An Ethnographic Inventory

An Ethnographic Inventory
This book provides an inventory of modes of inquiry for ethnographic

research and presents fieldwork as an act of relational invention. It advances
contemporary debates in ethnography by arguing that the empirical prac-
tice of anthropology is and has always been an inventive activity. Bringing
together contributions from scholars across the world, the volume offers
an expansive vision of the resourcefulness that anthropologists unfold in
their empirical investigations by compiling inventive social and material
techniques, or field devices, for anthropological inquiry. The chapters seek to
inspire both novel and experienced practitioners of ethnography to venture
into the many possibilities of fieldwork, to demonstrate the essential creative
and inventive practices neglected in traditional accounts of ethnography,
and to invite anthropologists to confidently engage in inventive fieldwork
practices.
Tomás Sánchez Criado is Ramón y Cajal Senior Research Fellow at the

CareNet-IN3 of the Open University of Catalonia in Barcelona, Spain.
Adolfo Estalella is Associate Professor in Social Anthropology at the

Department of Social Anthropology and Social Psychology, Complutense
University of Madrid, Spain.
Theorizing Ethnography
Series Editors: Elisabeth L. Engebretsen, EJ Gonzalez-Polledo,
and Silvia Posocco
The ‘Theorizing Ethnography’ book series seeks to reorient ethnographic

engagements across disciplines, methods and ways of knowing. By focusing
on ethnography as a point of tension between abstract thinking and situated
life-worlds, the series promotes ethnographic method and writing as an
analytical form that is always partial, open-ended and epistemologically
querying.
Against this background, ‘Theorizing Ethnography’ employs ‘concept’,
‘context’ and ‘critique’ as devices to stimulate creative ethnographic thinking
that transects lines of analysis and location. It publishes work that reaches
beyond academic, political and life-world divisions, and as such the series
seeks to foster contributions from across socially and critically engaged
fields of practice.
Contemporary Ethnographies
Moorings, Methods, and Keys for the Future
Francisco Ferrándiz
Trans Vitalities
Mapping Ethnographies of Trans Social and Political Coalitions
Elijah Adiv Edelman
Stories, Senses and the Charismatic Relation

A Reflexive Ethnography of Christian Experience
Jamie Barnes
Queer Word- and World-Making in South Africa

Dignified Sounds
Taylor Riley
Decolonial Queering in Palestine

Walaa Alqaisiya
www.routledge.com/Theorizing-Ethnography/book-series/THEOETH
An Ethnographic Inventory
Field Devices for Anthropological
Inquiry
Edited by
Tomás Sánchez Criado and
Adolfo Estalella
First published 2023
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2023 selection and editorial matter, Tomás Sánchez Criado and Adolfo Estalella;
individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Tomás Sánchez Criado and Adolfo Estalella to be identified as the
authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters,
has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,
and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 9781032124391 (hbk)
ISBN: 9781032182704 (pbk)
ISBN: 9781003253709 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003253709
Typeset in Sabon
by Newgen Publishing UK
Contents
List of Figures viii

Contributors ix
Introduction: The ethnographic invention 1

A DOLFO ESTALELLA AND TOMÁ S SÁNCHEZ CRIADO
Interlude I: The principle of invention (Outside in) 15

M ARTIN SAVRANSKY
1 How to counter-map collectively 23

C OUNTER- CARTOGRAPHIES COLLECTIVE (3Cs)
2 How to produce responsive ethnography of data 33

J O RG E NÚÑEZ AND MAKA SUÁREZ
3 How to use disconcertment as ethnographic field-device 43

HELEN VERRAN
4 How to draw fieldnotes 52

L E TIZIA BONANNO
5 How to do a digital epidemiography 62

S HAM A PATEL AND JOH N P OST ILL
6 How to make ethnographic research with exhibitions 73

F R ANCISCO MARTÍ NEZ
7 How to write fieldpoetry 83

L E AH ZANI
vi Contents
8 How to flow with materials 92
RACH EL H ARKNESS
9 How to game ethnography 102

IGNACIO FARÍ AS AND TOMÁS SÁNCHEZ CRIADO
10 How to get caught in the ethnographic material 112

GREG P IEROTTI AND CRIST IANA GIORDANO
11 How to devise collaborative hermeneutics 122

KIM FORTUN AND MIKE FORT UN
12 How to set ethnography in motion 133

MONIKA STREULE
13 How to use Pathosformeln in anthropological inquiry 143

ANTH ONY STAVRIANAKIS
14 How to perform field encounters 152

ANDREW IRVING
15 How to invent childhood publics with photo-stories 162

SEVASTI- M ELISSA NOLAS, CHRISTOS VARVANTAKIS
AND VINNARASAN ARULDOSS
16 How to remediate ethnography 172

