Since its founding three years ago, MFEA has opened up a new seam of research. With this year’s symposium focusing on the ‘graphy’ in ethnography, it has fresh questions to ask of writing. Suppose when it came to thinking about style and audience the ethnographer was not alone? The stimulus here is the role that Elsie Masson played in Bronislaw Malinowski’s literary presentation. This in turn leads to further questions about gender and divisions of labor. Various turns in the discipline have critiqued and reviewed both the ethnographic method and its written products. In particular, gender has emerged to the fore through the probings of postmodern, postcolonial, feminist and queer anthropologists (sometimes overlapping) who have promoted a more self-critical and reflexive ethnography in order to problematize the position of the ethnographer. This stance has dovetailed with efforts, on the one hand, to develop a more participatory writing genre to include the voices of participants, and on the other hand and more recently, a public-focused ethnography that would have greater circulation beyond the academic sphere.
This symposium aims to investigate and discuss the multiple connections between ethnography, ethnographic writing and gender in both history of anthropology and contemporary anthropology, underlining problems, potentialities, stereotypes, experiments, continuities, changes and challenges.
Program
Thursday, 19 September
Bozen Campus Room F.06
9:00-9:30 Welcome / Greetings from Authorities
9:30-10:00 Introduction
10:00-10:45 Contribution from the Malinowski grandchildren: Rebecca Stuart Malinowska, Lucy Ulrich, Patrick Burke
10:45-11:45 To be confirmed
Coffee Break 11:45-12:00
12:00-13:00 Can There be Feminist Anthropology in Turkey?: Histories, Continuities and (Dis)connections of Gender and Genre
Hande Birkalan-Gedik, Johann – Wolfgang Goethe Universität, Frankfurt am Main
13:00-14:30 Lunch Break
14:30-15:30 Elsie Masson’s writings between literature, journalism and ethnographical sensibility
Daniela Salvucci, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano
15:30-16:30 Devising a reciprocal genre: ambiguity, doubt, and the purposes of ethnography
Paloma Gay y Blasco, University of St. Andrews
16:30-16:45 Coffee Break
16:45-17:30 Interim Discussion, Discussant Marilyn Strathern, Cambridge University
Friday, 20 September
Bozen Campus, Room F.06
9:00-10:00 Not I but He. Writing {as} Longing
Omar Kasmani, Freie Universität, Berlin
10:00-11:00 Towards an anthropological appreciation of silence as an ethnographic key
Nigel Rapport, University of St. Andrews
11:00-11:15 Coffee Break
11:15-13:00 Final Discussion, Discussant Marilyn Strathern
13:00-14:30 Lunch Break
14:30- Excursion to Oberbozen
18:30 Group Dinner in Oberbozen
