I resisted starting a blog for years. It has always been very difficult for me to write short things. That is why I have published little in newspapers. After almost half a century dedicating myself to social anthropology, which is my profession, the posts offered me a new possibility that now, when I am in my 75th year of life, I want to project in a new communicative environment.
This environment is inevitably personal, wanting to break with the rigidities of academic communication but without giving it up completely. It is a space that does not force me into a narrative structure like the academic one, and that allows me a degree of personal freedom.
This blog thing is curious. The great Jean Baptiste Esquirol (1772-1840) spoke, in a report to a minister in 1818, of whether he had only written for himself. My desire is for this space to be a miscellaneous space between writing and what is sound or visual. But it would seem like a trap to hide my professional biases from the potential reader. Those of my profession are by nature nosy. In academic treatises they call it “wild ethnography”, but if thirty years of experience are worth anything, it is to offer you a free look at the world from which the things that interest me have been and are born.
I resisted starting a blog for years. It has always been very difficult for me to write short things. That is why I have published little in newspapers. After almost half a century dedicating myself to social anthropology, which is my profession, the posts offered me a new possibility that now, when I am in my 75th year of life, I want to project in a new communicative environment.
This environment is inevitably personal, wanting to break with the rigidities of academic communication but without giving it up completely. It is a space that does not force me into a narrative structure like the academic one, and that allows me a degree of personal freedom.
This blog thing is curious. The great Jean Baptiste Esquirol (1772-1840) spoke, in a report to a minister in 1818, of whether he had only written for himself. My desire is for this space to be a miscellaneous space between writing and what is sound or visual. But it would seem like a trap to hide my professional biases from the potential reader. Those of my profession are by nature nosy. In academic treatises they call it “wild ethnography”, but if thirty years of experience are worth anything, it is to offer you a free look at the world from which the things that interest me have been and are born.
