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- Convenors:
-
Emma Tarlo
(Goldsmiths)
Alpa Shah (LSE)
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- Stream:
- Who Speaks and for Whom?
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 31 March, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
What are our responsibilities in writing as anthropologists in 2020 and beyond? How do we navigate the multiple conflicting pressures within academia and the volatile environment outside it? Who are our audiences? How do we reach them? If writing differently is sometimes risky, who incurs the risk?
Long Abstract:
What are our responsibilities in writing as anthropologists in 2020 and beyond? Why and how should we keep writing? Who are our audiences? How do we navigate the multiple conflicting pressures within and outside the academy? On the one hand, we are being asked to prove our public engagement and impact whilst often writing about things which raise complex issues regarding ethics and confidentiality. On the other hand, we are subject to different academic evaluation criteria for job applications, tenure, promotions and REF. What role do different forms of writing in anthropology play in an increasingly volatile landscape both within and outside academia? What, if anything, is distinctive about anthropological writing? Should it engage or merge with other forms of writing such as poetry; fiction; blogs; journalism; creative non-fiction? What are the consequences of writing in different genres and writing with and for different audiences? If such an enterprise is risky, who incurs the risks? What happens when anthropological knowledge takes on new forms, enters new spaces of circulation and becomes amplified, silenced or contested in unexpected ways? What should be the responsibilities of institutions and departments of anthropology in nurturing and protecting different forms of writing in the discipline? We invite those who have experience-based reflections on these issues to join our panel.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 31 March, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
I look back on the process of co-authoring a reciprocal ethnography with my friend Liria Hernández. Reflecting on the encounter between our reciprocal aims and the imperatives of academic anthropology, I argue for a way of writing ethnography that foregrounds doubt and the inevitability of failure.
Paper long abstract:
In my contribution, I reflect on the process of co-authoring a reciprocal ethnographic memoir with my friend, Liria Hernández, a book where we tell together our intertwined lives as Spanish women, street-seller and scholar, Roma and non-Roma. Liria had been my informant for twenty years until together we decided to devise a new way of working and she became my collaborator and co-author. In our monograph, we observe and attempt to define each other so that the traditional roles of anthropologist and informant are discarded. We also confront uncertainty, ambiguity and doubt—our difficulties in discerning paths and asserting truths, our disagreements with each other—and turn them into unstable foundations for our stories. The result is more than an experiment in ethnographic writing: it is an experiment in ethnographic being and knowing, one that has demanded that we construct our own reciprocal genre. It is the process of devising this genre that I examine here. Reflecting on the encounter between our reciprocal aims and the aesthetic and institutional imperatives of academic anthropology, I ask what makes a text ethnographic, what makes it reciprocal, and what makes it scholarly. I argue for a way of writing and teaching ethnography that foregrounds doubt and not just certainty, the inevitability of failure and not just the striving for authority and success. And I consider the advantages of an anthropology that takes as its starting point the fundamental ambiguity and groundlessness of human experience.
Paper short abstract:
Based on the writing of a monograph on the families of Palestinian political prisoners I ponder the responsibility that comes with positing an ethnography that is entrenched in an ethics of justice instead within an ethics of care? Might political anthropology be written in different genres?
Paper long abstract:
This paper starts from the premise that writing an anthropological monograph, a book, allows the anthropologist to both say and to show our interlocutors that ‘I heard you’. Meanwhile, because the genre of anthropology hones in on a particular way of crafting an anthropological text, the reading of the lives and words of our interlocutors is staked dually, at least: Will it be read as a contribution to a scholarly conversation, and, will that contribution be one in which our interlocutors can glean the lives they shared with us? What if they don’t? Or, what if they do but our peers say they don’t? Based on the writing of a monograph on the families of Palestinian political prisoners I ponder the responsibility that comes with positing an ethnography that is necessarily entrenched in an ethics of justice instead within an ethics of care? What are the limits of what we think of as political anthropology? Drawing on the work of moral philosopher Sandra Laugier I wish to suggest that the anthropological monograph, amongst and often deeply entwined with other forms of impact, is a way of making the lives of our interlocutors matter. Because we noticed what others might have missed. Overall, the paper offers some anthropological thoughts on the embedded morality of our concepts and what we allow ourselves to attend to in the lives of the people at the centre of our work.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores why anxiety and self-loathing about writing are so commonplace among we anthropologists. Drawing on my own experience of writing and depression, I suggest that our sometimes rotten troubles at our desks should be part of our discussions about anthropology's role in the world.
Paper long abstract:
We anthropologists have been much preoccupied with writing and its conundrums for several decades now. Our worthwhile yet almost ritualized agonising over matters of accountability, audience, and genre almost always revolves around our responsibilities to others. What do we owe the people we write about? Can our texts make some difference for a better world? But what about the price writing can exact from the anthropologist struggling to get that paper, dissertation, or book done? The effort to put words to page in something like a coherent fashion can lead down unpleasant pathways to crippling anxiety and worse. That not a few of us - from graduate students to tenured professors - have suffered bad, sometimes career-ending writing troubles is a public secret at once widely known and yet seldom openly discussed. I'll draw on my own experience of writing and depression to try to make some sense why bad feeling related to writing is so relatively commonplace in anthropology today. And I'll suggest that the complexities and sometime horrors of the writing craft should be part of our reckoning with anthropology's role in the world.
Paper short abstract:
The spaces of intellectual dissidence once provided by universities – promoting disinterested enquiry, encouraging critical analysis, challenging conventional wisdoms – seem ever more controlled. Drawing on writing ‘Nightmarch: Among India’s Revolutionary Guerrillas’ this piece asks, ‘Why write?’
Paper long abstract:
In many parts of the world, the spaces of intellectual dissidence once provided by universities – promoting disinterested enquiry, encouraging critical analysis, challenging conventional wisdoms – seem ever more controlled, if not squeezed out or shut down entirely. In a climate of attack on the dissidence of our intellect, it seems ever more important for scholars as writers to ask the questions: What is our purpose? Who is our reader? How do we navigate the different tensions that we face – the constrains of academic evaluation criteria versus the compulsions of writing for wider publics; scholarly fidelity versus activist commitments; writing as anthropologists versus producing journalism or fiction? In this piece, I hope to create a forum for reigniting anthropology’s relevance beyond the discipline while also keeping alive the space within the discipline for its dissident democratic potential by reflecting on my experiences of writing Nightmarch: Among India’s Revolutionary Guerrillas.