Ethnographic Writing

3-0-9 units · Graduate

Introduces students to strategies in ethnographic writing. Readings highlight examples of different ethnographic writing techniques — such as life histories, broken line narratives, memoir, relational ethnography, object histories, landscape writing, and other strategies in literary anthropology and speculative fiction since the time of Zora Neale Hurston — to offer insights into the literary craft and narrative structures at work behind the scenes of a given text. Paired with an example of a different ethnographic form, students undertake a related writing experiment. Preference to HASTS students; open to others with permission of instructor.