Title: Unlearning: Rethinking Poetics, Pandemics, and the Politics of Knowledge
Abstract: ThIs book brIngs together efforts to oPen UP new ways of thinking, reading, writing, and practice.Focusing on core assumptions and theoretical approaches in folkloristics, linguistic anthropology, medical anthropology, and psychoanalysis, I try to build a deeper and broader dialogue by linking classic perspectives on poetics and performance with challenges presented by colonialism and the politics of knowledge in exploring new points of departure for researching cultural forms, health, media, mourning, and the more-than-human.This work extends the relationship between two of the things I hold dearest as a scholar: theory and ethnographic engagement with the worlds around and within us.This dual orientation is characteristic of much work in anthropology, folkloristics, and other fields.A difference lies in my sources of theoretical inspiration.Some are academic.Starting long before I first conducted ethnographic research at nineteen years of age and continuing through the present, however, many of the people who have affected my thinking the most are not scholars, never published, and, in some cases, never had access to formal schooling.Mentors in New Mexico and the Delta Amacuro rainforest of eastern Venezuela were some of the most profound, abstract, subtle, and creative thinkers I have known.In conversations that ranged from two hours to two decades, they criticized my core assumptions about knowledge and the world and opened doors to ways of thinking, feeling, writing, and being that, without them, I would never have imagined.Here again, I don't think that I am alone: I would assert that folkloristics, anthropology, ethnomusicology, and other fields gain their analytic power, in part, by appropriating theoretical insights developed by people outside the academy.The problem is that scholars often then take the credit for their insights and eliminate the challenges to scholarly authority that often come with their ideas.My practice has long been to acknowledge synergies between insights coming from academic domains and farmers, healers, forest dwellers, and wood-carvers.Introductions are charged with announcing the principal concerns advanced by the author and placing them in broader contexts; that is exactly what I do here.In academic books-and this is surely one-this work of contextualization emerges through business-as-usual scholarly rhetorics,