The Graphic Anthropology Field School (GrAFs) is a project launched by Expeditions, an independent network of scholars in the human sciences. For 11 years, we have been holding in Gozo (Malta) a summer school for anthropologists and social scientists, focused on the practice of fieldwork. Far away from sleepy lectures in gloomy classrooms, our aim has always been to …
The Incurable-Image: Curating Post-Mexican Film and Media Arts
by Tarek Elhaik
Edinburgh University Press, 2016, 198 pages
Tarek Elhaik’s first book—an ethnographic examination of multi-media artists, curators, and fellow anthropologists loosely centered around Mexico City—is a bold, highly theoretical effort to revive something of the experimental ethos of Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986) and the works that …
Is ethnographic research analogous to a gold mine project, an extractive industry that makes a social and material landscape knowable, and hence governable? Is knowledge construction a veil for narrative extraction, where knowledge is a commodity to be reassembled for productive gain? I ask these questions as a way to tease out the tensions experienced between me and my collaborators …
In The Anti-Witch, Jeanne Favret-Saada revisits fieldwork she first described in her classic Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage in a more reflective mode and conceptually ambitious mode. Made available as an open-access monograph by HAU Books, this translation introduces English-language readers to Favret-Saada’s encounters with the “dewitcher” Madame Flora and outlines the foundations for an anthropology …
In this short essay, I will try to convince you of the importance of earthworms in thinking about politics.
If this sounds like an argument, that is because it is. I first organized the materials in this essay to make a case. They were part of a public thesis ‘defense’ that took place in the small country of the …
Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India
Rutgers University Press, 2015, 216 pages
An Indian coffee shop franchise advertises their practice of hiring deaf baristas – “silent brewmasters” – to work their espresso machines. A Bangalore tech company boasts that it hires “physically challenged” workers only (118-121). Meanwhile, deaf adults in Bangalore complain that adult education at …