The Accidental Editor: An Interview with Andrew P. Lyons
AL: Quote-unquote. We had "peasants." And you've got to realize something: there's this stage where people really were doing twin killing, human sacrifice... not to mention the Inquisition and the Witch Craze in Europe. There really were differences as well as resemblances in cul...
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Veröffentlicht in: | Anthropologica (Ottawa) 2011-01, Vol.53 (2), p.335-347 |
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Format: | Artikel |
Sprache: | eng |
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Zusammenfassung: | AL: Quote-unquote. We had "peasants." And you've got to realize something: there's this stage where people really were doing twin killing, human sacrifice... not to mention the Inquisition and the Witch Craze in Europe. There really were differences as well as resemblances in culture. And we can gloss over this with whatever we want to say about the limits of globalization, but those things have changed. Here I think particularly about my friend, Bert N., and our last interview in the 1976 trip as he made a vain attempt to take us to the airport. "I'm taking you to Nigerian Airways because it's the safest way to get from Benin City to Lagos, but they may not go. Nigerian Airways is the safest in the world because Nigerian Airways never flies." Before we parted, he asked us, "Are there any questions you've wanted to ask us?" And I said, "I can think of one." "Let me guess," he said, "It's how come my wife and I are so well-heeled, despite the fact that I'm humble civil servant and she's a teacher." I said, "Well I did have that question." "Well," he replied, AL: The first fieldwork experience was in Benin City, Nigeria briefly in 1976, and then in 1983 to 1984. In a certain sense, Benin City was an accident. It was where we had contacts but our initial destination was Onitsha in Igboland. We ended up in Benin City in 1976, and we became fascinated by the place and stayed there. The brother of someone who taught at Rutgers had a job in educational television. Our work on mass media was then a new kind of project, a new kind of fieldwork. We didn't think of ourselves as pioneers, but in a way we were among a group of pioneers in what was to become the anthropology of media. It was an accident in a way. I... we used to be friendly with Tom Beidelman at New York University. He was very much of an inspiration to us early in our career, because he'd done marvellous fieldwork in East Africa with the Kaguru, was extraordinarily funny, and was always sparkling with ideas. Now it so happened that he had a collection of market pamphlets from Onitsha, in eastern Nigeria. They were published between 1940, late 1940s, and the 1970s. There's a famous book on them by Emmanuel Obiechina (1973), and they were literally, as Obiechina says, literature of the people, by the people and for the people, written often by secondary school students, young men fresh out of school, for people who, like themselves, are in the first generation of learning English. And some of them are ed |
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ISSN: | 0003-5459 2292-3586 |