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Conklin, Harold C., 2007, Fine Description: Ethnographic and Linguistic Essays.

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Conklin, Harold C., 2007, Fine Description: Ethnographic and Linguistic Essays. Joel Kuipers and Ray McDermott, eds., New Haven: Yale Southeast Asian Studies, Monograph 56, xvii + p. 511. ISBN 0-938692-85-2.

For many of us who were graduate students in anthropology in the 1960s, Hal Conklin was a figure of inspiration. Conklin's study of Hanunoo agriculture and his essays on ethnobiology were, for some of us, a revelation, disclosing the unexpected riches that can come from painstaking observation, careful attention to everyday speech, and to the categories by which people relate to, and act upon, their social and material surroundings.

The last four decades have not been kind to Conklin's legacy. None of his essays are currently in print and only Hanunoo Agriculture, published a half century ago, is still available, in a reprint edition. The editors, Joel Kuipers and Ray McDermott, both former students of Conklin, and the Yale University Southeast Asian Studies Program are therefore to be commended for republishing here a significant body of Conklin's writing, for the time has certainly come to reintroduce graduate students to the work of this remarkable anthropologist.

Fine Description is arranged in eight topical sections, each containing from one to five essays, or extracts from longer works, preceded in each case by a brief editorial introduction written by a different author. In order of appearance, these are: 1) "Fieldwork" (Clifford Geertz), 2)"Ethnographic Knowledge" (Myrdene Anderson), 3) "Lexicographical Approach" (Harold Scheffler), 4) "Kinds of Color" (Charles O. Frake), 5) "The World of Plants" (Eugene Hunn), 6) "Modes of Communication" (Deli Hymes), 7) "Orientation" (Nicole Revel), and 8) "Agriculture" (Michael Dove). A ninth section, "The Early Years," reprints from the Annual Review of Anthropology Conklin's autobiographical reminiscences, "Language, culture, and environment: My early years," and concludes with a CV and complete bibliography of Conklin's writings.

Frake in his foreword, Kuipers and McDermott in their introduction, and most of the other contributors attempt with varying degrees of success to identify Conklin's place in anthropology. At the outset Frake acknowledges the difficulty. Conklin was never a polemicist, his essays rarely confront theoretical debates directly, and, by and large, his ethnography, as Frake puts it, lacks "narrative style." In the end, Frake settles on "fine description" (p. xiv) as the defining characteristic of Conklin's work. The editors are more explicit and in their introduction they briefly sketch what they see as Conklin's principal contributions to the eight topical areas into which...

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