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Buckley (1994) looks inward at the effects of field work on neophyte anthropologists. This piece is premised on the idea of the anthropologist entering a completely foreign environment, where they are forced to look inward, in the midst of a chaotic alien environment. The examples aren’t totally applicable to most ethnography now. Buckley uses Malinowski’s journal and the analysis of a young female graduate student. Ultimately, he argues that the ethnographer may likely experience regression and changes of the Self amidst field work in a foreign world.

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Learning about/from psychoanalysis

“in the ethnographer Evans Pritchard’s words (1962), the capacity “to abandon himself without reserve,” “to think and feel alternately as a savage and as a European” and for whom the native society is “in the anthropologist himself and not merely in his notebooks.”-is this really achievable?

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Fieldwork

"In this paper, I shall attempt a psychoanalytic hypothesis concerning the psychological nature of fieldwork for the anthropologist who possesses, in the ethnographer Evans-Pritchard's words (1962), the capacity "to abandon himself without reserve," "to think and feel alternately as a savage and as a European" and for whom the native society is "in the anthropologist himself and not merely in his notebooks"" (614)"Briefly stated, the hypothesis postulated here is that in the course of fieldwork the anthropologist establishes a new object relationship with the culture being studied.

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