I am excited to be in Berlin today, to present a paper on minor ethnography at the prestigious Institutskolloquium of the Institute of European Ethnology at Humboldt University. This year the Institute is hosting a number of fascinating talks on how ethnography can do politics – or is already politics in itself. In my talk, I’ve tried to constitute researching and intervening in the politics of life at the margins as part of the same endeavour, which is minoritarian because it aims to unsettle from within. Ethnography is a way of going about it, because it’s intersubjective, provisional, incremental and collective. It is never really ‘done’, only experimented with. The presentation illustrates these points through an engagement with post-colonial and vitalist thinking, as well as through the illustration of a number of cases taken from my works.
In the evening, we will also screen my documentary on eviction and resistance, A Inceput Ploaia/It started raining, at the Carmah Berlin museum.
All of this is possible thanks to the generous invitation of Ignacio Farias and the excellent organising of Jens Adam – thanks to both!!