Event overview
'Uncertainty and failure at the edges of ethnography'- with Paloma Gay Y Blasco, Department of Social Anthropology, University of St. Andrews
Part of Anthropology's Autumn term seminar series.
In this paper, I reflect on the process of co-authoring a reciprocal ethnography with my friend, Liria Hernández, a book where we tell together our intertwined lives as Spanish women, street-seller and scholar, Roma and non-Roma. Liria had been my informant for twenty years until together we decided to devise a new way of working and she became my collaborator and co-author. In our monograph, we observe and attempt to define each other so that the traditional roles of anthropologist and informant are questioned. We also confront uncertainty, ambiguity and doubt, and turn them into unstable foundations for our stories. The result is more than an experiment in ethnographic writing: it is an experiment in ethnographic knowing and being, one that has demanded that we construct our own reciprocal genre.
It is the process of devising this genre that I examine in my paper. Reflecting on the encounter between our reciprocal aims and the aesthetic and institutional imperatives of academic anthropology, I argue for a way of writing and teaching ethnography that foregrounds doubt and not just certainty, the inevitability of failure and not just the striving for authority and success. And I consider the advantages and disadvantages of an anthropology that takes as its starting point the fundamental groundlessness of human experience.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 9 Oct 2019 | 4:00pm - 6:00pm |
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