The AMBER project seeks to, broadly speaking, mobilise amber as an ethnographic and affective subject to address the multiple and overlapping crises that we are facing today. Amber is emblematic of phenomena familiar to many trying to capture – through writing – the complexities of ethnographic work. The crises felt in many diverse settings today are at once social, political, and economic and often have ramifications on planetary scales. In other words, a key challenge we face as anthropologists working across diverse study areas and contexts is the task of clearly and effectively writing the multiscalar temporalities and spatialities that shape the social worlds with which we engage.
Prof. Bubandt has been at the forefront of studying climate change and environmental disruption, working with materials, objects, and temporalities that take us far away from the present moment (and the human). Such gatherings include coral reefs and spiritual worlds, colonial memories, and tourism fantasies. More recently, Prof. Bubandt has been reflecting on the idea of the “event” – particularly in the context of the official IUGS ruling on the Anthropocene, which rejected the concept as an official stratigraphical-geologic descriptor. What does it mean to think of the Anthropocene as event, rather than an epoch? And what does this position afford for anthropological research and writing?
Participation in the workshop
For this “Forms of Ethnography – Ethnography as Form” workshop, we seek to develop a conversation around how to write, ethnographically, about times, temporalities, and cosmo-temporalities that are not just beyond the present, but also beyond the human. These do not only include geological times, but can also include the ancestral past, the imagined future, and other-than-human temporalities.
The workshop is open to a maximum of 10 participants, which will be accepted on a first-come first-serve basis. Each participant is asked to pre-circulate (1 week in advance) a short text (1 page max) alongside one image. This can be a working draft or an excerpt of something published dealing with the broader themes of the workshop. We welcome experimental and collaborative writing. During the workshop we will discuss each other’s paper, with a focus on the very craft of writing.
Please also note that Prof. Bubandt will be giving a Department seminar talk on Wednesday, December 4. If you sign up for the workshop, we encourage you to attend the talk as well as it will dwell on similar issues to those that we will be discussing during the workshop.
For questions and singing up, please write to alessandro.rippa@sai.uio.no