Munro Lecture - Dr Elizabeth Chin: 'Ethnography, making, and recursive practice'

"As a non-linear thinker and maker who has had a non-linear career I’m now at a juncture (having elected to leave my academic position for no paying job at al–for now) where I have the terrifying privilege of doing work only because I want to, and doing it in whatever way I want to do it (no institutional reviews to worry about). More crucially or truthfully, I can work in ways that feel right to me without having to crush what I’m doing into some container – a journal publication, for instance - into which it does not naturally fit with ease or grace. I’ve always been a maker, and a performer, and these practices and disciplines have always shaped my ethnographic work. 

Writing is only one way to produce ethnographic knowledge. Now, after a dozen years teaching in a design school, I have a much more finely developed appreciation for the ability of materials to speak, to hold ideas, or to be vehicles to express them.  So what I’m working with and through in this talk is the way in which, by shuttling back and forth between making, research, and writing, my ethnographic work is a recursive practice where bits of making lead to stretches of investigation and where writing gets worked out as I sew or cut. Having spent far too long imagining that the scholarly and the creative, the intellectual and the crafty are oppositional or –worse–utterly unrelated to each other, increasingly I find that they speak to each other (and me) in ways that make both ethnographic process and output rich and exciting. It starts, perhaps unsurprisingly, with a quilt – and that has lead me to an upcoming six months of research in Taiwan where I will be apprenticing with a Cheongsam master, studying with one of his proteges who is modernizing cheongsam-making for busy middle class professional women; prototyping new versions of specialized tools that are no longer being made (on the one hand with a feminist blacksmith, and on the other using photogrammetry and 3-d printing); picking apart tangled political economies of both garments and textiles as they materialize emergent global politics between China, Taiwan, and Africa. All of this is bound up with questions of family and ancestry, tradition and technology, then and now and, of course, the future."

Elizabeth Chin is an ethnographer with a varied practice that includes performance, sewing, and writing. She has published widely including in 'American Anthropologist, Feminist Anthropology, The Journal of Consumer Culture'.  She is author of 'Purchasing Power: Black Kids and American Consumer Culture' (Minnesota, 2001) and 'My Life With Things: The Consumer Diaries (Duke 2016). She is currently editor-in-chief of 'American Anthropologist', the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association.