The construction of Yusof Bin Abdullah: the vicissitudes of an anthropologist in Malaysia

Abstract

Although  chance,  anecdote  and  im-provisation  are  elements  inherent  in  an-thropological  fieldwork,  they  are  rarely  seen  as  central  methodological  issues.  In  this article the author discusses, through a series of anecdotes and unusual events, his  own  experience  as  an  ethnographer  in  Malaysia.  The  text  uses  irony  to  capture the subtlety, density, complexity and emotional  quality  of  fieldwork  in  a  distant  place  largely  unexplored  in  Spanish  anthropology.  The  technical,  formal  and  logistical details of solitary fieldwork (and their  relative  successes  and  failures)  are  interwoven  into  this  narrative  recount-ing  the  construction  of  the  ethnographer:  the  initial  search  for  and  access  to  a  field  site,  adoption  into  a  local  world,  and  fieldwork  in  a  distant  place:  a  traditional  area  in  coastal  Malaysia.  This article  is  also  a  tribute  to  those  people,  without  whom  none  of  this  would  have  made sense, and an exercise in relativistic ethnographic  self-criticism  that  struggles  to  avoid  (successfully  or  not)  the  pitfalls  of Orientalism, ethnocentrism and all the prejudices  that  surround  but  also  distin-guish  the  celebrated  (but  less  common  than imagined) practice of Malinowskian fieldwork.