Genre Bending (After Life: An Ethnographic Novel)

Drawing from Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer (2006), this article offers suggestions for reading ethnographies in a new way: with an eye toward learning how they were written and what literary feats they accomplished. In a time of blurred genres, the line between fiction and nonfiction has become increasingly indistinct and it is no longer so clear where ethnography is to be positioned. It is therefore important to reassess the possibilities and limits of ethnography as a literary genre if we are to understand the idiosyncrasies of its "art." [

Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society, 2007

A number of anthropologists are now engaging in a radical appropriation of literary formats in ethnographic production, though it is a relationship which still lacks systematic theorisation. This paper deals with a subset of these relations, namely anthropologists’ interest in the novel as a format for ethnography. An analysis of the ethnographic novel Madumo: a Man Bewitched (Ashforth 2000) demonstrates that the format allows for a sophisticated approach to the description of context-specific subjectivities, a multi-layered emphasis on reflexivity and an innovative manipulation of literary elements for the purposes of theory making. However, incorrect usage of direct introspection and the impossibility of establishing with certainty the relationship between text and reality can pose serious challenges to its success. These problems are not insurmountable and further experimentation with the ethnographic novel is likely to benefit the ethnographic enterprise and advance theoretical understanding in this under-researched area.

Cambridge Scholars, 2018

The volume invites the reader to join in the debate regarding subjectivity and self-reflection, as the means of understanding and engaging through story telling with the social and historical changes that currently take place in the world. It examines the symbiosis between anthropology and fiction. On the one hand, by looking at various ways in which the two field co-emerge in a fruitful manner, and, on the other, by re-examining their political, aesthetic, and social relevance to world history. Following the intellectual crisis of the 1970s, anthropology lost its ethnographic authority and vocation. However, because of this, the ethnographic scope has opened up, towards more subjective and self-reflexive forms of knowledge and representations, such as the crossing of the boundaries between autobiography and ethnographic writing. In addition to this, the volume returns to authorship, discussed in direct relation to readership and spectatorship, making a ground-breaking move towards the study of fictional texts and images as cultural, sociological, and political reflections of the time and place in which they were produced. In this way, the authors of the volume contribute to the widening of the ethnographic scope of contemporary anthropology. A number of the chapters were presented as papers in two conferences organised by the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, entitled "Arts and aesthetics in a globalising world" (2012), and at the University of Exeter, entitled "Symbiotic Anthropologies" (2015). Each chapter offers a unique method of working in the grey area between and beyond the categories of fiction and non-fiction, while creatively reflecting upon current methodological, ethical, and theoretical issues, in anthropology and cultural studies. This is an important book for undergraduate and post-graduate students of anthropology, cultural and media studies, art theory, and creative writing, as well as academic researchers in these fields. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introductory Note ...................................................................................................1 Towards an Anthropology of Fiction Michelangelo Paganopoulos Part I: Literature Chapter One...........................................................................................................20 Kant’s Lectures on Anthropology and the Rise of World Society Michelangelo Paganopoulos Chapter Two ..........................................................................................................47 A Bottle of Manchester United Chardonnay Keith Hart Chapter Three........................................................................................................73 Parallel Perspectives in Ethnography and Literature: Reflections from Assamese Literature Prarthana Saikia Chapter Four..........................................................................................................73 Beyond Ethnographic Surealism: Hauntology and Ethnography Carrie B. Clanton Chapter Five ..........................................................................................................97 The Working Day John Hutnyk Chapter Six ..........................................................................................................120 Multinational Banking Culture in India: Facts in Fiction Geetika Ranjan Chapter Seven .....................................................................................................130 Mario Lodi’s Educational Approach: Is this Relevant for Anthropology in the Twenty-First Century? Melania Calestani Part II: Film Chapter Eight.......................................................................................................146 Forest of Bliss: Un poème réaliste—On the Aesthetic Structure of a Poetical Documentarism Norbert M. Schmitz Chapter Nine........................................................................................................161 Notes from a Film: The Places from which We are Absent Marta Kucza Chapter Ten .........................................................................................................176 Sensorial Resonance as a Key Reading Tool into Migrants’ Experiences Monica Heintz Chapter Eleven....................................................................................................187 The Post-Socialist Aesthetics of Jia Zhang-ke and the DV Revolution Ishita Tiwary Chapter Twelve...................................................................................................196 Mapping the Rrise of Subversive Slave Consciousness in Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s The Last Supper Ira Sahasrabudhe Chapter Thirteen .................................................................................................210 The “Other” Within: Constructions of Disability in Popular Hindi Cinema Shubhangi Vaidya

