Repositioning without Capitulation.

June Nash's work spans 50 years of anthropology and reflects important transformations in geopolitics, economic globalization, anthropological theory, and the people and societies we study. Nash's creativity reveals itself as inherently oppositional, even when she has written within major research paradigms. I argue that if we use the concept of ‘repositioning’ to examine the life work of an anthropologist, the notion of stable schools, paradigms and languages of analysis falls away to reveal a much more dynamic picture of anthropological practice. Based on interviews in 2002, this article examines the ways in which Nash has geographically and institutionally repositioned her ethnographic studies as an engaged anthropologist. It traces the ways her intellectual agenda and commitment to social justice have informed her research and ethnographic writing. The article is concerned with the living dimension of ethnographic knowledge, with Nash's fashioning of oral narratives that remember and reconsider her earlier fieldwork - as her published texts inevitably become historical artifacts. In the process, the article poses the question: how can we make ethnographic writing a more dynamic way of representing the human cost of the currents of change we seek to understand? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]