CASI Research Seminar: “Reading Literature as Ethnography”

February 19, 2015

February 19, 2015

Caroline Tracey, Fulbright Grantee to Kyrgyzstan

Abstract: Caroline will discuss the process of incorporating literature into her ethnographic studies of land ethics in Kyrgyzstan. Her talk will focus on two works by Chingiz Aitmatov, Jamilia and “On the River Baidamtal”. She will discuss the representation of landscape and land use in the works, and the land use/environmental ethics espoused in them, and finally discuss how this ethnographic reading will figure into her ethnographic field work.

Bio: Caroline is a Fulbright grantee to Kyrgyzstan. Her research has two facets: the representation of landscape in Kyrgyz literature, and the history of Kyrgyz land use policy. She is interested in the interaction between the two--how literature reflects and informs a cultural attitude toward the environment.

Caroline received her B.A. in Russian Literature from Yale University. Since graduating, she has worked as a freelance writer as well as for a land use nonprofit in California's Central Valley. She traveled to Kyrgyzstan for a month in the summer of 2013 with funding from the Yale Environmental Studies department, and returns now for ten months, until July 2015.

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