The Ethnographers Eye: notes from work in progress

• Type of Material: Article
• Authors: Anna Grimshaw, Emory University
• Language: English
• Date: 1997
• Publisher: MARTOR'Publishing House
• Publication Version: Final Published Version
• Copyright Statement: 1997 MARTOR
• Final Published Version (URL): http://martor.muzeultaranuluiroman.ro/archive/martor<2<1997/
• Title of Journal or Parent Work: MARTOR
• Volume: 2
• Start Page: 42
• End Page: 49
• Keywords: ways of seeing; anthropology; vision; technique
• Research Categories: Health Sciences, Opthamology; Anthropology, Physical

Abstract

"Technique, as I would define it, involves not only a poet's way with words, his management of metre, rhythm and verbal texture; it involves also a definition of his stance towards life, a definition of his own reality ... Technique entails the watermarking of your essential patterns of perception, voice and thought into the touch and texture of your lines; it is that whole creative effort of the mind's and body's resources to bring the meaning of experience within the jurisdiction of form." (Seamus Heaney, Preoccupations) This quotation comes from Feeling Into Words, an essay by Seamus Heaney, the Nobel prize-winning Irish poet. Perhaps it seems a little strange to begin here; but the process which Heaney describes is evocative and suggestive of my own contemporary explorations within anthropology. For central to my enquiry is the question of technique.