Paper short abstract:

Drawing on trail anthropology and theatre artist Constantin Stanislavski’s notion of the “through line of action,” this paper tracks the feeling of awkwardness I experienced in a dramatic storytelling project in Poland in an attempt to re-envision anthropology as a radical epistemic politics.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on trail anthropology and twentieth-century Russian theatre artist Constantin Stanislavski's notion of the "through line of action," this paper tracks the feeling of awkwardness I experienced in an imaginative ethnography project I conducted in collaboration with a Polish Roma woman, Randia, in an attempt to re-envision anthropology as an engaged, collaborative, and interventionist practice. I follow the trail, its offshoots, and connections to arrive at what I call an "awkward anthropology," which entails a radical and imaginative epistemic politics. Reflecting on how dramatic storytelling employed as a practice of political art-making and an ethnographic research methodology shifted reflexivity from the purview of the anthropologist to that of the interlocutor, the paper proposes an imaginative and creative praxis as a starting point for reinventing political and applied anthropology.