storytelling by anthropologists and other careful observers

December 18, 2022 12:40 PM

Otherwise Magazine's current issue on Work includes a profile of a teacher in Kurdistan and a visual report "Delivering precarity" on food delivery work in Romania. The issue on Becoming includes an ode to tap water and stories from those detained in refugee camps.

Two Pakistani men used to talk and sing from the small windows at night. I liked listening to them. It made me feel calm. One of them had a little mirror so that they could see each other and he used to joke: "Let's do a video call, uncle."

Another excellent piece is on the anti-eviction movement in Lagos, Nigeria.

posted by spamandkimchi (5 comments total)

These are marvelous - the whole magazine is marvelous - thank you for sharing.

I just shared it with my co- filmmakers. I’ve been focused so much on movies that I’d forgotten about narrative stories on… life. These feel so different. and i’ll put podcasts in with movies in this contemplation. These stories really shook me with how much i have become extremely blindered to a particular American/media frame of what constitutes a story of life.
posted by Silvery Fish at 5:08 PM on December 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

Lovely to see Otherwise here - I would have loved to posted about it, but I was rather too closely affiliated with it to post it within site rules (I was one of the editors until December, when I stepped down for reasons unrelated to the magazine itself). It's a fantastic project, genuinely intellectually interesting, and the collective as a whole is a group of interesting, thoughtful people who care about storytelling.

Silvery Fish, I'm delighted to see you enjoyed the narrative stories of the ordinary. That's definitely what we were hoping to convey.
posted by tavegyl at 5:44 PM on December 18, 2022 [5 favorites]

Oh and I have a story/ comic in one of the earlier issues. I won't link to it here but will add a link from my profile if anyone is interested.
posted by tavegyl at 11:32 PM on December 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

Sadly, and perhaps amusingly, this magazine's website is blocked by my (large, corporate) employer on the grounds of 'Pornography'.
posted by jpziller at 9:27 AM on December 19, 2022 [1 favorite]

Hmmm, powerful stuff. That cited poem about water; it reminded me of Hugh McDairmid [MetaPrev] , whom I heard reading The Glass of Pure Water ooof nearly 50 years ago when I was a student and he was almost 80. I was too young to really appreciate his polemic for social justice then. But both those poems are using a glass of water as a jumping off point for something else.

When we [in Ireland of the drizzle] were 22 days into a month-long drought in the Summer 2018. I wrote my own scorching polemic, not using water as a metaphor but as the thing itself: It's a good time to reflect on how much clean, chlorinated, coliform-free, cryptosporidium-negative water we piss away in normal life: running the kitchen tap for a minute to get a glass of cold water; brushing teeth to the sound of running water, flushing every tinkle; let alone washing the freakin' car, sprinkling the lawn and filling a kids' paddling pool with treated water. I was so cross.
posted by BobTheScientist at 1:47 PM on December 19, 2022