Frames of Imagination: Bridging Worlds between Ethnography and Fiction

Abstract (English)

Anthropologists are story-tellers. Anthropologists make use of metaphors, allegories, and approximations to illustrate what has been witnessed, heard, felt in everyday encounters, and during one-time off synchronicities. Like fiction writers, ethnographers and anthropologists are haunted by their subjects of inquiry, unsettled by the multitude of ways to write reality into being. Words unite both, but also structures and perspectives, as they write about the intimate, the far and the near. Witnessing reality through ethnographic fieldwork, proximity and distance culminates in a written format merging theory and description, affective realities and retrospections. The attention to boundaries, that are constantly redrawn, between ethnography and fiction according to Kirin Narayan (1999) should not be dismissed. Many ethnographies have transformed into works of fiction, centering the ethnographic novel as an avenue from which writing reality is a project of humanization (Nyamnjoh, 2012, 2009), abundance and freedom.

Writing against a pervasive failure of imagination symptomatic of ideological naturalization, this panel asks: How can contesting imaginaries of the ‘real’ and the possible imbricated in our interlocutors’ worldmaking gesture towards other futures that are not yet here? While we acknowledge the posed challenge of the blurred lines between when imagination begins and reality ends (Laterza, 2007), we are intrigued by the relationship between reality and fiction as both a literary intervention and a correspondence with our interlocutors’ lives.

Beyond ethnographic novels, we wish to inquire about fiction, as a practice, in ethnographic writing when the tools of theorizing feel too slim and thin to capture contemporary lives characterised with disruptions, and dystopian configurations. From feminist approaches to the economy (Bear, Ho, Tsing and Yanagisako 2015) to theories of spectrality and hauntology (Varley and Varma, 2018; Stoler 2013), anthropologists have challenged over the past decades grand narratives of ideological domination by paying attention to people’s practices of worldmaking. In understanding capitalism as something fabricated through multiple forces and entanglements of life and its imperial legacies as apparitions that shadow contemporary politics, they’ve carved a space for us to dwell on the diffuse powers of the imagination. In light of such interventions, this panel considers fiction, in a Geertzian sense, to be something fashioned and something made (and that can henceforth be unmade), complicating the binary between fiction and reality.

We wish to invite anthropologists engaged in thinking or working through fiction in their practice, exploring questions of form as well as thinking with fiction as a practice they encounter through ethnography. We welcome submissions that grapple with the following questions: How do we write reality into fiction? In what ways does fiction turn into reality? (How) can fiction help us do anthropology otherwise? Can thinking with fiction in anthropology become a decolonial praxis?