Paper short abstract:

Conducting ethnographic research in my hometown with friends and close kin, I used illustrations to process the emotional truths that my anthropological writing did not dare disclose. My illustrations came to haunt my scientific project, revealing both the joy and trauma promised by our discipline.

Paper long abstract:

I reflect in this paper on the relationship between anthropological writing and the more creative genres that haunt it, such as memoir, artwork, and field notes. I return to my own experience of conducting ethnographic research in my hometown of Chennai, India, with queer communities and activists who were both friends and close kin. As a doctoral student, trying to offer a critical and “sociological” analysis of these intimate relations was a traumatic and alienating experience of “failing” at anthropology. Faced with my own emotional blind spots, I turned to illustration which lent themselves to ambiguous meanings, overwhelming the identity of the anthropologist, exposing too much, and undermining the self-seriousness of the scientific project itself. In the years that followed, I developed a robust illustration practice that contains the emotional truth of my research experiences which could never be represented in papers and reports. In this presentation I present my drawings and the story they tell, and how they led me to seek scholarly community where we can reflect on the emotional labour involved in anthropological fieldwork, and how to re-evaluate this labour with the neo-liberalisation of academia. The dis-epistemology of my illustrations came to haunt my scientific project, revealing both the joy and trauma at the heart of my relationship with anthropology. Over time, illustrations have offered ways to connect with students, interlocutors, friends and colleagues in ways that have indeed, as Ben-Moshe suggests, allowed me to "be in community with like-minded people in an ethical manner” (2014).