Over the four chapters that you have completed, you encountered diverse strategies that anthropologists use to pursue imagination in understanding, describing, and explaining phenomena such as safety and security; loneliness and emotions; masking and power; the Afro-Atlantic and the dynamics of identity on the move.

Recall that a distinct feature of anthropology is that it sets out to understand social worlds by using the imagination to interrogate and expand the categories through which such an understanding is possible. This, we have suggested, is the central paradox that defines the anthropological imagination: that to understand social worlds, we need to reach beyond their limited concepts and images and thus, eventually, arrive closer to what they mean.

Pursuing an anthropological imagination, we have learned, means systematically deploying a set of techniques of research and thinking. As illustrated in the chapters of this course, such techniques entail:

• Describing a phenomenon with keen awareness for its details and hidden meanings
• Reading and synthesising how other anthropologists and social theorists have conceptualised your studied phenomenon
• Listening to stories and other narratives that people tell about themselves and the worlds they inhabit
• Mapping the discursive landscape of a phenomenon: what is being said about it, by whom, how it is depicted, etc. (e.g. “the loneliness epidemic”)
• Analysing such practices, narratives, and other representations for how they are meaningful to those who use them
• Assessing the historical and structural dynamics in which a phenomenon occurs, e.g. the rise of the security state, the trans-Atlantic slave trade
• Contextualising the studied phenomenon by explaining it in relation to its historical and structural background and to other social phenomena with which it coexists in a particular society, at a particular time
• Comparing your studied phenomenon with similar phenomena across the world (e.g. the carnival in Basel and the burduhoaze masks in Romania)

If coursework can introduce you to these strategies of the anthropological imagination, improving them requires time, dedication, and work.

Reading extensively – i.e. good ethnography, but also literature, political analysis, history – is one of the most important ways to cultivate an anthropological imagination.

As a next step, we encourage you to read the companion to anthropology that the University of Basel anthropologists have published to keep you company on this journey, and to follow their podcast Ethnographic Imagination Basel.

Author: George-Paul Meiu