Short Abstract:

The lab explores the power of anthropological storytelling to move beyond space and across time drawing on the magic of ethnographic surprise.

Long Abstract:

We propose to build on a successful EASA2016 Lab (https://nomadit.co.uk/easa/easa2016/panels.php5?PanelID=4687), exploring storytelling as a communicative interaction arising from what Arendt called the 'subjective-in-between' (Michael Jackson 2013, Hannah Arendt 1958). While the 2016 Lab focused on the intersection between the political and ethical, this Lab highlights the role of less tangible aspects of surprise, humour, love, lust, bad intuition, good feelings, faith and reciprocal trust in ethnographic work. We seek stories touching on deep human connections to bridge different frames of time, space, and emotions, while extending a shared sense of accountability. How do we use, invent, and re-enact stories to find a sense of home and attachment in a world of increasing mobility and disengagement? Participants will expand anthropology's desire to develop sustained connections with close and distant lives through discussing, displaying and debating diverse methods, techniques and conceptualisations of earthy, real and 'alive ethnography' (Narayan 2012).

Participants can bring: (a) audio-visual material, photo/soundscapes/films, (b) ethnofiction, (re-)enactments of stories, and autoethnography (c) others formats of story-telling (music, sketches, artefacts and objects), to stimulate discussion on the multiple possibilities of storytelling for anthropology's creative impetus to know and celebrate human interaction. We welcome experimental, messy, and deeply engaging accounts and commit to a fun-loving Lab.

Those interested should send the conveners very short proposals listing materials you'll bring (photos, paper, pencils, video, sound recording equipment, etc) and other resources required. We also encourage unlisted participants to attend and share stories more spontaneously.