Sometime Kin: Layers of Memory, Boundaries of Ethnography

Sometime Kin is the portrait of an Alpine settlement - its history, economy and culture - and its unusual resistance to outsiders and modernisation. Against this we see it embrace the ethnographer's four small children. Sandra Wallman's account reveals the distortion to ordinary life caused by the intrusion of the anthropologist and the effect of informants observing her. Though the fieldwork happened more than forty years ago, the challenges of multi-vocality, the indeterminacy of `truth' and the layers of memory which comprise ethnography apply equally to many anthropological projects.