文章基本信息

标题：When Ghosts Can Talk: Informant Reality and Ethnographic Policy
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作者：James M Nyce ; Sanna Talja ; Sidney Dekker 等
期刊名称：Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics
印刷版ISSN：1736-6518
电子版ISSN：2228-0987
出版年度：2015
卷号：9
期号：1
页码：81-97
出版社：University of Tartu, Estonian National Museum, Estonian Literary Museum
摘要：This paper argues that researchers doing ethnography can fail in their commitment to take what their informants say seriously. This often occurs, despite ethnographers’ best intentions, when informant statements depart radically from Western distinctions between what is real and what is imaginary. When informants talk about things like ghosts, witches and magic, there is a tendency to apply analytic strategies which translate these informant statements about the world so they conform to Western understandings about what is possible in the world and what is not. This article describes for example some commonly applied interpretive moves used in dealing with informant statements about other-than-human persons. The analytic models and categories we use in these cases are equivalent to often tacit and taken-for-granted Western strategies for dealing with ‘non-existent things’ and these make it impossible to take native statements at face value. We could turn the situation around in ethnographic analyses if we put under the microscope our own Western taken-for-granted assumptions and did so by taking definitions of reality, community, and the person radically different from our own seriously.
关键词：Ghosts;non; human persons;interpretation;ontology;epistemology