Fieldwork in Anthropology

Spring 2013 – New School for Social Research, New York

Thu, 6:00 – 7:50 pm


Course description

Fieldwork in Anthropology (GANT 6075)

This course kills three birds with one stone: 1) it introduces students to the anthropology of science 2) by teaching them how to do some very basic fieldwork 3) in the course of which they will learn about contemporary anthropology, which will be the object of our joint ethnographic inquiry. Science studies literature will provide us with research questions and a conceptual toolkit to conduct and analyze interviews with New York anthropologists. Our investigation will focus on the constitution and transformation of the epistemic objects of anthropology, the historical epistemology of fieldwork in comparison with laboratory research, the scientific virtues that make a good anthropologist, and the moral economy of anthropology as a scientific field.