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2005-2006 Fellows

Johannes Fabian

University of Amsterdam
Department of Anthropology

Johannes Fabian received a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology in 1969 from the University of Chicago.  He currently serves as a member of the Amsterdam School of Social Research at the University of Amsterdam.  His research interest areas include cultural knowledge systems (mythology, religious doctrines, kinship systems, cosmologies) primarily in francophone Africa. 

Project Summary

Fabian’s project, Closing House:  A Late Ethnography, is built around an ethnographic text, consisting of a long conversation in Swahili with Kahenga Mukonkwa, a Congolese healer and practitioner of magic (recorded in Lubumbashi, Congo, in September, 1974).  Prior to the recording, Kahenga had been consulted as a healer and had performed a magic-protective ritual of "closing the house," which Fabian observed and took notes on.  "Closing house" and "late" signal background issues that will be made topical.  The former not only refers to the event that resulted in the ethnographic text; it is also intended as a pun on the metaphor of "closing shop." Fabian will reflect on the situation in which he finds himself, facing the need to clean up, as it were, a vast store of ideas and materials that have accumulated during four decades.  "Late ethnography" evokes practical and theoretical issues, among them temporal distance to field research ("ethnography and memory"), the problematic distinction between ethnography and historiography, and the allegation implied in post-colonial critique that it may be too late to write ethnographies.