Ethnography rarely begins with wholes. It begins with fragments—with traces, residues, and partial connections that resist synthesis. Within European Ethnology, experimental ethnography takes this incompleteness as a starting point for thinking otherwise. It asks how attention to what is broken, mislabeled, or unstable can generate new forms of knowledge, relation, and care.
This teaching cluster explores the fragmentary, the speculative, and the erroneous as both ethnographic conditions and creative methods. Students learn to assemble incomplete materials, attend to what remains, and experiment with classification systems that expose the limits of order. Fragmentation and misclassification are treated not as failures but as modes of inquiry—ways of sensing and composing worlds that are always in the process of becoming.
The cluster brings together philosophy, anthropology, and the arts to question how ethnographic knowledge is collected, labeled, and displayed. Through reading, fieldwork, and studio practice, students engage the forms and politics of description: fragment, specimen, label, list, and cabinet. Each gesture becomes both analytic and ethical—a proposition for working with the unfinished, the uncertain, and the more-than-human.
Students encounter key thinkers—Adorno, Benjamin, Foucault, Haraway, Strathern, Tsing, and Viveiros de Castro—alongside contemporary ethnographers who transform attention, error, and care into inventive methods. They move fluidly across writing, drawing, and curatorial composition, cultivating a sensitivity to how ethnographic knowledge is simultaneously made and unmade.
The cluster comprises two courses that articulate a gradual progression in theoretical and methodological scope:
- Fragments and Fragmentography (MA) introduces students to fragmentation as an ethnographic condition and a way of knowing. It emphasizes observation, collection, and composition through incomplete traces—residues, voices, smells, and ruins—approached as living materials that demand curatorial attention rather than closure. Students develop fragmentaria that combine text, image, and object to think through incompleteness as an ethical and epistemological stance.
- Taxonomy, Misclassification, and the Poetics of Error (MA) extends this work into the realm of classification and display. It examines how acts of naming, ordering, and misclassifying shape ethnographic imagination and curatorial reasoning. Misclassification becomes a speculative technique that reveals the politics and pleasures of ordering life, inviting students to design counter-taxonomies, poetic labels, and living cabinets that refuse mastery while embracing uncertainty.
Together, these courses trace a movement from collecting to classifying, from attending to fragments to experimenting with the systems that hold—or fail to hold—them together. They offer students a coherent pathway for rethinking ethnographic practice as a curatorial, multimodal, and reparative craft—an art of assembling and caring for the incomplete.
Both courses share a commitment to experimental ethnography as an epistemology of attention: an approach that values the partial, the provisional, and the open-ended. They invite students to work critically and creatively with the limits of knowledge, cultivating the ability to read, write, and curate with fragments, specimens, and errors as the living materials of ethnographic thought.
Fragments and Fragmentography (MA)
This course explores fragmentation as a generative condition of ethnographic knowledge. Drawing on European Ethnology, material culture, and feminist STS, it treats incomplete, broken, or drifting materials as analytical companions. Through collecting, annotating, and curating fragments, students experiment with multimodal and speculative methods. The course culminates in The Cabinet of Fragments, a collective exhibition that reimagines ethnography as an art of care, composition, and thinking with the incomplete.
Taxonomy, Misclassification, and the Poetics of Error (MA)
This course examines classification as an ethnographic and aesthetic experiment. Students analyze how taxonomies shape worlds and explore misclassification as a generative method within European Ethnology. Through conceptual seminars and multimodal studio work, they design speculative systems of naming, error, and care. The semester culminates in The Living Index of Errors, a collective exhibition that transforms classification’s failures into spaces of relation, curiosity, and curatorial imagination.
Course Relationship and Progression
Fragments and Fragmentography and Taxonomy, Misclassification, and the Poetics of Error form two interconnected stages in the exploration of experimental ethnography within European Ethnology. Together, they develop a methodological sensibility grounded in incompleteness, curatorial experimentation, and empirical philosophy.
The first course, Fragments and Fragmentography, introduces students to fragmentation as both an ethnographic condition and a method of attention. It emphasizes observation, collection, and composition through incomplete traces—fieldnotes, residues, and everyday remains. Through readings, field exercises, and studio experimentation, students learn to work with the partial and the broken, treating incompleteness not as a deficit but as a generative mode of inquiry. The emphasis lies on developing ethnography as a practice of noticing and assembling, where care and curiosity replace closure and coherence.
The second course, Taxonomy, Misclassification, and the Poetics of Error, extends these explorations into the analytic and curatorial realms. It investigates how systems of classification, labeling, and error shape the production of knowledge, and how misclassification can become a methodological and ethical device. Students engage with philosophical, anthropological, and artistic approaches to order, disorder, and equivocation, experimenting with speculative taxonomies, counter-archives, and multimodal forms of display. The emphasis lies on developing ethnography as a practice of naming and unmaking, where error opens new epistemic and affective possibilities.
Taken together, these courses trace a coherent pedagogical trajectory—from collecting and composing fragments to classifying, misclassifying, and reimagining their relations. Students move from learning to attend to the infraordinary textures of everyday life to learning to theorize, curate, and care for the systems through which those textures are organized, archived, and exhibited. The sequence cultivates an ethnographic imagination attuned to the incomplete: one that listens to fragments, experiments with order, and finds insight in the poetics of error.