SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This chapter uses the immersive experience of Open Dialogue, an innovative approach to mental healthcare, as the pretext for reflection on the stance of anthropologists in relation to our interlocutors, fieldwork as ethical practice and the personal motivations involved in ethnography. The chapter considers the paradox of presence and absence that characterises ethnographic practice in the context of Open Dialogue. It uses this therapeutic approach as a set of challenges around practices of presence, attention, dialogue and interpretation that lay out the ambitions and limitations of ethnography as a relational methodology. The chapter points to the non-dialogical aspects of anthropologists’ representational work, but also the necessity of practice beyond representation; anthropological work that is about ‘not-writing’. The final part considers personal motivations and drivers of research involved in a ‘personal anthropology’, asking what anthropology does for its practitioners.