Customer Reviews

OLD MAN FOG (Smithsonian Series in Ethnographic Inquiry)

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Haviland's book is an interesting if not entirely successful experiment in ethnographic literature. Or perhaps we should say, Haviland's and Roger Hart's, since he goes further than most anthropologists in crediting the person who provided him with the information. It is well to remember that we anthropologists do not so much write books as craft accounts of the experiences that people allow us to have into books.
Haviland weaves together three strands in his work: Hart's life story as an elder from the Barrow Point region, the myths of the Barrow Point people (as reconstructed by Hart), and documentary data from the modern history of northern Queensland. He finally accompanies Hart on a journey back to his homeland. Haviland is more aware and more clear than most that an ethnography of a contemporary Aboriginal or any other native group cannot be straightforward reportage but must always been pieced back together from the fractured memories of the survivors of the modernization process. The resultant book, he warns, will always seem more integrated and unified than the experiences that went into it. His book cannot help but suffer from the same defect. He presents a refraction of his disjointed experience of Hart's disjointed memories, but a book that really presented the experience as it felt in the first place would be impossible to read. The whole project is worthwhile not only for what we learn about Aboriginal culture but about anthropological knowledge and the construction of one kind of account and literature out of another.