Michael Carrithers (University of Durham)
Irony
as Method: Some Precarious German Examples
Irony, even the anthropologistıs irony, may conceivably have a powerful political dimensionı, suggests Alcida Rita Ramos in a recent Current Anthropology comment(2005:450), and if so, then we might ask, What happens to the hovering, the neither-precisely-right-or-precisely-wrong, of ironic method, if it has such a political dimension? Here I query an episode of inadvertent fieldwork while talking in Germany of irony about the recent German past. How can one be ironic about such catastrophic events and their aftermath?
