Having read Boon's Verging
on extra-vagance (1999), arguably, and deeply playfully (putting my
status as a professional anthropologist on the line)
Anthoroughpology is to be more AnThoreaupology than AnTropology or even an ANTropology.
In other words,
- to move the discipline of anthropology (that is work of the
polity of scholars who reflexively index each other's works)
- farther than
it has gone before (that is to advance of the science of anthropology),
- it
is
more
important
to enter extraordinary, uncharted territories (that is to write what
has so far remained unwritten, voiceless, deliberately ignored--not only
among far away populations but also in the minutiae of our own everyday lifes)
- using extra-vagant methods (that is methods that were never
before used,
or were used for other purposes)
- than it is to work with the (sad or happy) tropes that the tradition bequeathed
us
- even if more practically grounded in actor-networks
This is not playful in the esthetic sense; it is playful in the dramatic sense
that produces both comedy and tragedy, joy and pain. It is something to be
used for the study of weddings and funerals, airplanes that make us soar and
bomb our cities.