“Space and the Question of Interdiscipinarity: Notes from an African Urban Fieldwork Site”

The classic ethnographic story follows a well-known sequence: arrival, followed by cultural nausea both regarding one’s own culture and aspects of the one being encountered, then the progressive gathering of information through various interlocutors, and finally (hopefully) some form of enlightenment.  But what happens when the fieldwork site is the city in which one grew up and the ethnographic experience is mapped onto various kinds of (inter)disciplinary discoveries following many years of absence?  This talk will reflect on the various ways in which I navigated the question of interdisciplinarity whilst doing field work in Accra for my book Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism.  I shall explore how I put three disciplines into dialogue, namely, literary studies, history, and anthropology and will  show how the entire question was mediated for me via my choice of the concept of space, which ended up providing the mode for interweaving concepts and methods from the different disciplines.