Agenda

Joâo Pina Cabral, University of Lisbon

Abstract
This paper concerns what it takes for a narrative to be an instance of ‘ethnographic writing’—here understood in its broadest sense, to include all kinds of media. It reflects upon a chance event in which I was an unwilling participant in England 1979/80. The trigger for a police officer’s highly xenophobic response that I witnessed was his confrontation with a Lybian man’s personal name—a name he considered inadmissible. At the time, I did not experience this event as in any way connected to ethnographic research. Yet, soon after, I realised that this had turned out to be a traumatic event for me, which honed my own sensitivity towards the less obvious characteristics of personal naming. Ethnographic accounts transform an interactive event one has witnessed into a narrative, but one of a very particular kind. Most discussions of ethnographic research over the past decades have focused exclusively on the first moment of ethnographic practice (the moment of going out there, as it were) and have taken for granted the second moment (the moment of returning and writing it up). This paper uses this event as a foil for exploring what turns a description of an occurrence one personally experienced into an ethnographic description. When seen from the personal perspective of the ethnographer, this process of objectification is also a ‘reduction’, namely in that it is a process of des-identification. As I produce a narrative of such an event, I objectify it by placing it into a determinable ethnographic ‘field’ that responds to specific anthropological queries (aporias). This paper harks back to Bourdieu’s famous comments concerning ‘participant objectification’ in order to search for a formulation of the ‘anthropological reduction’ that escapes the French master’s sociocentric and representationist vitriol against both posmodernist and phenomenological reflexivism.

Bio
Born in northern Portugal, João Pina-Cabral was brought up in Mozambique and studied in South Africa (BA Hons 1977, Univ. Witwatersrand, Johannesburg). His doctorate (Oxford 1982) was written under the supervision of John Campbell and Rodney Needham and was published as Sons of Adam, Daughters of Eve: the peasant worldview of Alto Minho (Clarendon Press 1986). He has held academic posts in Portugal and the United Kingdom. He has been Visiting Professor at various universities in Brazil, Spain, Mozambique and Macau. He was Malinowski Memorial Lecturer (London School of Economics and Political Science, 1992); Distinguished Speaker (Society for the Anthropology of Europe, AAA, 1992); Stirling Memorial Lecturer, (University of Kent, UK, 2003); Oração de Sapiência (Univ. Lisbon 1999) and Inaugural Lecturer (Program of Postgraduation in Social Anthropology, UNICAMP, Brazil, 2006). He is also Honorary Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute; Honorary Member of the European Association of Social Anthropologists and Miembro Correspondiente of the Real Academia de Ciencias Morales y Politicas (Spain). His thematic interests cover, among others, the relation between symbolic thought and social power; family and kinship in a comparative perspective; ethnicity in colonial and post-colonial contexts.

To participate, please register at this Zoom link

Coordinator: Franca Tamisari, tamisari@unive.it