RAI RESEARCH SEMINAR
Tuesday 13 October 2026, 4.00-6.00pm (BST)
This is a hybrid event. (links to follow)
On ethnographic satire
Jeremy MacClancy, Member of Common Room, Wolfson College, Oxford University
Deploying ethnographic methods and style for satirical ends is one of the oldest, most enduring forms of ethnography. Though the bestselling form of ethnography, the genre has gone unrecognised, surprisingly. As a form defined by its political purpose, it can also be viewed as the earliest, sustained example of critical ethnography. In this intervention, I pass a brief critical chronology of the genre, from Lucian to Montesquieu to today’s practitioners, before focussing on the hitherto neglected interwar satire, ‘Anthropological report on a London suburb’ by Vladimir Chernichewski (aka Charles Duff).
(Image: Still from Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s film ‘How tasty was my little Frenchman’, 1971, Cagey Films.)