Crumpled Paper Boat: Experiments in Ethnographic Writing
Anand Pandian teaches anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. His books include Reel World: An Anthropology of Creation, also published by Duke University Press.
Stuart McLean teaches anthropology at the University of Minnesota. His books include Fictionalizing Anthropology: Encounters and Fabulations at the Edge of the Human.
Anand Pandian teaches anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. His books include Reel World: An Anthropology of Creation, also published by Duke University Press.
Stuart McLean teaches anthropology at the University of Minnesota. His books include Fictionalizing Anthropology: Encounters and Fabulations at the Edge of the Human.
This essay is composed of a series of thought images or scenes that draw together historical and contemporary instances of sending and receiving “messages” in the Inuit communities of Nunavut, Canada. It is an experiment with textual montage that attempts to produce resonances between the different scenes presented and, at the same time, disrupts our sense of the linearity of time and our received notion of the “context” necessary for academic writing.
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