ABOUT THIS BOOK

Crumpled Paper Boat is a book of experimental ventures in ethnographic writing, an exploration of the possibilities of a literary anthropology. These original essays from notable writers in the field blur the boundaries between ethnography and genres such as poetry, fiction, memoir, and cinema. They address topics as diverse as ritual expression in Cuba and madness in a Moroccan city, the HIV epidemic in South Africa and roadkill in suburban America. Essays alternate with methodological reflections on fundamental problems of writerly heritage, craft, and responsibility in anthropology. Crumpled Paper Boat engages writing as a creative process of encounter, a way of making and unmaking worlds, and a material practice no less participatory and dynamic than fieldwork itself. These talented writers show how inventive, appealing, and intellectually adventurous prose can allow us to enter more profoundly into the lives and worlds of others, breaking with conventional notions of representation and subjectivity. They argue that such experimentation is essential to anthropology’s role in the contemporary world, and one of our most powerful means of engaging it.

Contributors. Daniella Gandolfo, Angela Garcia, Tobias Hecht, Michael Jackson, Adrie Kusserow, Stuart McLean, Todd Ramón Ochoa, Anand Pandian, Stefania Pandolfo, Lisa Stevenson, Kathleen Stewart

A School for Advanced Research Advanced Seminar

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Anand Pandian teaches anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. His books include Reel World: An Anthropology of Creation, also published by Duke University Press.

Stuart McLean teaches anthropology at the University of Minnesota. His books include Fictionalizing Anthropology: Encounters and Fabulations at the Edge of the Human.

REVIEWS

"In a ‘post-truth’ world, where facts have become less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief, this publication is of timely importance. . . . It is a text that encourages the reader to embrace writing as a practice immanent to the world, rather than a detached reflection upon society and our place within it."

-- Fawzia Haeri Mazanderani LSE Review of Books

“There is still much to learn about cultivating uncertainty, failure and collaboration in geographic writing and research, and this volume invites just this kind of casting off.”

-- Ursula Lang Antipode

"This is an outstanding volume to use as provocation, to reflect on one’s own practice and history, as well as for teaching. I can see students becoming excited at the possibility of an anthropology that takes as its departure point the very hesitations and unknowns that we are schooled to suppress."

-- Paloma Gay y Blasco Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

"The volume challenges anthropological conventions on multiple fronts and provides both an energizing example and a refreshing reminder that powerful writing energizes our knowing and can bring anthropology out of its mostly self-imposed limits of speaking."

-- David Syring Anthropology and Humanism

"The Paper Boat Collective . . . demonstrates that not only can ethnography survive, but by incorporating an aesthetic mode of uncertainty, vulnerability, and adventure, it is better equipped to connect with the violent storms and hopeful struggles of a complex and untidy world.… The sense of journey is palpable in the persistent exhortation to go beyond: beyond the tangible, beyond the human, beyond oneself, beyond the real."

-- Jason Danely Anthropology Book Forum

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments vii
Prologue / Anand Pandian and Stuart McLean 1
Introduction: Archipelagos, a Voyage in Writing / Paper Boat Collective 11
1. The Ambivalent Archive / Angela Garcia 29
2. Writing with Care / Michael Jackson 45
3. After the Fact: The Question of Fidelity in Ethnographic Writing / Michael Jackson 48
4. Walking and Writing / Anand Pandian 68
5. Anthropoetry / Adrie Kusserow 71
6. Poetry, Uncertainty, and Opacity / Michael Jackson 91
7. Ta'bir: Ethnography of the Imaginal / Stefania Pandolfo 94
8. Writing through Intercessors / Stuart McLean 116
9. Desire in Cinema / Anand Pandian 119
10. Flows and Interruptions, or, So Much for Full Stops / Stuart McLean 126
11. Denial: A Visit in Four Ethnographic Fictions / Tobias Hecht 130
12. Ethnography and Fiction / Anand Pandian 145
13. SEA / Stuart McLean 148
14. Writing Otherwise / Lisa Stevenson 168
15. Origami Conjecture for a Bembé / Todd Ramón Ochoa 172
16. Ethnographic Excess / Daniella Gandolfo and Todd Ramón Ochoa 185
17. Conversations with a Hunter / Daniella Gandolfo 189
18. On Writing and Surviving / Lisa Stevenson 207
19. A Proper Message / Lisa Stevenson 209
20. Fidelity and Invention / Angela Garcia 222
Epilogue / Kathleen Stewart 225
Bibliography 231
Contributors 241
Index 243

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