Being there : learning to live cross-culturally / edited by Sarah H. Davis and Melvin Konner.

Includes bibliographical references.

A kind of kinship / Lila Abu-Lugbod -- Saints and outcasts: La Negrita and the accidental Catholic / Russell Leigh Sharman -- Mad to be modern / Alma Gottlieb, Philip Graham -- The evil eye of the anthropologist / Ruth Behar -- Two women / Melvin Konner -- Graça / Jessica Gregg -- Insult and danger: anthropology among Navajos, Montenegrin Serbs, and wild chimpanzees / Chris Boehm -- Shame and making truth: the social repairs of ethnographic blunders / M. Cameron Hay -- Far from home, and being gnawed on by a Vervet / Melissa Fay Greene -- Time travel / Robert Shore, Bradd Shore -- Prostitutes with honor: a researcher with shame / Louise Brown -- A widening circle: family, collaboration, and lifelong ethnography in canyon de Chelly / Jeanne Simonelli -- Japanese ghosts don't have feet / Liza Dalby -- Field relations, field betrayals / John C. Wood -- My family's honor / Sarah H. Davis -- Return to Nisa / Marjorie Shostak.

Print version record.

As they immerse themselves in foreign cultures, trained anthropologists find that accepting difference is one thing, experiencing it is quite another. In tales that entertain as well as illuminate, these writers show how the moral and intellectual challenges of living cross-culturally revealed to them the limits of their perception and understanding.

How can an academic who does not believe evil spirits cause illness harbor the hope that her cancer may be cured by a healer who enters a trance to battle her demons? Whose actions are more (or less) honorable: those of a prostitute who sells her daughter's virginity to a rich man, or those of a professor who sanctions her daughter's hook-ups with casual acquaintances? As they immerse themselves in foreign cultures and navigate the relationships that take shape, the authors of these essays, most of them trained anthropologists, find that accepting cultural difference is one thing, experiencing it is quite another. In tales that entertain as much as they illuminate, these writers show how the moral and intellectual challenges of living cross-culturally revealed to them the limits of their perception and understanding. Their insights were gained only after discomforts resulting mainly from the authors' own blunders in the field. From Brazil to Botswana, Egypt to Indonesia, Mongolia to Pakistan, mistakes were made. Offering a gift to a Navajo man at the beginning of an interview, rather than the end, caused one author to lose his entire research project. In Côte d'Ivoire, a Western family was targeted by the village madman, leading the parents to fear for the safety of their child even as they suspected that their very presence had triggered his madness. At a time when misunderstanding of cultural difference is an undeniable source of conflict, we need stories like these more than ever before.

In English.

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