Intimate ethnography and the anthropological imagination: Dialectical aspects of the personal and political in My Father’s Wars.

Intimate ethnography is work of the anthropological imagination that models dialectical thinking in its approach to people, topics, and analysis. Rooted in particular intellectual, cultural, political, and anthropological currents, intimate ethnography comes when the need to engage larger publics in rethinking and recounting lives lived and experienced is increasingly urgent. An example of such work, My Father's Wars, centers an intimate Other as the subject of my research, a transnational life story in the context of historically constituted violence. Intimate ethnography illustrates feminist ethnography and illuminates the dangers of ethnonationalism; requires the crafting of an evocative, compelling account through the writing itself; and offers the possibility of an afterlife for anthropological work in the public sphere and thus of anthropology as an intervention in public discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]