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The Edge of Anthropology
keywords:
cultural politics
aesthetics
engagement
There has been growing interest in the craft of anthropology, perhaps a resurgence or resonances of earlier waves of aesthetic and ethical consideration. Most recently, we've seen the blossoming and subfield solidification of literary anthropology. Attention to textuality and writing has changed the discipline in far-reaching ways. It has enriched understandings of and capacities for narrating ordinary life and textures of experience. This roundtable builds upon the attention to craft to ask somewhat more explicitly political, critical, artistic, and methodological questions about what makes a work of anthropology "edgy." We consider such themes as formal experimentation in writing and other media, the anthropological study of harsh, disturbing, and dark realities, dangerous or controversial ethnographic projects, fieldworker involvement in illicit activity, the ordinary and ambiguous ethics of fieldwork, the gendering and queering of edge, and edges and edginess of activist anthropology and documentary and reportage genres. We critically query the rationales and payoffs of edge work and the problematic figure of intrepid ethnography. We also consider the intellectual and political potential of provocation, experimentation, and equivocation of method and genre for edgy anthropologies of historical and contemporary worlds. This roundtable is inherently committed to and exemplary of an anthropology centered on values of diversity, equality, and critiques of power. It focuses on anthropology's margins in multiple critical senses (representational, geographical, methodological) and examines the empowering uses of diverse representational approaches for incisively studying social power and cultural identities. The roundtable also brings together an incredibly diverse group of scholars who represent multiple kinds of social locations and identities (race/ethnicity, gender, sexuality, rank, institutional type).