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Chapter Two Part Two – Methodology - Page 64
women in intense heat, she thinks first how dreadful and down-trodden that woman
looks before becoming aghast that it is her, and this is what she has become. The
response of some of her hosts to her Japanese-American pronunciation of Japanese,
spoken from her humble social position as a junior foreign woman on the edge of a local
family, was that she must be a bit simple, or even worse, a Korean. Importantly for this
study, she comes to a notion of a layered and complex crafting of selves within the
individual, particularly informed by her capacity to position herself within hierarchies
and to articulate experience from those positions.
Much as Fine and Martin have reconsidered Goffman’s work and its consequences,
Ewing (2006, pp. 95-97) has considered how aspects of Kondo’s work impose
limitations on her account. For example, arguing for the importance of clinical
awareness in ethnographic interviewing, Ewing notes how Kondo retreats from a very
personal approach by a young man to her as a wiser adult, which, given the twin lenses
of psychoanalytic clinician and ethnographer, Ewing can readily and convincingly
highlight as significantly transferentially determined. The importance of the synthesis of
ethnography and psychoanalysis that Ewing notes leads to consideration of other inter-
weavings of the two disciplines.
Inter-weavings between psychoanalysis and ethnography
There have been some notable and productive disciplinary inter-weavings between
psychoanalysis and anthropology.
Devereux is a striking example of someone trained as both an anthropologist and a
psychoanalyst, and determined to exploit the overlap between the two disciplines to the
full. As a clue to the path he took, his major work is titled, ‘From Anxiety to Method in
the Behavioural Sciences’ (Devereux, 1967). In one of a series and range of