Tales of the Unexpected: Doing Everyday Life, Doing Fieldwork, Doing Anthropology and Sociology
Keywords:
fieldwork, everyday life, uncertainty, contingency, unpredictability, normality, DenmarkAbstract
This article is a developed version of my keynote
address to the annual meeting of the Canadian Association of
Social and Cultural Anthropologists held at the University of
Edmonton in May 2012. I examine the somewhat neglected,
but nonetheless central, role of unexpectedness in everyday
life, in order to think about how we might better deal with the
unpredictable contingencies of life, theoretically and during field
research. More specifically, I discuss some of the sources of
uncertainty in human experience, and the role of culture as a
means of suppressing uncertainty, in order to examine why 'the
unexpected' is relatively neglected in anthropology and sociol
ogy. Following this I consider the analytical consequences of
this neglect and—more tentatively—how we might set about
remedying the situation.
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Copyright (c) 2013 Richard Jenkins
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