Rivers of (Im)possibility

Graphic anthropology creates an empathetic ethics, ethnographic anonymity, an opportunity to explore intangible elements of participants’ everyday lives, and an alternative mode of storytelling. An ethno-graphic novel provides an opportunity to give back the stories entrusted to the anthropologist during the research period and make the stories embedded in the data widely known. This chapter offers an example of ‘retrospective (re)presentation’: using the visual to offer alternative modes of (re)presentation to the written ethnographic text, as a means of anthropological knowledge production. In collaboration with independent artist Ben Thomas, Dr Charlie Rumsby’s ambition is to turn her doctoral and post-doctoral research, that has explored identity and belonging among stateless people with Vietnamese descent living in Cambodia, into an ethno-graphic novel. Presented here is the first chapter of that novel.