A Possible Anthropology: Methods for Uneasy Times [Hardcover]

In a time of intense uncertainty, social strife, and ecological upheaval, what does it take to envision the world as it yet may be? The field of anthropology, Anand Pandian argues, has resources essential for this critical and imaginative task. Anthropology is no stranger to injustice and exploitation. Still, its methods can reveal unseen dimensions of the world at hand and radical experience as the seed of a humanity yet to come.A Possible Anthropologyis an ethnography of anthropologists at work: canonical figures like Bronislaw Malinowski and Claude Lévi-Strauss, ethnographic storytellers like Zora Neale Hurston and Ursula K. Le Guin, contemporary scholars like Jane Guyer and Michael Jackson, and artists and indigenous activists inspired by the field. In their company, Pandian explores the moral and political horizons of anthropological inquiry, the creative and transformative potential of an experimental practice.USConceptualizing anthropology as a mode of practical and transformative inquiry, Anand Pandian stages an ethnographic encounter with the field in an effort to grasp its impact on the world and its potential for addressing and offering solutions to the profound crises of the present.Anand Pandian teaches anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. His books includeReel World: An Anthropology of Creation and the coedited volumeCrumpled Paper Boat: Experiments in Ethnographic Writing, both also published by Duke University Press.Introduction. An Ethnographer among the Anthropologists  1
1. The World at Hand: Between Scientific and Literary Inquiry  15
2. A Method of Experience: Reading, Writing, Teaching, Fieldwork  44
3. For the Humanity Yet to Come: Politics, Art, Fiction, Ethnography  77
Coda. The Anthropologist as Critic  110
Acknowledgments  123
Notes  127
Bibliography  141
Index  155