Pasts and presents: History, politics, and the representation of self and other in pacific ethnography
Foerstel, Lenora and Angela Gilliam, eds. Confronting the Margaret Mead Legacy: Scholarship, Empire, and the South Pacific. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 1992. xxxv + 298 pp. $34.95 cloth. Hays, Terence E., ed. Ethnographic Presents: Pioneering Anthropologists in the Papua New Guinea Highlands. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. xv + 301 pp. including combined bibliography and index. $40.00 cloth.
In Search of the Primitive: A Critique of Civilization
Anthropology is a kind of debate between human possibilities-a dialectical movement between the anthropologist as a modern man and the primitive peoples he studies. In Search of the Primitive is a tough-minded book containing chapters ranging from encounters in the field to essays on the nature of law, schizophrenia and civilization, and the evolution of the work of Clause LEvi-Strauss. Above all it is reflective and self-critical, critical of the discipline of anthropology and of the civilization that produced that discipline. Diamond views the anthropologist who refuses to become a searching critic of his own civilizations as not merely irresponsible, but a tool of Western civilization. He rejects the associations which have been made in the ideology of our civilization, consciously or unconsciously, between Western dominance and progress, imperialism and evolution, evolution and progress.
Fieldwork in geography teaching: A critical review of the literature and approaches
Abstract Virtually all lecturers in geography recognise the importance of fieldwork as a vital mode of teaching in the subject. This paper draws on material produced as part of a HEFCE review of teaching and learning in the field and assesses the implications of recent changes in higher education for field studies in geography. The literature on the development of, and recent changes in, fieldwork practice is reviewed and assumptions about appropriate forms of teaching and assessment are challenged. The need for carefully integrated preparation of project‐orientated fieldwork is stressed and the importance of debriefing and feedback after field visits is emphasised. Various suggestions for guidelines on good practice are presented. Finally, a range of future issues and problems in fieldwork is identified and discussed.