| Title | Introduction |
|---|---|
| Subtitle | Here Be Monsters |
| Contributor | Yasmine Musharbash(author) |
| Ilana Gershon(author) | |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.53288/0361.1.02 |
| Landing page | https://punctumbooks.com/titles/living-with-monsters-ethnographic-fiction-about-real-monsters/ |
| License | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ |
| Copyright | Yasmine Musharbash, Ilana Gershon |
| Publisher | punctum books |
| Published on | 2023-05-11 |
| Long abstract | This introduction addresses how anthropological scholarship on monsters poses distinct epistemological challenges not shared by other humanities scholarship on monsters. Anthropologists are living among and writing about fieldwork interlocutors who believe that monstrous beings exist, when often their colleagues do not, placing anthropologists in an ontological bind. By turning to ethnographic fiction, anthropologists are able to explore a different scholarly stance towards this quandary. We discuss the ways in which monsters often are liminal beings both in time and in place. We outline how thinking alongside monsters allows a vantage point for criticizing contemporaneous power relationships and the lingering effects of colonialisms. |
| Page range | pp. 15–29 |
| Print length | 15 pages |
| Language | English (Original) |
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Yasmine Musharbash is an Associate Professor and Head of Discipline (Anthropology) at the School of Archaeology & Anthropology at the Australian National University. She conducts participant, observation-based research with Warlpiri people in Central Australia with a particular focus on relations: among Warlpiri people on the one hand and between them and non-Indigenous people, fauna, flora, the elements, and monsters, on the other. She is the author of Yuendumu Everyday Contemporary Life in Remote Aboriginal Australia (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2008) and of a number of co-edited volumes, including two about monsters that she co-edited with Geir Henning Presterudstuen: Monster Anthropology in Australasia and Beyond (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and Monster Anthropology: Ethnographic Explorations of Transforming Social Worlds through Monsters (Routledge, 2020).
Ilana Gershon is a professor of anthropology at Rice University and studies how people use new media to accomplish complicated social tasks such as breaking up with lovers and hiring new employees. She has published books such as The Breakup 2.0: Disconnecting over New Media (Cornell University Press, 2010) and Down and Out in the New Economy: How People Find (or Don’t Find) Work Today (University of Chicago Press, 2017), and has edited two other volumes of ethnographic fiction on work and animals. She has been a fellow at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, at Notre Dame’s Institute for Advanced Study and is currently a visiting professor at the University of Helsinki. She will soon publish a book analyzing how working in person during a pandemic sheds light on the ways workplaces function as private governments.