Crumpled Paper Boat

Crumpled Paper Boat is a book of experimental ventures in ethnographic writing, an exploration of the possibilities of a literary anthropology. These original essays from notable writers in the field blur the boundaries between ethnography and genres such as poetry, fiction, memoir, and cinema. They address topics as diverse as ritual expression in Cuba and madness in a Moroccan city, the HIV epidemic in South Africa and roadkill in suburban America. Essays alternate with methodological reflections on fundamental problems of writerly heritage, craft, and responsibility in anthropology. Crumpled Paper Boat engages writing as a creative process of encounter, a way of making and unmaking worlds, and a material practice no less participatory and dynamic than fieldwork itself. These talented writers show how inventive, appealing, and intellectually adventurous prose can allow us to enter more profoundly into the lives and worlds of others, breaking with conventional notions of representation and subjectivity. They argue that such experimentation is essential to anthropology's role in the contemporary world, and one of our most powerful means of engaging it.
Contributors. Daniella Gandolfo, Angela Garcia, Tobias Hecht, Michael Jackson, Adrie Kusserow, Stuart McLean, Todd Ramon Ochoa, Anand Pandian, Stefania Pandolfo, Lisa Stevenson, Kathleen Stewart

A School for Advanced Research Advanced Seminar

“"This is an outstanding volume to use as provocation, to reflect on one's own practice and history, as well as for teaching. I can see students becoming excited at the possibility of an anthropology that takes as its departure point the very hesitations and unknowns that we are schooled to suppress."”

"In a ‘post-truth’ world, where facts have become less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief, this publication is of timely importance. . . . It is a text that encourages the reader to embrace writing as a practice immanent to the world, rather than a detached reflection upon society and our place within it." - Fawzia Haeri Mazanderani (LSE Review of Books) “There is still much to learn about cultivating uncertainty, failure and collaboration in geographic writing and research, and this volume invites just this kind of casting off.” - Ursula Lang (Antipode) "This is an outstanding volume to use as provocation, to reflect on one’s own practice and history, as well as for teaching. I can see students becoming excited at the possibility of an anthropology that takes as its departure point the very hesitations and unknowns that we are schooled to suppress." - Paloma Gay y Blasco (Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute) "The volume challenges anthropological conventions on multiple fronts and provides both an energizing example and a refreshing reminder that powerful writing energizes our knowing and can bring anthropology out of its mostly self-imposed limits of speaking." - David Syring (Anthropology and Humanism) "The Paper Boat Collective . . . demonstrates that not only can ethnography survive, but by incorporating an aesthetic mode of uncertainty, vulnerability, and adventure, it is better equipped to connect with the violent storms and hopeful struggles of a complex and untidy world.… The sense of journey is palpable in the persistent exhortation to go beyond: beyond the tangible, beyond the human, beyond oneself, beyond the real." - Jason Danely (Anthropology Book Forum)

Anand Pandian teaches anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. His books include Reel World: An Anthropology of Creation, also published by Duke University Press.

Stuart McLean teaches anthropology at the University of Minnesota. His books include Fictionalizing Anthropology: Encounters and Fabulations at the Edge of the Human.

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