Ethnography Beyond Anthropology
Deadline for submissions: April 1, 2010
Altérités, edited by: Phillip Rousseau and Kiven Strohm
This issue of Altérités aims to address recent efforts to reconfigure the ethnographic in anthropology and across its manifold uses and questionings within other academic fields and among contemporary social and cultural practices. While recent years have been particularly fertile with respect to the revaluation of the place, role and form of the ethnographic, these reflections have tended to focus on developments solely within anthropology. Our goal is to address the problem of the ethnographic beyond this disciplinary framework. Three lines of thought are particularly apt for laying the groundwork for the reinsertion of the ethnographic within a broader context:
1. To address the changes that have affected ethnographic work in recent years and how these reconfigurations are part of the anthropological field (i.e., the rise of the importance of collaboration, as well as other more specific conceptualizations such as the para-ethnographic and the "collaboratory", etc.).
2. To illustrate and consider the various borrowings and uses by other disciplines and social practices of the ethnographic. While art practice and business marketing seem particularly amenable to such methodological borrowing, political science and even the military equally draw on the ethnographic as a means to an end. It is necessary, therefore, to explore the role and place of the "ethnographic" in non-anthropological contexts.
3. To confront recent epistemological reformulations that seem unique to anthropology with reflections from other disciplines and fields. The relationship between researcher and informant is at the heart of any attempt to reconfigure the ethnographic (including the problem of representation of one by the other), hence the importance given to such concepts as collaboration, participation, intervention, intersubjectivity, communication, etc.. If these concepts are at the heart of attempts to overhaul contemporary ethnography within anthropology, they also seem to be a focus that can be found outside of it. In art and advertising, for example, relational art or "collaborative marketing" are also attempts at a convergence between two poles traditionally perceived as being separate and distinct (artist/spectator, transmitter/receiver, etc.). However, the attempt to minimize such distances recalls recent anthropological efforts to bridge the gap between researcher and informant. Are these non-anthropological reconfigurations comparable to recent developments in anthropology and, if so, how? Do such efforts have something to contribute to anthropology or is there need for caution?
While the first line of thought seeks to reinvigorate an epistemological debate within anthropology, the final two are intended as an open invitation to non-anthropologists to place similar reflections from diverse fields side by side. The juxtaposition of these three lines of thought will allow us to establish an account of the ethnographic that we hope will be, if not exhaustive, at least expanded. Ideally, this juxtaposition will lead to a better understanding of current disciplinary predicaments by comparing the epistemological and methodological upheavals unique to anthropology in the light of an overflowing contemporaneity.
(Click HERE to download a PDF version of the call for papers.)
Please send an electronic copy of your text and abstracts to comite (AT) alterites.ca and alterites (AT) umontreal.ca.
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