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- Convenors:
-
Alisse Waterston
(City University of New York, John Jay College)
Eva van Roekel (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Peter Froggatt Centre (PFC), 02/026
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 27 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
The aim of the panel is to examine critically grounded experimental formats in crafting and communicating anthropological knowledge. We examine and exchange creative works grappling with real-world concerns that transform the discipline, inspire hope, and effect social change for the common good.
Long Abstract:
For decades, anthropologists have been participating in a series of interconnected debates centered on the politics of representation, "writing culture," calls to decolonize the discipline, and how to put anthropological knowledge to public use in the interest of a more just world. These discussions have led to the current wonderful moment when anthropologists are again paying careful attention to writing otherwise (Hannerz 2016) and engaging multimodal practices to make knowledge accessible that facilitates interaction with diverse audiences. The aim of this panel is to explore the new use of riveting and critically grounded formats for crafting and communicating anthropological knowledge, such as creative writing, painting, comix, (audio)visual ethnography, performance, and photography. The panel will feature concrete examples of creative works by junior and established scholars that are theoretically driven and grapple with real-world concerns with a focus on any aspect of the creative process from conception and creation to practicalities and the afterlife of the work. Underneath such efforts to transform the discipline and inspire hope and social action arise various questions, such as: How to creatively communicate topics that are painful and complex, requiring historical knowledge and ability to grasp abstract concepts? How to ethically convey the drama of the world in difficult circumstances while revealing spaces of resiliency, creativity, and hope? What is gained and what is lost in crafting works designed to stimulate, disturb and/or inspire? How to effect change in the discipline and its institutions to support experimental formats and efforts to communicate otherwise in anthropology?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 27 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
Writing is a key mode of communication in anthropology. Yet anthropological texts can be boring. With the recent call for clarity in anthropological writing, this paper explores concrete multimodal essays where images and sound in online texts is identified in terms of a creative anthropology.
Paper long abstract:
Writing is a key mode of communication in anthropology, both academically and to a wider audience. Yet anthropological texts can be boring and unreadable. Building on the recent call for clarity in anthropological writing, this paper explores concrete essays in multimodal anthropology focusing on the role of images and sound (audio files) in online texts. Two of the essays are by Petra Rethmann (2021) https://edgeeffects.net/sensorial-attunement/ and Helena Wulff (2021) https://www.otherwisemag.com/someone. The debate on text versus image goes a long way back, but has taken on new meanings with online publications. The point is that a variety of topics, not only on visuality, sound (or dance), become more credible by combining texts with new digital possibilities. As to the actual writing, anthropology has a lot to learn from creative writing techniques, in particular how to write a theoretically informed narrative with a nerve. This benefits not only the discipline’s knowledge production, but also public anthropology, and increases the discipline’s relevance in larger society. It has even been suggested that a creative anthropology is more accurate than traditional academic texts. In order to accomplish this shift there is an emerging demand for courses in writing accessible anthropology. They often include training in different anthropological writing genres, from creative nonfiction and memoir to journalism. The only caveat in the move towards creative anthropology in a multimodal spirit is that it tends to be confined to publications that are not included in citation indices. This may be a disadvantage for an academic career.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores efforts to foreground vivid ethnographic accounts for wider audiences through multimodal work in books and journals, and also discusses the challenges of telling historical stories in ways that can enfold contemporary audiences in the process of making meaning.
