's most distinguished and provocative anthropologists. Joha...
This book collects published and unpublished work over the last dozen years by one of today's most distinguished and provocative anthropologists. Johannes Fabian is widely known outside of his discipline because his work so often overcomes traditional scholarly boundaries to bring fresh insight to central topics in philosophy, history, and cultural studies. The first part of the book addresses questions of current critical concern: Does it still make sense to search for objectivity in ethnography? What do we gain when we invoke -context- in our interpretations? How does literacy change the...
This book collects published and unpublished work over the last dozen years by one of today's most distinguished and provocative anthropologists. Joha...
Johannes Fabian was one of the first anthropologists to introduce the concept of popular culture into the study of contemporary Africa. Drawing on his research in the Shaba region of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), he has been writing for thirty years about the practices, beliefs, and objects that make up popular culture in an urban African setting: labor and language, religious movements, theater and storytelling, music and painting, grassroots literacy and historiography.
In Moments of Freedom Fabian reflects on anthropological uses of the concept of popular culture....
Johannes Fabian was one of the first anthropologists to introduce the concept of popular culture into the study of contemporary Africa. Drawing on ...
In Memory against Culture, the renowned anthropologist Johannes Fabian assesses the contemporary practice of anthropology and its emerging shape as a global discipline. In twelve essays ranging from theoretical reflections to re-examinations of past ethnographic work, Fabian addresses central theoretical debates within the discipline and throughout the social sciences about language and time, history and memory, and ethnography and recognition. Together the essays illuminate Fabian s pluralist vision of an anthropology that always makes the other present by opening itself to...
In Memory against Culture, the renowned anthropologist Johannes Fabian assesses the contemporary practice of anthropology and its emerging shap...
In Memory against Culture, the renowned anthropologist Johannes Fabian assesses the contemporary practice of anthropology and its emerging shape as a global discipline. In twelve essays ranging from theoretical reflections to re-examinations of past ethnographic work, Fabian addresses central theoretical debates within the discipline and throughout the social sciences about language and time, history and memory, and ethnography and recognition. Together the essays illuminate Fabian s pluralist vision of an anthropology that always makes the other present by opening itself to...
In Memory against Culture, the renowned anthropologist Johannes Fabian assesses the contemporary practice of anthropology and its emerging shap...
The Internet allows ethnographers to deposit the textual materials on which they base their writing in virtual archives. Electronically archived fieldwork documents can be accessed at any time by the writer, his or her readers, and the people studied. Johannes Fabian, a leading theorist of anthropological practice, argues that virtual archives have the potential to shift the emphasis in ethnographic writing from the monograph to commentary. In this insightful study, he returns to the recording of a conversation he had with a ritual healer in the Congolese town of Lubumbashi more than three...
The Internet allows ethnographers to deposit the textual materials on which they base their writing in virtual archives. Electronically archived field...
