Vignettes from Athens: On drawing, ethnography, and being a bad anthropologist

Abstract This article explores the entangled practices of drawing and ethnographic fieldwork through a series of illustrated vignettes from Athens. Written from the perspective of a self‐described “bad anthropologist,” I reflect on the tensions between theory and experience, visibility and failure, and the messy subjectivity of the fieldworker. Drawing—sketchy, ironic, sometimes raw—is treated neither as a romanticized gesture nor a tool for “impact” or mere “illustration.” Instead, it is foregrounded as a thinking practice, an analytical tool, and a situated act—a way to reckon with what escapes writing, to process visual and affective intensities, and to reimagine relationships with theory, memory, and self. The article critically engages with established scholars not to name‐drop but to advance its argument through situated dialogues as a form of theoretical storytelling and speculative fabulation. As an anti‐heroic anthropologist, in the article, I challenge the macho tropes of classic fieldwork and the institutional dynamics that determine what counts as “valid” ethnographic experience. Rather than offering generalizable conclusions, I argue for a mode of ethnographic writing and drawing that embraces awkwardness, contradiction, and the freedom to be and feel awful.