TY - BOOK

T1 - An Anthropology of Common Ground

T2 - Awkward Encounters in Heritage Work

AU - Brichet, Nathalia Sofie

PY - 2018

Y1 - 2018

N2 - How might we explore commonness in cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural collaboration? This book offers a detailed analysis of a cultural heritage project reconstructing a former Danish plantation in Ghana. The project was designed as a joint heritage project, addressing the shared Danish-Ghanaian history and with participants from both countries. By focusing on a series of awkward encounters in this project work, entailing histories of slavery, questions of building materials, ideas of cultural exchange, and discussions of authenticity, the book daringly suggests a need to nurture a common ground. Offering a patch of interrelated stories, the book is an intervention both into heritage work and ethnography. Longer abstractPaying attention to details and ‘small stories’ as that which make worlds (heritage projects as well as ethnography), the book proposes a kind of postcolonial scholarship. Rather than uncovering or building up one story about the Danish-Ghanaian past, the work insists on providing ‘inconclusive’ analyses, collaboratively generated in the course of the project work and in the process of writing ethnographically about it. The ambition is to nurture fieldwork as an opportunity for creating a common ground, on which to think about what heritage and ethnography could be. Common ground, then, is not only an ideal of the joint heritage project, but an expression of an anthropological ambition. In consequence, the book is an account of a particular ethnographic research project - the ‘methods story’ being about how post-colonial relations might be noticed and supported and about how empirical research is done as relations between what is going on in the field and the way that the ethnographer choses to tell the story of the field in the text. The book is structured around four different approaches, following a ‘crafting the field’ chapter (in lieu of a ‘context’ chapter). Each provides a qualification of heritage and ethnography – as components to positively and collaboratively generating what these phenomena even are.

AB - How might we explore commonness in cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural collaboration? This book offers a detailed analysis of a cultural heritage project reconstructing a former Danish plantation in Ghana. The project was designed as a joint heritage project, addressing the shared Danish-Ghanaian history and with participants from both countries. By focusing on a series of awkward encounters in this project work, entailing histories of slavery, questions of building materials, ideas of cultural exchange, and discussions of authenticity, the book daringly suggests a need to nurture a common ground. Offering a patch of interrelated stories, the book is an intervention both into heritage work and ethnography. Longer abstractPaying attention to details and ‘small stories’ as that which make worlds (heritage projects as well as ethnography), the book proposes a kind of postcolonial scholarship. Rather than uncovering or building up one story about the Danish-Ghanaian past, the work insists on providing ‘inconclusive’ analyses, collaboratively generated in the course of the project work and in the process of writing ethnographically about it. The ambition is to nurture fieldwork as an opportunity for creating a common ground, on which to think about what heritage and ethnography could be. Common ground, then, is not only an ideal of the joint heritage project, but an expression of an anthropological ambition. In consequence, the book is an account of a particular ethnographic research project - the ‘methods story’ being about how post-colonial relations might be noticed and supported and about how empirical research is done as relations between what is going on in the field and the way that the ethnographer choses to tell the story of the field in the text. The book is structured around four different approaches, following a ‘crafting the field’ chapter (in lieu of a ‘context’ chapter). Each provides a qualification of heritage and ethnography – as components to positively and collaboratively generating what these phenomena even are.

M3 - Book

SN - 978-0-9955277-9-9

BT - An Anthropology of Common Ground

PB - Mattering Press

CY - Manchester

ER -