Common book of the ANFAA chair

Congratulations to our lecturer Laurent van Lancker on the publication of the book “STRATA – Ethnographies indociles de mondes troublés” he co-authored (Authors: Aurélie Darbouret, Camilo Leon-Quijano, Petna Ndaliko Katondolo, Daniela Rodrigues, Jeff Silva et Laurent Van Lancker; Published by SunSun Éditions (Céline Pévrier))

This book is a collective work born out of a shared desire: to rethink the way social science research is written and transmitted. Produced by a group of anthropologist-artists, it offers a novel approach, combining text, image and sound to expand thoroughly the narrative forms of contemporary anthropology.
Based on six ethnographic studies conducted in France, Portugal, Romania, and Congo, this book explores sensory experience in a variety of social and political contexts.
Inspired by phenomenology, this research questions the living, the relationships between humans and non-humans, soil, time, sensory perceptions, the climate, and colonial memory.
In doing so, the book and this linked website break with traditional modes of scientific narration by proposing a decentralized writing style in which the figure of the author gives way to a shared arrangement of sensory materials. Thus, narrative design, graphics, and layout are no longer secondary stages in the work, but acts integrated from the outset of the process of designing and narrating the scientific object. The form thus becomes also epistemological, and the relationship between form and content becomes an intentional force.

This book is not just read: it is looked at, felt, listened to, and invites readers to immerse themselves in lived, often unspoken, unruly worlds; by reinventing the ways in which research is shared. To this end, it offers a multimodal reading both in the book and on the website that highlights films, interviews, and other ethnographic traces. More than an editorial object, STRATA is an experience of thought, vision, and sensitivity.