Extraordinary Encounters: Authenticity and the Interview

Given the anthropological focus on ethnography as a kind of deep immersion, the interview poses theoretical and methodological challenges for the discipline. This volume explores those challenges and argues that the interview should be seen as a special, productive site of ethnographic encounter, a site of a very particular and important kind of knowing. In a range of social contexts and cultural settings, contributors show how the interview is experienced and imagined as a kind of space within which personal, biographic and social cues and norms can be explored and interrogated. The interview possesses its own authenticity, therefore--true to the persons involved and true to their moment of interaction--whilst at the same time providing information on human capacities and proclivities that is generalizable beyond particular social and cultural contexts.