The Poetics of Ethnography

How, why and for whom exactly do we ‘research’ and write? Are we longing for connecting to what has been devoured by the responsibilities and hassles of our everyday? Or are we, in one way or the other, reproducing the very ‘stuff’ that we aim to disentangle from? Who has the epistemological authority to interpret our own experiences in the ‘field’ and why? Who sets the rules of writing creatively and to what extent should we take them seriously? How are we going to formulate the words to encompass the vivid experiences that we lived through? In this seminar, we explore together the politics of fieldwork and the poetics of anthropological writing.

This course is designed to be a blend between theory and practice. The theoretical aspect of this seminar relies on the work of authors such as Walter Benjamin, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Michael Jackson (the anthropologist not the singer ), Edward Said and several other authors who produced contemporary ethnographical texts. The assigned texts serve as an introduction to the discipline of anthropology in an attempt to break the supposedly ‘inevitable’ authority that abstracts thought has over fieldwork

This course is ideal for those who benefit the most from a collaborative learning environment that is premised on personal experience and initiative. objective is to give each other constructive feedback on our work, where we will all be writers, readers and critics of ethnography!

Whoever signs up for this course is required to conduct his/her own ethnographic fieldwork and textual research. At the beginning, students will be exposed to ethnography and anthropology through theories, which they will get to critically oversee through and after their fieldwork. This approach offers and encourages an authentic understanding of ethnography that manifests differently upon each scholar in the group.

This course is ideal for those who benefit the most from a collaborative learning environment that is premised on personal experience and initiative. That being said, fluidity in roles is one of this seminar’s essences, as we all will get to be writers, readers and critics of ethnography! We will commence with the assigned ethnographic texts and then with the work of each person in our group. The dynamics rely on constructive feedbacks that demonstrate our attempts to weave in, or simple negate, theory from the different experiential ethnographies.