#ethnographic writing

[thegeekanthropologist]

Choosing Your Own Adventure: My Life as a Teenage Dungeon Master and How it Prepared Me to Become an Anthropologist

Choosing Your Own Adventure: My Life as a Teenage Dungeon Master and How it Prepared Me to Become an Anthropologist

By Holly Walters

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[ethnographic-urbanism-blog]

[E]very imagined authenticity presupposes, and is produced by a present circumstance of felt inauthenticity. But Williams's treatment suggests that such projections need not be consistently located in the past; or, what amounts to the same thing, that the 'genuine' elements of cultural life need not be repetitiously encoded as fragile, threatened or transient. This sense of pervasive social fragmentation, of a constant disruption of 'natural' relations, is characteristic of a subjectivity Williams loosely connects with city life and with romanticism. The self, cut loose from viable collective ties, is an identity in search of wholeness, having internalized loss and embarked on an endless search for authenticity. Wholeness by definition becomes a thing of the past (rural, primitive, childlike) accessible only as a fiction, grasped from a stance of incomplete involvement...And this is approximately the temporal distance that many conventional ethnographies assume when they describe a passing reality, 'traditional' life, in the present tense.

Clifford, James. “On Ethnographic Allegory.” Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Clifford, James and George E. Marcus, eds. (1986) p. 114.

[thegeekanthropologist]

So You Want to Write for The Geek Anthropologist?

So You Want to Write for The Geek Anthropologist?

You ever see those quippy article titles–the perfect combination of academic punnery and inside theory humor–pop up on your newsfeed, only to click through and discover that your elevated expectations of incisive analysis and critique aren’t met? In the midst of conference presentations, journal article rewrites (more substantive revisions from Reviewer 3?!), and grant applications, do you find…

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[ethnographic-urbanism-blog]

"The (re)making of social coherence in the city is only partly generated through its material infrastructure. To a much greater extent, it is shaped through dynamic processes of a more immaterial, invisible, relational nature between the various actors that inhabit, use and produce the city through the collusion of both their bodies and their minds. Bodies, and the relational networks they generate in the urban space, form the locus of much of the 'invisible modalities of urban action.'"

-Filip de Boeck, Kinshasa: Tales of the Invisible City (2004)

[putawaytheglobe]

Life's raw materials can be shaped into absorbing materials that might not be labeled ethnography but are still ethnographically informed.

Kirin Narayan, Alive in the writing

[putawaytheglobe]

But society is not a text that communicates itself to the skilled reader. It is people who speak. And the ultimate meaning of what they say does not reside in society—society is the cultural condition in which speakers act and are acted upon. [To say otherwise] is the privileged position of someone who does not, and can not afford not to, engage in a genuine dialogue with those he or she once lived with and now writes about.

Talal Asad, "The concept of cultural translation in British social anthropology"

[putawaytheglobe]

In the introduction to Writing Culture (1986), James Clifford laments the absence of feminism in the book: "Feminism had not contributed much to the theoretical analysis of ethnographies as texts. ... It had not produced either unconventional forms of writing or a developed reflection on ethnographic textuality as such" (20-21).

Those of you who know more about these debates and reflections than I do, is this claim still true today? Or could you point me toward some feminist scholars who have developed these debates since the 1980s?

[putawaytheglobe]

Poetics don't license texts without order. The challenge is to put things together inventively, to order them in a way that reorders readers' experience.

Fortun, Kim. “Foreword to the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition.” In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, edited by James Clifford and George E. Marcus