中研院民族所

THE THEORETICAL ACCOMPANIMENTS TO AN ETHNOGRAPHER’S CAREER: Toward an anthropology for the 21st century?

Dr. Fred Damon (Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, University of Virginia)

吳明仁（中央研究院民族學研究所助研究員）

2024年5月20日（一）上午10點至12點

中央研究院民族學研究所新館三樓第三會議室

In November 2017 I returned to Muyuw, Woodlark Island, Milne Bay Province in Papua New Guinea for a short stay concerning past and future research, remembrances, and reciprocity. The visit marked nearly 50 months on the island spread over 50 years working as an ethnographer of the island’s culture. This presentation reviews the phases of that extended research, structured by my theoretical and topical orientations. Structuralism and what Americans called “Symbolic Anthropology” defined my initial training; my fieldwork experience and developments in European Marxism modified that stance. I added Wallerstein’s world-systems analysis by the late 1970s. ‘Marx’—the way I read Capital—and Wallerstein made ethnographic contribution to my initial structuralist background —their contributions were not just a matter of history. The early 1990s opened the second half of my research career, purposefully, and very quickly astonishingly. I added environmental interests to my orientation, and I hoped to initiate a third, mostly different, ethnographic area of competence, China (My second area of developing competence was modern United States history and culture, which I needed to deal with the problem of time in mid-century structuralist orientations and my use of Marx: my talk discusses these matters.). These two shifts, to environmental research and China, define my present. ‘Historical Ecology’ became the principal focus of the environmental trajectory, and a move from an intended southwestern China to Fujian Province, southeastern China, led me to combine rather than separate my ethnographic inquiries. I may complete the Muyuw strand of my current research passions but I’m sure the Chinese aspect is much bigger than I can manage. Both, I think, point to a direction Anthropology, and related inquiries, might take for their futures.

許仟慈，02-2652-3324，chientsu@gate.sinica.edu.tw