I swear I saw this

Michael Taussig is an anthropologist who writes beautifully. His research has focused on tin mines and the cocaine trade in South America. He writes about, and evokes through his writing, the combined sense of hopelessness and grit that keeps people keeping on even though their lives are incoherently dominated by capitalist forces out of their control.

He writes
"This is a drawing in my notebook of some people I saw lying down at the entrance to a freeway tunnel in Medellin in July 2006. There were even people lying in the pitchblack tunnel. It was 1:30 in the afternoon.
  The sides of the freeway before you enter the tunnel are high there, like a canyon, and there is not much room between the cars and the clifflike walls. "Why do they choose this place?" I asked the driver. "Because it's warm in the tunnel" he replied. Medellin is the city of eternal spring, famous for its annual flower festival and entrepreneurial energy.
  I saw a man and woman. At least I think she was a woman and he was a man. And she was sewing the man into a white nylon bag, the sort of bag peasants use to hold potatoes or corn, tied over the back of a burro making its way doggedly to market. Craning my neck I saw all this in the three seconds or less it took my taxi to speed past. I made a note in my notebook. Underneath in red pencil I later wrote:

I SWEAR I SAW THIS

 

See Taussig talk at the Tate here

 

Anthropologists have so much to share.

How is anthropology relevant to story-making

Stories are the processes through which society (open-ended, ongoing activity) becomes culture (activity contextualised to specific circumstances). Stories are meaningful selections - deliberate or subconscious choices by people who construct and share their worldview by connecting certain elements in specific ways.

As accounts of experiences both real and imagined, stories are repeated and represented in different formats to help people make sense. Anthropologists tell and use stories to help make sense of how people in communities make sense.

The anthropology of storytelling recognises how all this sense-making through narrative is both an implement in the anthropologist’s toolbox and a practice employed by people in communities across the world.

Anthropological contribution to discussions about the 'future of storytelling' would help contextualise how stories are shaped, how they come deeply rooted in specific cultural contexts. It is critical to make these roots explicit // picture squealing, squirming story creature with long tentacles pulled out of writing mass below //