How has the "business" of higher education affected the environment in which academics work? Who should be able to hold anthropologists ethically responsible—the research institution that sponsors the fieldwork or the community of people being studied? What happens when academics step out of the ivory tower and into the public realm? Why and how, do some anthropologists come undone by the challenges of the academy?

These are some of the questions posed in this innovative collection of essays. Accessibly written, ethnographically grounded, and theoretically informed, this volume faces contentious issues with honesty, integrity, and the occasional bout of humour. It touches on issues of ethics, teaching, the politics of peer review, and the ironies involved in attempting to make anthropology relevant in wider circles. It offers rare insight into the challenges and dilemmas that mark contemporary scholarship.

Anne Meneley is the co-editor, with Don Kulick, of Fat: The Anthropology of an Obsession (Tarcher Penguin, 2005). She is an associate professor of anthropology at Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario.

Anne Meneley's profile page

Donna J. Young is at the University of Toronto, Scarborough and has written on issues of memory, trauma, and personhood.

Donna Young's profile page

Auto-Ethnographies is a lively and generally appreciative collection of perspectives on the practices that constitute academic and professional anthropology. [...] For students of ethnography and the academic practice of anthropology, this collection offers a thoughtful set of reflections and 'conversations' on what is surely the most 'vocational' of disciplines.

<i>Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology</i>