1. History 'Functionalised' -- 2. A historico-functionalist debate: (Ernesto De Martino, Michel Leiris and E. E. Evans-Pritchard) -- 3. Deconstructing Descent -- 4. Frontier Fetishism and the 'Ethiopianisation' of Africa -- 5. Writing Nationalism in the Horn of Africa -- 6. Present and Past in North-East African Spirit-Possession -- 7. The 'Wise Man's Choice': Conversion Theories -- 8. Shamans and Sex: a Comparative Perspective -- 9. Ethnography and Theory in Anthropology
Summary
Arguments with Ethnography presents a major critique of the globalisation of the culture principle in anthropology. The study contends that the subjective anthropology promoted through postmodernism represents an extreme development of long established, highly patronising and misleading evaluations in the anthropologist's creative role in the construction of theory. Arguing that theory-building is dependent on the actual study of peoples - a study which is empirically based and historically sensitive - the book advocates the "fieldwork mode of production and reproduction"