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Paper short abstract

I will address questions of fictionalization while examining some of the techniques I have used in my ethnographic work on Indian Muslim online activists. I try to show that a concept of "the problem" is crucial to coming to terms with the type and degree of fictionalization required.

Paper long abstract

This presentation will address questions of fictionalization while examining some of the techniques I have used in my ethnographic work on Indian Muslim online activists. The lives of my interlocutors are hyper-securitized; they face legal persecution, and their public personas are often drawn into moral outrage. In my work I have been exploring various ways of turning individuals into characters and altering some texts that may lead to easy identification of individuals. In this presentation, I will critically revisit some of the techniques I have used in my past ethnographic writing to unearth the epistemic and ethical problems surrounding fictionality and referentiality in the attempt to represent the lives of my precariously situated interlocutors in India. If anthropological work takes on degrees of—or islands of—fictionality, I think it is important to ask, in the spirit of the writing culture debate, what kind of genre conventions and tropes mediate the fictionalized parts of what could be called a "patchwork referentiality." Is there a risk of convincing myself a bit too much of the narrative arc I aim to establish through the power of fictional worlding? In other words, how does fictionalization lend a certain worlding effect to our moral parables, dramas, thrillers, and detective stories?

To approach an answer to such questions, I will conceptualize the "problem" as a way to come to terms with the type and degree of fictionalization required.