Abstract:

This brown bag explores the question: How should we use literature (and film) from/in our fieldsites in our research and writing? The relationship between anthropology and literature has been a complex one. Throughout the discipline's history anthropologists developed different ways of handling texts, some, for example, turned to fiction writing to depict their fields, others have hung around with their informants as they watched or read texts and learned about them through their interactions with these texts. In this brown bag we will propose other ways of approaching literary and visual texts while testing the boundaries of our discipline.