“Patchwork is a modality of both method and life,” for a “horizon in the future that is opaque.”
Anne Allison
29 April 2021
Published: 22 September 2021
Image by Anne Allison.
Patchwork ethnography feels of the times, but it’s always been a part of ethnography too. It means we must ask how we’re stitching the patches of interlocutors’ lives together. For Anne Allison, this was especially the case with her recent work on burials and the way life and death can become fragmented. It also became apparent working with students in the current context of the discipline. At the same time that the spatiality and temporality of the field is changing, becoming more or differently patchy, so is that of the academic job market. You might not even get a secure academic job, so you have to consider how you’re committing time for something that’s uncertain. What’s the purpose of a dissertation, especially if you’re not going into an academic job? The genre, production, output, theoretical argument, and methodology of anthropological works are all being rearranged because of the changing coordinates of life. We have to ask who is invested in hanging on to the old, and we have to be able to throw things away.
Anne Allison is a Professor at Duke University. anne.allison[at]duke.edu