Introduction to theme issue Otherwise: Ethnography, Form, Change Introduction au numéro thématique Autrement : ethnographie, forme, changement

Why a theme issue on ethnography and form? Why think about form at all? For many years anthropologists, especially politically oriented anthropologists, have been suspicious of questions of genre, narrative, and form. Consider, for example, the fervent debate that swirled around Michael Taussig’s (1986) form-shifting ethnography Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man. In tracing the violent excess of colonialism and the promise of healing among Indigenous women and men in Columbia, Taussig (1986) draws on the cinematic aesthetics of early Soviet directors Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein, who sought to disrupt habitual ways of seeing, as well as surrealist techniques of juxtaposition and montage. In transposing forms that emerged in the visual realm to narrative and writing, Taussig sought to convey the terror-ridden charges of living in and with violence. Much lauded today, then reviewers called Taussig’s approach “lapidary,” “capricious,” or “untidy.” At best, form, and especially narrative form, was seen as epiphenomenal to the true purpose of ethnographic labour: critiquing power, exposing the real. Since then, a once-dismissive attitude to considerations of aesthetic and narrative forms has clearly changed. In tackling the supposed naïveté of a mimetic realism that assumes that our senses provide us with direct and transparent access to the world, and that documentation and reportage only entail observable data (Willerslev and Suhr 2013), anthropologists have worked hard to make space for insights, experiences, and affects that spill beyond such mimetic borders (McLean 2017; Narayan 2012; Pandian 2019). Kathleen Stewart (2007) and Lisa Stevenson (2014), for example, have taken their cue from Walter Benjamin’s imagistic and montage-like writing to make palpable the (often traumatic) fragmentations of political and everyday life. Recently, the Crumpled Paper Boat Collective (2017) has employed an essayistic form in which writing is not closed but open-ended and responsive to the feelings, perceptions, thinking, and writing of others. Anthropologists situated at the intersection of history and anthropology, too, have started to think creatively about form. David Scott (2017) has recently drawn on the epistolary form to open up a space for hospitable communication with deceased friends and interlocutors, and Gary Wilder (2015) makes use of a conceptual parallelism to show how decolonial and critical-humanist thought have shaped each other. The emergence of creative digital platforms has made possible the relational and interactive design of the feral atlas (Tsing, Deger, Saxena, and Zhou 2021) that brings together science and in-situ analyses, poetry, art, politics, and maps. The ethnographic novels of Ella Deloria (1988), Zora Neale Hurston (1935, 1984), and others are finally finding their rightful place on syllabi. Autobiography and memoir (Behar 1996), life histories (Cruikshank, Sidney, Smith, and Ned 1992), blogging (Stoller 2018), poetry (Rosaldo 2013; Kusserow 2013), and the photo essay have all begun to matter. One reason anthropologists used to be suspicious of inquiries into form was because form was purely seen as an aesthetic issue. Closely connected to narrativity and genre, form seemed to privilege shape, image, style, tone, voice, and trope over content and meaning. Even recently scholars have continued to argue that an emphasis on form risks being a recipe for ahistoricism and political quietism (Lesjak 2013). Art critic Hal Foster (2012), for example, has remarked that attention to form detracts us from paying attention to the politically critical work of interrogating, defamiliarizing, and demystifying. In tracing scholarly interest in form and modes of affect back to the politics of the Bush administration that bullied scholars by suppressing oppositional thought, Foster concludes that our moment in time is not an opportune moment to go supposedly post-critical. In insisting on the necessity of critique in bleak times, Foster is …