Paper short abstract:

This paper is based on a research project on public anthropology in Greece focused on narrative experimentation with stand-up comedy and alternative publishing with handmade books (cartoneras). I discuss the transformative potential, for anthropology/ists, of experimenting with genres and formats.

Paper long abstract:

The research project "Anthrobombing: Narrative Experimentations for the Design of a Public Anthropology Platform" was conceived as a way to explore how anthropology as a mode of problematizing one's place in the world and relations with others, its epistemology and politics, that is, could be introduced to non-academic publics. Since academic writing is highly specialized and difficult for non-anthropologists to access, our team decided to foreground experimentation with alternative narrative genres, through the design and carrying out of interventions in non-academic social spaces. In this paper, I provide a roadmap to these experimentations that centers on how the affordances of the two narrative forms we chose (stand-up comedy, cartoneras publication) were crucial in shaping our interaction with the respective audiences.

The embodied experience of performing and publishing in an "anthropological way" outside of spaces of academic communication led to insights about the potential of humor, multimodal forms and performance for anthropology, as well as about the hierarchies of knowledge production; to questions like "who is anthropology for" and "what makes knowledge anthropological", and an emergent concern for becoming-with publics.

This research was co-financed by Greece and the European Union (European Social Fund- ESF) through the Operational Programme "Human Resources Development, Education and Lifelong Learning 2014-2020" in the context of the project "Anthrobombing: narrative experimentation for the design of a public anthropology platform" (MIS code 5048954)