"Personal Acquaintance": Essential Individuality and the Possibilities of Encounters.

Franca Tamisari reflects on the experience of entering her fieldsite as a way of exploring the different ways we can know other people and ourselves. Drawing on De Monticelli, Mauss, Fabian and others, she builds an ‘epistemology of the encounter’ that distinguishes between knowledge about the other accessible to an objective observer, and knowledge with the other which rests on the ‘essential individuality’ of a person. She examines how the process of personal acquaintance is crucial in all fieldwork interactions, and she considers the challenge that knowledge with the other poses for anthropology.