Poetry and Ethnography: Tracing Family Resemblances

The present research intends to examine the possible use of poetry in social anthropology, especially in the context of the writing of ethnography in sites of violence. More precisely, it problematises the binary of fact and fiction that have been kept apart through disciplinary frameworks of literature and social sciences. The act of writing the experience of the field is an act of representation whereby the voices of the informants capture the experience that constitutes the fact of the social world. However, the task of writing also involves the exercise of representation that involves creating the field for others to partake. It is in this context that the act of fabrication needs to be engaged with.