His books include Reel World: An Anthropology of Creation and the coedited volume Crumpled Paper Boat: Experiments in Ethnographic Writing, both also published by Duke University Press. As such, the readings and exercises will help you cultivate various modes of attention, participation, and observation gain experience writing fieldnotes and producing other forms of documentation analyze the fieldwork material that you gather/produce grapple with the ethics of accountability and representation and experiment with forms of writing that might be adequate to the task of weaving analysis, narration, and theorization into a genre recognizable as “ethnography. Anand Pandian teaches anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. The goal is to explore various ways of attuning yourself to the demands-pragmatic, conceptual, political, aesthetic, to name a few-of producing knowledge that is grounded in experience. Building on three fieldwork exercises, each student will design and implement a small fieldwork project based on observation and interviewing, which will be the basis of an analytical case study. These original essays from notable writers in the field blur the boundaries between ethnography and genres such as poetry, fiction, memoir, and cinema. In tandem with the readings and our class discussions, you will complete a number of exercises aimed at familiarizing yourself with some of the practical and epistemological issues raised by fieldwork and helping you develop what we might think of as ethnographic sensibilities. Crumpled Paper Boat is a book of experimental ventures in ethnographic writing, an exploration of the possibilities of a literary anthropology. You will alternate between readings that explicitly address methods for conducting fieldwork and those that enact and theorize the transformation of that research into writing. This graduate seminar is an invitation to think through what it takes to do and write ethnography.

Anand pandian a possible anthropology