Transgression is the stock in trade of a certain kind of anthropological sensibility that transforms fieldwork from strict social science to something more engaging. It builds on Koeppings idea that participation transforms perception and investigates how transgressive practices have triggered the re-theorization of conventional forms of thought and life. It focuses on social practices in various cultural fields including the method and politics of anthropology in order to show how transgressive experiences become relevant for the organisation and understanding of social relations. This book brings key authors in anthropology together to debate and transgress anthropological expectations. Through transgression as method, as discussed here, our understanding of the world is transformed, and anthropology as a discipline becomes dangerous and relevant again.

Ursula Rao is Lecturer in Anthropology in the University of Halle, and is now involved in writing about the problem of fieldwork in dispersed and postmodern settings. She has also worked extensively in the field of Religious Anthropology and writtenNegotiating the Divine: Temple Religion and Temple Politics in Contemporary Urban India (2003, Manohar),Kommunalismus in Indien. Eine Darstellung der wissenschaftlichen Diskussion über Hindu-Muslim-Konflikte (2003) and co-editor ofIm Rausch des Rituals: Gestaltung und Transformation der Wirklichkeit in körperlicher Performanz (2000), She has further edited a volume on the relevance of performance for cultural change:Kulturelle VerWandlungen. Die Gestaltung sozialer Welten in der Performanz (2005)

List of Figures
Klaus Peter Köpping

Introduction
Ursula Rao andJohn Hutnyk

PART I: FIELDWORKS

Chapter 1. Reflexivity Unbound: Shifting Styles of Critical Self-awareness from the Malinowskian Scene of Fieldwork and Writing to the Emergence of Multi-sited Ethnography
George Marcus

Chapter 2. News from the Field: the Experience of Transgression and the Transformation of Knowledge during Research in an Expert-site
Ursula Rao

Chapter 3. Soiled Work and the Artefact
Howard Potter

Chapter 4. Transgression for Transcendence? On the Anthropologists (Dis)engagement in the Politics of Meaning
Kaori Sugishita

Chapter 5. Running Out of Tricks: the Experience of Ethnography and the Politics of Culturalism
Thomas Reuter

PART II: PERFORMANCES

Chapter 6. Transcending Transgression with Transgression: Inheriting Forsaken Souls in Bali
Mary Ida Bagus

Chapter 7. The Dance of Punishment: Transgression and Punishment in an East Indian Ritual
Burkhard Schnepel

Chapter 8. Divine Play or Subversive Comedy? Reflections on Costuming and Gender at a Hindu Festival
Beatrix Hauser

Chapter 9. Between Meaning and Significance: Reflections on Ritual and Mimesis
Alexander Henn

Chapter 10. Animism on Stage: Tracing Anthropologys Heritage in Contemporary African Dance in Europe
Nadine Sieveking

Chapter 11. Transgression and the Erotic
Vincent Crapanzano

PART III: INFRINGEMENTS

Chapter 12. Michel Leiris: Master of Ethnographic Failure
Peter Phipps

Chapter 13. Boundary Confusion in Anthropology and Art: Pablo Picasso and Michel Leiris
Judith Weiss

Chapter 14. The Concatenation of MindsKlaus
Peter Buchheit

Chapter 15. Transgressions of Fieldwork/Filed Works: Method in the Madness
John Hutnyk

Notes on Contributors
Index