Sometime Kin
Subtitle: Layers of Memory, Boundaries of Ethnography
Publisher: Berghahn Books, Incorporated
Published: 2019
Language: eng
Number of pages: 174
ISBN-13: 9781789203394
Subjects: Ethnology, italy; Participant observation; Italy, social life and customs
Description: "In Sometime Kin Sandra Wallman paints the portrait of an Alpine settlement - its history, economy and culture, and its unusual resistance to outsiders and modernisation. Against this, journal extracts show the villagers embracing her four small children and acting as participant observers in the two-way process of research. This project happened more than forty years ago and involved a uniquely large fieldwork family, but its insights have wider significance. The book argues that the intrusion of observation inevitably distorts the ordinary life observed; that the challenges of multi-vocality and 'truth' are always with us; and that memory is the bedrock of every ethnographic enterprise"--