J. Favreau and R.Patalano (Eds.) Shallow Pasts, Endless Horizons: 48th Annual Chacmool Conference Proceedings, 2017

In this paper Jane Holden Kelley's two Yaqui life-history monographs are compared and situated within the context of the anthropological life-history genre as a whole. The paper focuses on the question of how the anthropological author (as opposed to the biographical subject) conveys tacit ethnographic content: that is, information about a particular society or subculture which is necessary to know if the subject's perspective is to be intelligible to the reader, but which is not explicitly conveyed in the subject's own words. The circumstances by which Jane Kelley came to produce her two life-history monographs were different and she conveyed this tacit information differently in each case. It is noted that in certain respects these two works anticipated later methods in anthropology (including collaborative and dialogical ethnography), but were at the same time characterized by a distinctive punctiliousness when it came to working out the chronology and dating of events. This derived from her conviction that these two monographs were means of providing rare first-person insights into the events of the Yaqui uprising and diaspora.

American Ethnologist, 2014

Ethnography and fiction have long been in dialogue in their common endeavor to understand human life and through their shared foundation on writing. Recently, anthropologists and sociologists have expressed concern that the worlds they study might be depicted more compellingly, accurately, and profoundly by novelists or filmmakers than by social scientists. Discussing my work on the embodiment of history in South Africa and on urban policing in France in light of, respectively, J. M. Coetzee's novel The Life & Times of Michael K and David Simon's television series The Wire, I analyze their commonalities and singularities. Using Marcel Proust's meditation on life and suggesting the heuristic value of distinguishing true life from real lives, I propose, first, to differentiate horizontal and vertical approaches to lives and, second, to complicate the dichotomy associating ethnography with the former and fiction with the latter. This reflection, which borrows from Georges Perec's rumination on the puzzle-maker, can be read as a defense of ethnography against a certain prevailing pessimism. [ethnography, fiction, writing, life, imagination]

Þjóðarspegillin XIV Conference Publication, 2013

Ethnographic fieldwork consists of, roughly speaking, moving to an unfamiliar environment and experiencing what other people experience. By sharing everyday life with their interlocutors, ethnographers try to understand how people live and make sense of the world around them. In this paper I explain in which sense anthropological accounts may be conceived as metaphorical descriptions of the world, by the means of which anthropologists try making sense of the metaphorical descriptions of the world produced by their so-called informants. As well, I discuss the relational character of qualitative research and the role non-verbal information, time and processes of incorporation play in the acquisition of knowledge in fieldwork activity. Finally, I reflect on fiction as key-category in the production of knowledge in social sciences – where fiction is not deliberate invention but rather an act of giving shape to reality.

Anthropology & Humanism, 2021

Guided by Ruth Behar's provocation to explore how ethnography was born out of the writings of novelists and poets and building on a special issue of Anthropology and Humanism on the art of ethnography published in 2007, I explore the histories, potentials, and boundaries of ethnography as a genre and craft. Relying on narrative theory as a resource that can enrich ethnography, I provide a close reading of several ethnographies, focusing on issues of character, time, and plot. I argue that a focus on narrative helps ethnographers put in conversation multiple selves' shifting roles in ethnography. Narrative provides tools to put in dynamic dialogue these different selves, animate our texts, and write more accessible and enjoyable ethnographies. On another level, consulting with narrative theory is a reminder to claim all our ancestors and take pride in ethnography as a queer genre whose strength lies in its openings and porous boundaries.

2018

This volume invites the reader to join in with the recent focus on subjectivity and self-reflection, as the means of understanding and engaging with the social and historical changes in the world through storytelling. It examines the symbiosis between anthropology and fiction, on the one hand, by looking at various ways in which the two fields co-emerge in a fruitful manner, and, on the other, by re-examining their political, aesthetic, and social relevance to world history. Following the intellectual crisis of the 1970s, anthropology has been criticized for losing its ethnographic authority and vocation. However, as a consequence of this, ethnographic scope has opened towards more subjective and self-reflexive forms of knowledge and representations, such as the crossing of the boundaries between autobiography and ethnography. The collection of essays re-introduces the importance of authorship in relationship to readership, making a ground-breaking move towards the study of fictiona...

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2017