Ethnography: A Workshop on Radical Attention
23-26 October, 2026
Anthropology: An Art of Attention
Anthropology, I believe, is an art of attention. In this workshop, we learn primarily to think about, immerse ourselves in, and react to the world with utmost attention. As much attention as we can muster while thinking about war, climate, and the blooming of flowers in the spring. Located in the mountainous Palampur district of Himachal Pradesh, we look at mountains and each other and heaps of plastic waste and listen to the sound of gurgling stream water with an intention to be there in an absolute act of seeing, observing, and experiencing. We attempt to immerse ourselves in a total grasp of a moment. While we realize that this is impossible, we try to move our buzzing brains and phones away from the worries of daily existence and see the mundane and unique around us in a kind of equivalence. We, tentatively, call this seeing, being, speaking, writing practice, ethnography – a kind of radical, meditative attention. While imbibing this practice, we try to suspend judgment almost entirely, knowing that it is impossible. How do we talk about injustice and oppression without judgment? We sit with and wade through some of these questions in this workshop.
Structure
The workshop explains what ethnography is and what kinds of things it can be useful for. I will use the first two sessions to introduce ethnography as a research technique of anthropology. I will unpack what I like to call ‘a point of view about points of view.’ This discussion will depend on unpacking some previously distributed reading material that participants will have to come having read beforehand. The final session focuses on a small writing assignment where each participant will share their work with the rest of the group.
This workshop conducted over four days (see plan below) aims at:
Day 1 – Practices of seeing, being, and a bit of speaking as the art of attention.
Keywords: seeing, feeling, narrating, listening, power, representation.
Day 2 – Tasting two ethnographic texts—one in narrative, one in poetry. Close-reading the texts, discussing, and applying their insights to our contexts.
Keywords: fieldwork, journey, intimacy, suffering, abandonment, loss, witnessing.
Day 3 – Constructing research questions and visiting one’s ongoing, or currently nascent research through the ethnographic lens. Bringing to the forefront, the elements of mutual dialogue, ethics, situational sensitivity and understanding in furthering the work of activists and practitioners.
Keywords: activism, change, intervention, politics, justice, research.
Day 4 – Writing workshop.
Day 1
Reading: Annie Ernaux. A Girl’s Story (2016, excerpt)
Interview with anthropologist Webb Keane.
Morning: Lecture on ethnography and anthropology
Afternoon: Discussion on the following lines.
- What is attention?
- How does it help to negotiate?
- How does it help in our changemaking work?
- Why engage with ethnography?
- Anthropology, fiction, journalism, memoir, travelogue
Day 2
Readings:
Das, Veena. 2022. Slum Acts. Cambridge: Polity Press. Ch. 2.
Renato Rosaldo. The Day of Shelly’s Death: The Poetry and Ethnography of Grief. Duke UP, 2014. Full text.
- Why write about others’ lives?
- What is narrative? How is it constructed?
- Seeing is believing?
- Limits of the method.
- Ethics/Politics of representation
- How do Others affect us?
- Suffering
- Violence
- Limits of language
- How to live with witnessing suffering?
Evening film screening: Winter in Sokcho by Koya Kamura (2024).
Day 3
- Participants present their research questions/project
- Everyone comments on each presentation
- Feedback
- Note-taking practices
- Discussion of feasibility
- Practicalities of research
Afternoon
- Session on proposal and grant-writing skills (practical elements of ethnographic research).
Day 4
- Participants submit writeups on any one of the films or books read in the past three days (12000 words or less) by 6 am in the morning.
- Writing workshop for the rest of the day.
Facilitator Bio:
Atreyee Majumder is an anthropologist, poet, and writer. She is currently Dean, Academics, and an associate professor (Social Sciences) at the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru. She has published widely in academic and popular venues, including the Religions, Anthropology & Humanism; South Asian Multidisciplinary Academic Journal; Economic & Political Weekly; India Today; The Wire, 3AM Magazine, LSE Review of Books. Her first monograph, Time, Space, and Capital in India (Routledge, 2019), was an exploration of the social life of thwarted expectation amid post-industrial conditions in peri-urban West Bengal. Her first collection of poems, published in 2024, was titledThe Book of Blue. She is currently completing a nonfiction book, Love Among the Ruins. Her personal and ethnographic journey in and through the devotional tradition of Bhakti and across the Braj region of Uttar Pradesh is documented on the web-repository constellations.in.
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