Pandian, Anand & Stuart McLean (eds). Crumpled paper boat:experiments in ethnographic writing. vi, 252 pp., illus., bibliogr. Durham, N.C.:Duke Univ. Press, 2017. ￡21.99 (paper)

摘要

In very practical ways, this important volume edited by Anand Pandian and Stuart McLean demonstrates that the ethnographic imagination can gain much by approaching the world through existential orientations more usually associated with poetry, memoir, travelogue, and the novel. What we learn is not that ethnography is fiction, but that these other genres deliver truth because they can bring us close to fundamental aspects of the human condition. These ways of creating, and indeed of being, reveal realities that are best 'described through metaphor and simile' (p. 89); so they enable ethnographers to confront experiential complexities that we usually avoid. Ethnography has traditionally looked away from the intractable in its pursuit of academic authority and prestige; it is time to work out how to convey this intractability with fidelity.