Intimate Engagements of the Public Kind (Critical ENGAGEMENTS WITH CULTURAL Intimacy) (Report‪)‬

Public Intimacy: An Introduction Michael Herzfeld introduced the notion of "cultural intimacy" (2005 [1997]) into our scholarly vocabulary as an analytical and operational tool in doing and writing ethnography. It is yet another one of Herzfeld's inventive couplings, which points to an expansive space of intellectual imagination and playful ethnographic praxis. If I am to simplify this vast territory of meaning that Herzfeld extracts from the two otherwise ubiquitous words, cultural intimacy is a "collective space" (2005:x), within which "broadly shared cultural engagement" (2005:3) happens between various cultural and social segments within that collectivity, as well as between the anthropologist and the peoples under study. In Herzfeldian terms, the anthropologist "intrudes" (2005:x) into this collective space, the world of insiders, to partake in common sociality and join the familiar of culture. Intrusion is a movement inward to the domain of the intimate and encourages the disclosure of "sources of external embarrassment" (2005:3), cultural tensions, fault lines, and fissures--thus affording the anthropologist an expansive space of ethnography, fraught with "productive discomfort" (Herzfeld 1992:16) and inventive possibilities for analysis and narration.