Crumpled Paper Boat: Experiments in Ethnographic Writing

265 Pages·2017·3.936 MB·English

by  Anand Pandian, Stuart McLean

CRUMPLED P APER B OAT
ABOUT S AR AD VANCED SEMINAR TITLE S
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C R U M P L E D
P A P E R
B O A T
EXPERIMENTS IN E THNOGRAPHIC WRITIN G
Anand Pandian and Stuart McLean, editors
A S CHOOL FOR AD VANCED RE SEARCH AD VANCED SEMINAR
duke university press D urham and London 2 017
© 2017 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of Amer i ca on acid- free paper ∞
Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan
Typeset in Quadraat by Westchester Publishing Ser vices
Library of Congress Cataloging- in-P ublication Data
Names: Pandian, Anand, editor. | McLean, Stuart (Stuart John), editor.
Title: Crumpled paper boat : experiments in ethnographic writing /
Anand Pandian and Stuart McLean, editors.
Other titles: School of American Research advanced seminar series.
Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2017. | Series: School
for Advanced Research Advanced Seminar | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers:
lccn 2016040907 (print)
lccn 2016041332 (ebook)
isbn 9780822363293 (hardcover : alk. paper)
isbn 9780822363408 (pbk. : alk. paper)
isbn 9780822373261 (e- book)
Subjects: lcsh: Ethnology— Authorship. | Anthropology—
Authorship. | Ethnology in lit er a ture. | Anthropology in lit er a ture.
Classification: lcc gn307.7.c78 2017 (print) | lcc gn307.7 (ebook) |
ddc 808.06/63—d c23
lc rec ord available at https:// lccn . loc . gov / 2016040907
Poems in Chapter 5, “Milk,” “Mud,” “Lost Boy,” “War
Metaphysics for a Sudanese Girl,” “The Unraveling Strangeness,”
“Bus Station, Kampala, Uganda,” “Skull Trees, South Sudan,”
and “Opening Day, Mukaya,” are by Adrie Kusserow, from Refuge.
Copyright © 2013 by Adrie Kusserow. Republished with the
permission of The Permissions Com pany, Inc., on behalf of boa
Editions, Ltd., www . boaeditions . org
Chapter 9 was originally published in Reel World from Duke
University Press. Copyright © 2015, Anand Pandian.
CONTENTS
ACKNOWL EDGMENTS v ii
Prologue 5. Anthropoetry
ANAND PANDIAN ADRIE KUSSEROW 71
AND STUART McLEAN 1
. . . . .
. . . . .
6. Poetry, Uncertainty,
Introduction: Archipelagos,
and Opacity
a Voyage in Writing
MICHAEL JACKSON 91
PAPER BOAT COLLECTIVE 11
. . . . .
. . . . .
7. Taʿbīr: Ethnography
1. The Ambivalent Archive
of the Imaginal
ANGELA GARCIA 29
STEFANIA PANDOLFO 94
. . . . .
. . . . .
2. Writing with Care
8. Writing through Intercessors
MICHAEL JACKSON 45
STUART MCLEAN 116
. . . . .
. . . . .
3. After the Fact:
9. Desire in Cinema
The Question of Fidelity in
ANAND PANDIAN 119
Ethnographic Writing
. . . . .
MICHAEL JACKSON 48
10. Flows and Interruptions,
. . . . .
or, So Much for Full Stops
4. Walking and Writing
STUART McLEAN 126
ANAND PANDIAN 68
. . . . .
. . . . .
11. Denial: A Visit in Four 17. Conversations
Ethnographic Fictions with a Hunter
TOBIAS HECHT 130 DANIELLA GANDOLFO 189
. . . . . . . . . .
12. Ethnography and Fiction 18. On Writing and Surviving
ANAND PANDIAN 145 LISA STEVENSON 207
. . . . . . . . . .
13. SEA 19. A Proper Message
STUART McLEAN 148 LISA STEVENSON 209
. . . . . . . . . .
14. Writing Other wise 20. Fidelity and Invention
LISA STEVENSON 168 ANGELA GARCIA 222
. . . . . . . . . .
15. Origami Conjecture Epilogue
for a Bembé KATHLEEN STEWART 225
TODD RAMÓN OCHOA 172
. . . . . BIBLIOGRAPHY 231
CONTRIBUTORS 241
16. Ethnographic Excess
INDEX 243
DANIELLA GANDOLFO AND
TODD RAMÓN OCHOA 185
. . . . .
vi CONTENTS
ACKNOWL EDGMENTS
This volume emerged from an Advanced Seminar at the School for Ad-
vanced Research (sar), Santa Fe, New Mexico, titled “Literary Anthropol-
ogy.” Convened by Anand Pandian and Stuart McLean, the seminar met
from Sunday, April 21, to Friday, April 25, 2013. We wish to thank the admin-
istration and staff of sar for their hospitality and unstinting support, most
especially Lynn Baca, James Brooks, Michael Brown, Jason Ordaz, Leslie
Shipman, and Nicole Taylor. We are deeply grateful to the participants in
the seminar, the contributors to this volume, for their generous spirit of col-
laboration and the won der of their words. We wish to express our gratitude
to Katie Stewart for her profound and illuminating afterword. Thanks are
also due to Dominic Boyer, Lawrence Cohen, Vincent Crapanzano, Val Dan-
iel, Elizabeth Davis, Bob Desjarlais, Denielle Elliott, Abou Farman, Brian
Goldstone, Cymene Howe, Tim Ingold, Eduardo Kohn, Jean Langford, Na-
tasha Myers, Kirin Narayan, Juan Obarrio, Beth Povinelli, Hugh Raffles, Pete
Skafish, Mick Taussig, Rane Willerslev, Bo ris Wiseman, and Helena Wulff,
who have provided much inspiration and encouragement over the years.
Parts of chapter 1 appear in an earlier form in “The Blue Years: An Ethnogra-
phy of a Prison Archive,” Cultural Anthropology 31, no. 4 (November 2016), and
parts of chapter 19 appeared in a diff er ent form in Lisa Stevenson’s book Life
beside Itself. Fin ally, we thank Duke University Press (in par tic u lar, Ken Wis-
soker) and two anonymous reviewers for their enthusiasm and support for
this book.
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Prologue
ANAND PANDIAN AND STUART McLEAN
An ethnography carries beings of one world into another one. This is a
promise that our writing shares with fiction, poetry, cinema, and most
other expressive arts. It is also a capacity we share with more literal modes
of transport: the flatbeds, planes, ships, and mobile devices that take us in
and out of the field, put our interlocutors in motion, and allow our stories
to travel from place to place on their own. When it comes to such move-
ments, we get caught up too often in ideas of origin and destination—w here
someone is coming from, where a text must go. The “how” of transporta-
tion is easily lost: the means of conveyance, the transformative potential of
movement, the techniques our works rely on in taking their readers else-
where. Writing is a transitive pro cess of communication, a material prac-
tice no less participatory and dynamic than ethnographic fieldwork itself.
This is a volume of experimental ventures in anthropological writing, at-
tempts to explore and extend both the medium and its basic modes of
displacement.
Our title is borrowed from a phrase in Paul Schmidt’s translation of “The
Drunken Boat,” a poem composed by Arthur Rimbaud in 1871. Here’s how
the poem ends:
If I long for a shore in Eu rope,
It’s a small pond, dark, cold, remote,
The odor of eve ning, and a child full of sorrow
Who stoops to launch a crumpled paper boat.
Washed in your languors, Sea, I cannot trace
The wake of tankers foaming through the cold,