The adventure in text and experience.
In 1912 two men---Ernest C. Oberholtzer and Billy Magee---embarked on a canoe trip to the northern reaches of Canada. Oberholtzer was a twenty-six year old Harvard graduate, while his travelling partner was an Ojibwe man twice his age who spoke no English. Their experiences were both written in a da...
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| Format: | Thesis |
| Language: | English |
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2000
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| Online Access: | https://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/132486 http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&res_dat=xri:pqm&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:9963909 |
| Summary: | In 1912 two men---Ernest C. Oberholtzer and Billy Magee---embarked on a canoe trip to the northern reaches of Canada. Oberholtzer was a twenty-six year old Harvard graduate, while his travelling partner was an Ojibwe man twice his age who spoke no English. Their experiences were both written in a daily journal kept by Oberholtzer and recorded on audio tape in 1946: this dissertation explores the adventures contained therein. Anthropology demands that we investigate not just the concept of culture but the experience of it, especially when cultures (in this case Anglo-American and Native American) come into agreement and conflict. At times the discipline seems to regulate what kind of information counts as anthropological knowledge, and suggests the proper language in which to make an argument for such knowledge. Oberholtzer and Billy's adventure, however, is a testament to the fluidity of experience: it shows that life is made up of overlapping moments that are neither directly experienced nor simply imagined. Ethnography---as an activity that includes research, writing travel, and living---usually demands that the anthropologist use individual informants as a way to draw a complete (if complicated) picture of the epistemological place in which the work is being done. The Adventure in Text and Experience engages they ways in which anthropology makes knowledge in that it uses as its data a combination of journals, audio tapes, and reminiscences. This dissertation was written in conversation with the stated aims of the discipline of anthropology, but with an eye trained toward literature---as a way in which to question the very foundation of our ideas about experience and the imagination and to question our construction of the anthropological discipline. PhD Cultural anthropology Social Sciences University of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/132486/2/9963909.pdf |
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