A forgetful ethnography: Memory, memoir, and brain injuries

Abstract

In this paper, I consider how one writes an ethnographic memoir about memories, time, and our fieldwork when our memories, or our interlocutors’ memories, are unreliable, inconsistent, false, or simply missing. Reflecting on a brain injury that resulted during fieldwork, my (dis)ordered memories, and the intense reliance on memory in sociocultural anthropology, I ask what writing would look like for anthropologists if we wrote with the forgetfulness? Imperceptible to most, and escaping clinical and lab evaluations, the e/affects of my brain injury have reshaped how I am in this world and shifted how I approach and understand the ethnographic project. I suggest that by writing with memory loss, by admitting there are gaps and fissures, by embracing the confusion and confabulations, and by acknowledging the paralleled unfinishedness of the ethnographic project, we work toward a reformed anthropology that no longer uncritically esteems memory as the basis for the anthropological project. In doing so, the paper contributes to what Marlovitz and Wolf-Meyer have called a “psychotic anthropology,” one that disrupts disciplinary ideas about minds, methods, and memoir and contributes to a productively unruly, and inclusive, ethnographic practice.