Anthropology

Title: The Force of the Fragment

Presenters: Dr. Kernaghan and students from the Ethnographic Writing Seminar

Ethnographic writing can be many things: demanding, painful, tiring, but also exciting and contemplative. As an inherently mixed-genre, ethnographic writing remains an open-question in constant dialogue with the imperatives and desires of specific fieldwork moments and the empirical worlds the convey.

Writing from fieldwork contends with the tendency of words to totalize, domesticate, and assert mastery over the potency of the events that outpace them and shape ethnographic research in ways hard to grasp. If ethnographers strive to tell a story and welcome readers and listeners, then their writing is at its most compelling when it embraces the necessary slant of ethnographic perspectives and positionings but also when it affirms the disparate character of fieldwork experiences – what we call the force of the fragment.

We welcome you to a 2-act exploration and discussion on Ethnographic Writing. In Act 1, eleven participants present short texts in response to some place, person, event or after-image of fieldwork. In Act 2 we will open the floor for a free-form conversation on the task and challenges of ethnographic writing.