Paper long abstract:
Classroom text author Jerry Moore posed these questions to students of theory in 2004: “Should anthropological explanation be modeled on scientific theory building or on humanistic interpretation? Will anthropology simply divide into two camps?” It seems that instead of dividing, anthropology has managed to build a bigger tent. It’s a drafty one, perhaps, but one that aims to accommodate professional endeavors, settings, and skills ranging well beyond traditional academic practice. Multimodal anthropology in the 21st century can be compared to Tom Wolfe’s description of how journalists “seized the power” in the 1970s, adopting writing techniques formerly restricted to fiction and making them their own. Then as now, the results of genre bending and the means used to get there have sparked controversy and rethinking, followed by increasingly bolder experimentation. For anthropologists, structural and technological changes have combined with a shifting ethos, or in some cases driven it, blurring the boundaries of discipline and practice in productive ways. This paper pokes into drafty spaces where ethnographic innovation breathes most free, as understood from the perspective of a former journalist who currently edits efforts to foreground vivid ethnographic accounts for wider audiences through multimodal work in books and journals, and also grapples personally with the challenges of telling historical stories in ways that can enfold contemporary audiences in the process of making meaning.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the creative process behind transforming ethnographic notes into a creative story. Inspired by Ubuntu methodologies, I reflect on ‘Roots’ a short-story on the enjoyment and care of cooking and sharing food with forced migrant women in South Africa during the pandemic.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the creative process behind transforming ethnographic notes of the pandemics into a Ubuntu story. The aim here is to engage with elements that are essential to the ethnographic process, such as sensorial and spiritual experiences, that are often left out by mainstream academia. Inspired by Ubuntu storytelling, an African methodology that takes the art of storytelling as an interactive tool for critical knowledge, I explore how personal interconnections with interlocutors in my research lead to ‘Roots’: a short-story on how food works as refuge of joy and hope in the outset of the COVID19 pandemic. This story is based on my field notes within Food for Change, an online cooking project with forced migrant women from Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. The project, as well as the story, is centered in presenting alternative narratives on forced migrants’ experiences of the pandemic. While very real struggles are not overlooked, the focus here is on the women’s capacities to cultivate and share enjoyment and care, for themselves and their loved ones, through cooking and sharing food. The process of crafting a riveting Ubuntu story is then part of a dialectic process to honor the wisdoms of migrant communities manifested in non-verbal elements, such as flavors and smells, that have the potential to nourish a more reflexive and humble scholarship.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how collaborative film and exhibition making can contribute not only to communicating anthropological knowledge otherwise, but can fundamentally transform the ways in which we conduct anthropological research. It argues for multimodal translations across knowledge formations.
Paper long abstract:
In my anthropological research, I follow Trin T. Minh-ha (1992) in seeking to speak not about or for, but nearby my research partners. I do not pretend to write an all-encompassing account of the lives of people I encounter, but rather seek to set up research environments in which my research partners can equally contribute their research questions, agendas and methodologies. Being aware of my powerful disposition as white woman working in Western academia and museums and with initial research interests in mind, I set out to understand and, ideally, meet the needs and interests of my research partners. This has ended, for example, in a collaborative film project on the history and cultural heritage of African cosmopolitanism, transatlantic trade and cultural exchange in the Niger Delta, today’s Nigeria, and in a collaborative exhibition project on confronting the colonial pasts of collections from Namibia at the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin and on envisioning creative futures with them. In both cases, my research partners brought to bear a variety of forms of knowledge, ranging from curatorial and artistic skills to oral histories and embodied and performative knowledge. Such a multitude of forms of knowledge needs translation not only amongst themselves, but also with possible audiences. This paper discusses the challenges and benefits of collaboratively doing research on topics such as colonial contact and its legacies and designing creative ways of translating the research and its findings to a wider public. It argues for doing anthropology as a form of multimodal translation.
Paper short abstract:
This paper unearths the practice of collaboration between academic and non-academic illustrator. It demonstrates how to ethically convey the drama of the world of children who are stateless while revealing spaces of resiliency, creativity, and hope.
Paper long abstract:
Collaborating with illustrator Ben Thomas, we have embarked on a journey of taking the ethnographic written text and converting it into an ‘ethno-graphic’ novel. This piece presents the evolution of working with single images, organising single images into a sequence amplified with interview transcripts, to the creation of comic panels. Each sequence explores the qualities illustration can bring to ethnography: empathetic empathy, ethnographic anonymity, alternative modes of storytelling, and representing the intangible elements of participant’s everyday lives. Whilst this project is in-process, the potential of graphic anthropology, as an interdisciplinary activity, to aid the communication and analysis of ethnographic research beyond disciplinary boundaries offers new pathways for academic and empathetic exchange.
The creation of an ethno-graphic novel offers anthropologists an opportunity to discuss their research beyond the ethnographic text. Graphic anthropology must consider the ways in which images are curated, represent the lives of research participants and how stories are (re)told. This is not unique in anthropological practice. What is unique to graphic anthropology are the ways that an image can disrupt traditional preferences of the text - that is often laden with impenetrable language that only the trained can digest. The project I present here is an insight into the collaborative process that I have called 'retrospective (re)presentation': using the visual to offer alternative modes of (re)presentation to the written ethnographic text (Rumsby, 2020: 7).