ClassInfo

This seminar puts together "contemporary" and "ethnography" in order to problematize the relation between the two terms. What is con-temporary and what does it mean to profess to recognize it as such? What is "ethnography" that it may take the qualifier "contemporary"? Might there be off-temporary ethnographies? By de-coupling "ethnography" from "contemporary," this seminar attempts to think ethnography as a genre of writing which problematizes time. Anchoring this approach for us will be Michel de Certeau's L'Invention du Quotidien (1980) or The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), which was instrumental in inaugurating the turn towards the "everyday" in ethnography writing. Much about this "turn" can be gleaned from the titular (mis)translation of "invention" as "practice." This translation prioritizes the "rhetorics of space" (topos) over the "rhetorics of time" (kairos) (B. Cassin). We will examine how these two rhetorics are worked out in the ethnographies by Veena Das, Kathleen Stewart, Eduardo Kohn, and Elizabeth Povinelli.