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Given the anthropological focus on ethnography as a kind of deep immersion, the interview poses theoretical and methodological challenges for the discipline. This volume explores those challenges and argues that the interview should be seen as a special, productive site of ethnographic encounter, a site of a very particular and important kind of knowing. In a range of social contexts and cultural settings, contributors show how the interview is experienced and imagined as a kind of space within which personal, biographic and social cues and norms can be explored and interrogated. The interview possesses its own authenticity, therefore—true to the persons involved and true to their moment of interaction—whilst at the same time providing information on human capacities and proclivities that is generalizable beyond particular social and cultural contexts.
“…a diverse group of scholars who have a broad range of experience as ethnographers and whose work with interviews, life stories and biography highlight the extraordinariness of social encounters.” · Tamara Kohn, University of Melbourne
“Each chapter is well written and has something interesting . . . to say about interviewing. . . All in all, a genuinely absorbing read which has prompted me to think about interviewing in new ways.” · Peter Collins, Durham University
Katherine Smith is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. She has carried out ethnographic fieldwork in the north of England on the subjects of fairness and equality, social policy, social class, political correctness and humour. She is author of Fairness, Class and Belonging in Contemporary England (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
Introduction: The Interview as Analytical Category
James Staples and Katherine Smith
Chapter 1. The Transcendent Subject? Biography as a Medium for Writing ‘Life and Times’
Pat Caplan
Chapter 2. Using and Refusing Antiretroviral Drugs in South Africa: Towards a Biographical Approach
Isak Niehaus
Chapter 3. An ‘Up and Down Life’: Understanding Leprosy through Biography
James Staples
Chapter 4. Finding My Wit: Explaining Banter and Making the Effortless Appear in the Unstructured Interview
Katherine Smith
Chapter 5. ‘Different Times’ and Other ‘Altermodern’ Possibilities: Filming Interviews with Children as Ethnographic ‘Wanderings’
Angels Trias i Valls
Chapter 6. Dialogues with Anthropologists: Where Interviews Become Relevant
Judith Okley
Chapter 7. Talking and Acting for Our Rights: The Interview in an Action-research Setting
Ana Lopes
Epilogue: Extraordinary Encounter? The Interview as an Ironical Moment
Nigel Rapport
Notes on Contributors