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Accepted Paper:

Misunderstood, misrepresented, contested? Anthropological knowledge production in question  
David Mosse (SOAS)

Paper short abstract:

The outputs of anthropological research are less stable than they used to be. Post-fieldwork negotiations of ethnographic accounts are increasingly part of the research experience. This paper explores some experiences and implications of anthropology’s essentially relational epistemology.

Paper long abstract:

Anthropologists it seems often have peculiar difficulty communicating the results of their research to those with whom they have collaborated. It is increasingly common for PhD researchers among other to find when they return the insights of their ethnographic analysis to the institutions that they have studied, be they NGOs, activist networks, or other institutional actors, that they receive a hostile response. This is not because the researchers have made what are recognised as factual errors or because their analyses are insufficiently rigorous, but because the framing is alien, the epistemology unfamiliar. The ethnographic account is seen to have missed the point, focussed on irrelevant matters, or undermined stated goals with its focus on relationships. The anthropological account is not regarded as inconsequential, but as excessively consequential, yet unrestrained by the discursive conventions that it has studied. The issues here are both epistemological and ethical and arise from the inescapably relational nature of anthropological knowledge.

Panel P18
What is truth? - reflections on 'the world's' responses to anthropological knowing
  Session 1