“We need to decenter our own authorship.”
Alvaro Jarrín
31 March 2021
Published: 13 May 2021
Image by M.C. Escher.
From Alvaro Jarrín’s recent work with gender nonconforming activists in Brazil, what’s clear and pressing is that interlucutors are theorists themselves. We need to normalize ethnography as a polyvocal process of working with interlocutors, and we need more guidance on how to actually do this kind of collaboration responsibly. This collaboration might scale distances and temporalities that anthropology hasn’t always been able to accommodate openly. Such polyvocal production necessarily speaks to ethnographic knowledge as patchwork or palimpsest. This defies the notion of the anthropologist as the sole producer of knowledge. It demands a more vulnerable, limited, and humble anthropology that works against the ethnographic authority we’re still often invested in despite our several-decades-long critique of it. Ultimately, this opens up new avenues for political engagement as anthropologists; anthropology is not merely a science.
Alvaro Jarrín is an Associate Professor at the College of the Holy Cross. ajarrin[at]holycross.edu