Paul Stoller

In June 2019, Paul Stoller taught a four-day workshop entitled "Weaving the World: Writing Evocative Ethnographies" at the University of Bern. The technique of “weaving the world”, according to Stoller, denotes the seamless linkage of ethnographic description to social analysis. The evocation of space/place, character, and dialogue are strategies that ethnographic writers can use to ensure that readers come to know a place or the people who live in a particular place. During the course of the workshop, Paul Stoller outlined ethnographic writing (and blogging) practices and revealed some of the “tricks of the trade”. He encouraged the participants to begin to “weave the world” by writing descriptions of places as well as dialogues and character portraits, and to then combine them into a short ethnographic essay that captured in prose the texture of those elements as they are expressed during an event.

A new cathegory is proposed, as an extension of
Habermas Theory of Communicative Action, for the sake of
understanding the pre-reflexive expressive phaenomena,
mostly about those stemmed from the usage of perception
artifacs which may conduct to non-individualized
subjectivation states. Some cases are pointed as prone to
be clarified through that approach: intercultural first
contacts experiences; performatic artistic installations; and
the utterances of ciber-cinematic documentaries.