Anthropology 316EX - Special Topics in Anthropology: 'Craft and Composition: Experimental Ethnography'

Above all else, ethnography is a form of writing. Its formal properties range widely, running a gamut that transects art criticism, speculative fiction, travel writing, memoir, science writing, and poetry. But the genre's soul is an imaginative experiment: transporting one world into another. Ethnographers, then, share practices of representation and evocation with the arts. This course introduces the craft of imaginative ethnography, paying central attention to writing that refuses the (social) sciences' stodgy conventions. We will reflect on experiential shapes of reading -- what does ethnography do for or to us? -- as we recompose ourselves as a collective of ethnographic experimentalists.

Prereq: 8 credits in Anthropology.