Stumbling toward Truth: Anthropologists at Work

The essayists in Stumbling toward Truth are anthropologists who have paused to share personal experiences that uncover important truths they've learned by living with and trying to understand others. The twenty-nine poignant fieldwork tales collected here reveal much about what anthropology can teach about others as well as ourselves, the spirit of the ethnographic enterprise, and issues of crosscultural humanity and humaneness. Readers will discover from these once-private stories from around the world that much of what anthropologists learn about themselves and others is totally unanticipated. Oftentimes, cultural truths and unexpected realities are stumbled upon. These lessons, none for which social science training offered adequate preparation, remain perhaps the most memorable and critical of fieldwork.

Titles of related interest from Waveland Press: Anderson, Around the World in 30 Years: Life as a Cultural Anthropologist (ISBN 9781577660576); Barley, The Innocent Anthropologist: Notes from a Mud Hut (ISBN 9781577661566); Bohannan-van der Elst, Asking and Listening: Ethnography as Personal Adaptation (ISBN 9780881339871); Gardner-Hoffman, Dispatches from the Field: Neophyte Ethnographers in a Changing World (ISBN 9781577664512); and Lenkeit, High Heels and Bound Feet: And Other Essays on Everyday Anthropology (ISBN 9781478615231).