Short Abstract:

In this session, we seek to explore the use of poetry in the field of anthropology. It is an invitation to defamiliarise yourself with what anthropology is and can be, exploring possible ways how the confluence of poetry and anthropology can affect the world of ideas and the world itself.

Long Abstract:

This is an invitation to explore poetry and its potential as a tool for worldbuilding, historically, theoretically and ethnographically. Anthropology’s credo of ‘making the familiar strange and the strange familiar’ traces its ancestry to Viktor Schlovsky’s paper published in 1917. In his ‘Art as technique’, Schlovsky argued for the use of art and poetry, to defamiliarise oneself with the world, to see the world afresh and as the result to live in it fully. Familiarity, Schklovsky has written, gobbles up existence: if we can’t remember our lives, are they even lived? This is precisely where poetry has much to contribute to the world of anthropology and beyond. By breaking up the familiarity with analytic prose, poetry can make the familiar anthropological concepts seem strange. In the new light, anthropological ideas may become both more visceral and accessible.

Boas once quipped ‘I’d rather have written a good poem than all the books…’, his students Mead, Sapir and Benedict have done just that. The trio has written over a thousand poems. While this early engagement with poetry has influenced contemporary anthropology, steering it towards sensuous, it is the decolonising and feminist school of anthropologists-performers including Dunham, Hurston and Ulysse whose work the audience is invited to explore more deeply. These anthropologists have engaged in performance ethnography, which follows the movement from performance as mimesis (reflection), to poiesis (construction) to kinesis (change). Change to both the way we engage with the world and how doing so may affect the world will be discussed.