LIFE IN DIS-PLACE: RE-SEARCHING PROCESSES OF IMAGINING WITH ENEWETAK-UJELANG PEOPLE

Authors

Laurence Marshall Carucci, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Montana State University, Bozeman, MTFollow

Abstract

The current article attempts to outline the way in which ongoing research with the Enewetak-Ujelang community and with other Marshall Islanders over a period of nearly three decades has required the author to reformulate taken for granted ideas about "culture," "the field," and "field research" as well as presuppositions about self/other and about ethnographic writing. Not only has the shape of "the field" shifted substantially during this time period, becoming much more multifaceted and multilocational, so too, the identity of the author has been recontoured many times over by members of Enewetak-Ujelang communities. Therefore, neither "field" nor "fieldworker" are ever the same since members of the community and the field researcher are continuously reformulating their ideas about each other. I argue that shared experiences—in this case, ongoing and extended periods of living life with members of the Enewetak-Ujelang community, engaging in their daily activities and pursuing their varied agendas—allow an anthropologist of the long term to speak and write with some legitimacy about the lives of others because their lives and the ethnographer's life are of a piece. If the aim of anthropology is "to grasp the native's point of view" (Malinowski 1922), this enigmatic quest can only be realized to the degree that the ethnographer has shared in the processes of mutual self-fashioning that make the practices of others "experience-near" fragments of one's self.

Recommended Citation

Carucci, Laurence Marshall (2004) "LIFE IN DIS-PLACE: RE-SEARCHING PROCESSES OF IMAGINING WITH ENEWETAK-UJELANG PEOPLE," Pacific Studies Journal: Vol. 27: No. 2, Article 5.
Available at: https://digitalcollections.byuh.edu/pacific-studies-journal/vol27/iss2/5