Paper Short Abstract:

Building on our Arcana of Inquiry tarot reading performance at EASA2024, followed by a collaborative project inviting anthropologists to design cards, we will showcase the Ethnographic Tarot and explore how it can be used to enhance ethnographic practice and anthropological knowledge-making.

Paper Abstract:

The Ethnographic Tarot Project merges the ancient practice of tarot with contemporary anthropological inquiry, ethnographic practice, and restorative community building, creating a dynamic, multifaceted resource for thinking, teaching, uplifting each other, and playing. While not a game in the conventional sense, tarot—rich in symbolism, narrative, and multisensory engagement—invites an exploratory and interpretive ethos. This ethos disrupts the hierarchical boundaries of academic knowledge production, making room for collaborative, embodied, and reflexive modes of inquiry. Emerging from the Arcana of Inquiry performance at EASA2024, the Ethnographic Tarot reinterprets traditional tarot archetypes through ethnographic lenses. Each card offers an interpretive space where anthropology’s recurring dilemmas—power, precarity, relationality—are refracted through layered symbolism and narrative play.

In this presentation, we explore how the Ethnographic Tarot can be used as a pedagogical device to foster imaginative and interactive learning experiences. By introducing playful methodologies into teaching, the tarot encourages students to engage with anthropological concepts in ways that transcend textual analysis, inviting them to draw connections between abstract ideas and their sensory, lived realities.The act of drawing and interpreting a card becomes a moment of rupture and possibility, unsettling conventional epistemologies and foregrounding the relational, contingent nature of ethnographic knowledge. This project demonstrates how ludic methodologies invite anthropology into new forms of collective meaning-making, resisting the textual hegemony of the academy. The Ethnographic Tarot is not merely a teaching tool but a provocation: an invitation to rethink what it means to do anthropology in playful and transformative ways.