Extraordinary Encounters (Web PDF) von Katherine Smith

Introduction: The Interview as Analytical Category
James Staples and Katherine Smith

Chapter 1.The Transcendent Subject? Biography as a Medium for Writing Life and Times
Pat Caplan

Chapter 2.Using and Refusing Antiretroviral Drugs in South Africa: Towards a Biographical Approach
Isak Niehaus

Chapter 3.An Up and Down Life: Understanding Leprosy through Biography
James Staples

Chapter 4.Finding My Wit: Explaining Banter and Making the Effortless Appear in the Unstructured Interview
Katherine Smith

Chapter 5.Different Times and Other Altermodern Possibilities: Filming Interviews with Children as Ethnographic Wanderings
Angels Trias i Valls

Chapter 6.Dialogues with Anthropologists: Where Interviews Become Relevant
Judith Okley

Chapter 7.Talking and Acting for Our Rights: The Interview in an Action-research Setting
Ana Lopes

Epilogue: Extraordinary Encounter? The Interview as an Ironical Moment
Nigel Rapport

Notes on Contributors

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, thereforetrue to the persons involved and true to their moment of interactionwhilst at the same time providing information on human capacities and proclivities that is generalizable beyond particular social and cultural contexts.

James Staples is Senior Lecturer in anthropology at Brunel University London, author ofPeculiar People, Amazing Lives (Orient Longman, 2007) andLeprosy in India: Journeys With A Tamil Brahmin (Lexington Books, 2014), editor ofLivelihoods at the Margins (Left Coast Press, 2007) and two recent volumes on suicide. He has published numerous journal articles and chapters on his work in South India.