Introduction: Reason and passion: the parallel worlds of ethnography and biography

Abstract

This special issue of Social Anthropology places ethnography at its centre and considers how it is framed by the biographies of those involved. Probing some of the more unexpected connections that may arise between these parallel worlds, we discuss how collaborations between anthropologists and those they study inform the moral judgements and ethical practices that pervade the experience of fieldwork. What are the after-lives of such encounters? What role does the materialisation of experience – for example, in houses, photographs, files and fieldnotes – play in the biographical narratives of anthropologists and of those they study? We explore these moral, material and political resonances and set out a new agenda for the biographical as part of the anthropological project.