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Ethnography
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Being Lost at Sea

Ontology, Epistemology and a Whale Hunt

Anita Lundberg

University of New South Wales, Australia

This article probes the sense of loss attendant upon beginning fieldwork in the whale-hunting village of Lamalera in Eastern Indonesia. This feeling of ontological absence was heightened when four boats were towed away by a harpooned whale, a tragedy which invoked the origin story of the first whale hunt that tells how Lamalera ancestors disappeared at sea. Each of these tales, those of the ethnographer and those of the whale hunters, speaks of the psychoanalytic fear of lack. Yet the details of their narration suggest that the syncopated moments in these heroic quests are cracks through which a different story may begin to emerge. Informed by theories ranging from feminism to phenomenology to anthropology, this article proposes that the space of no-thing offers new ways of being and knowing. Syncope is thus a vital moment in the stories that inform our lives, whether these be fiction, tales of adventure, fieldwork experiences, cultural performances and myths - or the disciplined story of the practice of anthropology itself.

Key Words: syncope • liminality • loss • fieldwork • feminism • archetypes • whale hunting • Indonesia

Ethnography, Vol. 2, No. 4, 533-556 (2001)
DOI: 10.1177/14661380122231028
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 Cultural DynamicsHome page
A. Lundberg
A Gift of Whale Meat: On the Flesh of the No-Thing
Cultural Dynamics, March 1, 2005; 17(1): 33 - 50.
[Abstract] [PDF]