This presentation on my 13-month anthropological fieldwork (NSF-DEL) in the Northern Paiute community of McDermitt (NV) will address crucial issues of community-based ethnographic research practices in the United States. What is the value for a native community of having an anthropologist conducting research amongst them? Answering this question, and developing the assumption that anthropologists are not necessary for native communities but can be useful, I will retrospectively explore the pitfalls and successes of my fieldwork experience. While we may not be able to make the entirety of our documentary efforts seen as useful by community members, it is essential that, overall, the work of the anthropologist be apprehended in their own terms by the native community. More generally, I see anthropological description and cultural activism as inseparable in contemporary anthropological fieldwork.
Thierry Veyrié is a PhD candidate in the Anthropology Department at Indiana University. He received a Licence of Philosophy and Licence of History from the Sorbonne, Paris IV in 2011 and a Master degree in Ethnology and Social Anthropology at the École des Hautes Études en Science Sociales (EHESS) in Paris in 2014. His research focuses on the representation of the body in the Northern Paiute oral tradition. He identifies emic and meaningful actions in a system of representation by articulating subsistence practices, rituals and myths. He returned to Bloomington recently from a year of field work, funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the American Philosophical Society.
Part of Reports from the Field Speaker series
Anthropological description and activism on the Fort McDermitt Paiute-Shoshone Reservation (2017-2018) - Thierry Veyrié
Thursday, November 01, 2018, 3:00 PM – ,
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