Abstract
This chapter argues that a key contribution of digital humanities to the field of anthropology lies in the generation of imaginative “texts” (artifacts, collages, stories) akin to the field interlocutors’ experiences and narratives. This premise entails new knowledge practices in digitally mediated anthropology and the consideration of unorthodox propositions of navigation through ethnographic evidence. Situated at the intersection of ethnographic, feminist and media studies interrogations, the chapter also seeks to resist the established formats of academic and ethnographic writing (lecture, paper, book) and provide alternative spaces for the conceptual and affective problematization of surrogacy. It also addresses the polyphonic economies of knowledge as they unfold in the twenty-first century and presents a set of ethnographic and theoretical observations that may guide the process of multimodal writing. In illuminating the generative possibilities of digital writing, it outlines the empirically grounded proposition that fictionalized multimodal stories are more efficacious than standard academic text for the anthropological grasp of surrogacy practices and for propelling the future trajectories of the discipline.
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Notes
- 1.
During a lucid dream the dreamer is aware that they are dreaming and may gain some amount of control over the dream characters, narrative, or environment.
- 2.
New practices tend to bring new ethical conundrums. Most guidelines on research ethics in the digital age focus on the gathering and analyzing of information and on the intensification of old issues, such as easy plagiarism, without paying adequate attention to representation ethics (cf. Dobrick et al. 2017). However, the questions of ethics are tied to methodological innovations in order to safeguard ethical responsibility, democratization of research, empowerment, and the relationship between research and the academy, highlighting the ways in which innovation is about reflexivity as well as new research techniques.
- 3.
Born-digital material is digital material that has never existed in any other form than digital. This includes all types of material on digital media such as CD-ROMs, DVDs, or the internet and the web. This type of material is not the product of transformation from analogue to digital and it therefore lacks an “original” to go back to (Brügger 2016).
- 4.
Wood (2011) provides a concise account of the attempts that anthropologists have made to incorporate hypertext into their work since the late 1990s, including the groundbreaking ethnographic work entitled Yanomamo Interactive, Roderick Coover’s commercially available project entitled Cultures in Webs, Jay Ruby’s attempt to demonstrate the interplay between image, sound, and moving picture in multivocal hypertextual forum formats and many more.
- 5.
New media art and criticism connect (Ricardo 2009), duel on new genres such as geopoetics, transmodality, and screen writing as practice-based modalities for digital literature and poetics. In some cases, as in the example of the middle east, digital literature has an obvious political function, more so than in other cases (Lenze 2019).
- 6.
Text here refers to any cultural product (aural, visual, tactile, or otherwise) open to interpretation.
- 7.
The phenomenology of pregnancy, a recurring theme in the fieldwork and ethnographies of surrogacy, coincides with this project’s epistemological positionality. Phenomenology is viewed throughout the fieldwork and write-up as a possible means to circumvent modernity’s ontological and epistemological dualism and relates to this research in three ways: 1) in acknowledging the phenomenological experience of surrogate reality and the differently filtered consciousness of our women interlocutors in the field, 2) the inevitably partial phenomenological perception of surrogacy as experienced by the ethnographers, 3) with respect to the fresh phenomenological import of digital reading as applied on the ethnographic “text”/story.
- 8.
It is interesting that this particular informant’s elderly mother was cared for by a Georgian woman and her twin children were conceived by Georgian women as well. Pursuing the strand of the distribution of care by immigrant women in Greece, according to ethnic origin and nationality, would be a fascinating research project; however, it fell out of the scope of the present one.
- 9.
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Apostolidou, A. (2022). When Fictional Ethnography Goes Digital. In: Reproducing Fictional Ethnographies. Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13425-8_4
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