Short Abstract

We invite contributions that consider moments of ethnographic excess in method and analysis, and that respond to the demand for creating an ethical universe at the margins of a collapsing late liberal order by experimenting with the lyric essay.

Long Abstract

How can we write anthropology in a time of sweeping transformations, when violent upheavals and uncertainty disrupt our ability to stay attuned to one another? And how is the lyric essay as a form itself a way of knowing ethnographically; in-between concept and image?

As put by Deborah Tall and Troy D’Agata, who coined the term in 1997 as editors of the literary journal Seneca Review — the lyric essay combines  an “allegiance to the actual with its passion for imaginative form” (Tall and D’Agata 1997, 7). It is a hybrid genre of writing combining elements of poetry, memoir, and essay, to explore ways of knowing beyond explanatory or narrative-based accounts. The lyric essay attentively inhabits, rather than overcomes, an impasse in affect and thought (Brunson forthcoming). 

In these violent and uncertain times, we contend that moments of ethnographic excess become particularly important because they demand that we participate in the work of “bringing an ethical universe into being” (Cohen 2007: 103). What might come to matter, or matter otherwise, when we allow ourselves to suspend the primacy of explanatory modes and to dwell in ethnographic excess and its disquieting potentials? And how might we do this while insisting on both public communicability and academic standards?

We invite contributions that consider moments of ethnographic excess in method and analysis, and that respond to the demand for creating an ethical universe at the margins of a collapsing late liberal order by experimenting with the lyric essay.

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