Why can the anthropologist be a writer but not an author? This essay reflects on the possibility of conveying anthropological knowledge through creative writing while reconsidering ethnographical authorship and its audience.

The research material is a fiction written by myself to evoke a particular structure of feeling bound to a specific location, contemporary Berlin. The story is not told, however, from the perspective of an ethnographer who masters expert knowledge, but from the partial view of a protagonist that appears as a lost, hopeless, and vulnerable figure.

This anthropological fiction invites us to reconsider the boundary between academic knowledge production and creative writing, rising along questions about evidence, representation and how our research could reach a general audience.

Keywords: ethnographic writing, ethnological fiction, writing otherwise, storytelling, contemporary alienation.

“Anthropologists and storytellers are cousins, certainly family. We both create narratives, make use of the self as an instrument of knowing, and share the same fertile ground of events.” Pg. 2.

“Everything starts with a sense of being constrained by the forms present in academic writing, refusing to reduce all our material to analytical clarity.” Pg. 2.

“We are not talking of making up our data, but of bringing ethnographic insights and anthropological analysis into fictional writing.” Pg. 11.

“Experiments with writing invoke other ways to practicing anthropology… allowing new possibilities for expressing knowledge to spring up.” Pg. 17