TY - JOUR
T1 - Deliberate Perspectival Obstructions
T2 - Looking at Nothing in Papua New Guinea
AU - Mikkelsen, Henrik Hvenegaard
AU - Rasmussen, Anders Emil
PY - 2017/10/20
Y1 - 2017/10/20
N2 - This article discusses the collaborative use of what the authors call ‘perspectival obstructions’. Taking its outset in the events revolving around a series of challenges given to each other, as well as to their interlocutors, in Papua New Guinea, the article unfolds how obstructions may be tied to a radical shift in perspective that allows partly for the invisible and absent to emerge as visible and present, and for different potentialities of persons and social relations to be brought to light. Hence the article demonstrates how obstruction and intervention as parts of the ethnographic methodology may help elicit perspectives that are otherwise kept hidden (deliberately or not), such as power-relations or the occluded side of a friendship or a kinship relation. This, in turn, also poses a danger to the otherwise collaborative ideal of modern ethnographic fieldwork in literally challenging and affecting ‘the natives' point of view’.
AB - This article discusses the collaborative use of what the authors call ‘perspectival obstructions’. Taking its outset in the events revolving around a series of challenges given to each other, as well as to their interlocutors, in Papua New Guinea, the article unfolds how obstructions may be tied to a radical shift in perspective that allows partly for the invisible and absent to emerge as visible and present, and for different potentialities of persons and social relations to be brought to light. Hence the article demonstrates how obstruction and intervention as parts of the ethnographic methodology may help elicit perspectives that are otherwise kept hidden (deliberately or not), such as power-relations or the occluded side of a friendship or a kinship relation. This, in turn, also poses a danger to the otherwise collaborative ideal of modern ethnographic fieldwork in literally challenging and affecting ‘the natives' point of view’.
UR - http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00141844.2015.1107606
U2 - 10.1080/00141844.2015.1107606
DO - 10.1080/00141844.2015.1107606
M3 - Journal article
SN - 0014-1844
VL - 82
SP - 867
EP - 885
JO - Ethnos
JF - Ethnos
IS - 5
ER -