ADOLFO ESTALELLA
17 How to disrupt our field habits with sensory probes 182

ANNA H ARRIS
18 How to stitch ethnography 192

TANIA PÉREZ-BUSTOS
Interlude II: An elimination dance (a history of

disciplining the field/s) 200
DENIELLE ELLIOTT
Contents vii
Interlude III: The politics of invention 213
I SAAC M ARRERO- G UILLAM ÓN AND E. GABRIEL DAT TAT REYAN
Conclusion: Taking inventory 222

TO MÁ S SÁ NCH EZ CRIADO AND ADOLFO ESTALELLA
Index 231
Figures
1.1 Counter/mapping Queen Mary map (2010) 28

2.1 Entrelazados (Entwined) 36
4.1 Medicine for all 58
5.1 A sketch of Keedron Bryant’s nanostory in the form of a
mind map, created by the authors in Coggle 66
6.1 Broken tools to be used in the installation ‘Failure is
Practice’ 80
7.1 Two explosive technicians survey a rice field with metal
detectors. The technicians are listening for the pinging
sounds of the detector sensing metal underground 86
9.1 Testing games at the Spiele für eine kritische Nachbarschaft 110
10.1 Left to right: Cristiana Giordano, Ugo Edu, John Zibell,
Maria Massolo, and Sarah Hart in, Unstories, written by
Cristiana Giordano and Greg Pierotti, directed by Greg Pierotti 120
11.1 An image composition showing a map of Santa Anna and
the process of collaborative hermeneutics 129
12.1 A moment during an entrevista en movimiento in
Mexico City 137
13.1 Sketch from a memory of a moment before Clément
ended his life 147
14.1 Composition by the author. Photo 1: Top left corner:
The bench. Photo 2: Top right corner: The walk after
diagnosis. Photo 3: Bottom left corner: Waiting at the
side of the road. Photo 4: Bottom left corner: Outside the
old house 156
15.1 Examples of pictures chosen by children 166
15.2 The photo-story method 169
16.1 Participants in an auto-construction workshop organized by
Ciudad Huerto and held in the urban community garden of
Adelfas (Madrid) 177
17.1 Results of a probe activity (22a, 5 October 2018): Make a
collage from field site images 190
Contributors
Vinnarasan Aruldoss, Assistant Professor, Department of Social Wellbeing,

UAE University (UAE)
Letizia Bonanno, Research Associate in Medical Anthropology, KMMS,
University of Kent (UK)
Counter-Cartographies Collective (3Cs) is a long-term mapping research
initiative currently dispersed geographically, although its origins were at
the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This piece is written by
Nathan Swanson (Clinical Assistant Professor at Purdue University), Tim
Stallmann (Worker-Owner, Research Action Design, North Carolina),
Liz Mason-Deese (independent researcher and translator, Virginia),
Sebastian Cobarrubias (ARAID researcher at the University of Zaragoza),
& Maribel Casas-Cortés (Ramón y Cajal researcher at the University of
Zaragoza).
Tomás Sánchez Criado, Ramón y Cajal Senior Research Fellow, CareNet-IN3,
Open University of Catalonia (Spain)
Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology,
New York University (USA).
Denielle Elliott, Associate Professor, Departments of Social Anthropology
and Social Science, York University (Canada).
Adolfo Estalella, Associate Professor in Social Anthropology, Department of
Social Anthropology and Social Psychology, Complutense University of
Madrid (Spain).
Ignacio Farías, Professor, Institute of European Ethnology, Humboldt-
University of Berlin (Germany).
Kim Fortun, Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of California
at Irvine (USA).
Mike Fortun, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, University
of California at Irvine (USA).
x Contributors
Cristiana Giordano, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology,
University of California at Davis (USA).
Anna Harris, Associate Professor, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences,
Maastricht University (The Netherlands).
Rachel Harkness, Lecturer in Design Ecologies, School of Design, Edinburgh
College of Art, University of Edinburgh (Scotland).
Andrew Irving, Professor, Department of Social Anthropology, University of
Manchester (UK).
Isaac Marrero-Guillamón, Serra Húnter Lecturer, Department of Social
Anthropology, University of Barcelona (Spain).
Francisco Martínez, Visiting Professor, Faculty of Design, Estonian Academy
of Arts, Tallinn (Estonia).
Sevasti-Melissa Nolas, Reader, Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths,
University of London and Director, the Children’s Photography Archive -
https://childphotoarchive.org/ (UK)
Jorge Núñez, Visiting Scholar, SUM – Center for Development and the
Environment, University of Oslo (Norway) & Co-founder, Kaleidos –
University of Cuenca (Ecuador).
Shama Patel, PhD Candidate, Department of Digitalization, Copenhagen
Business School (Denmark).
Tania Pérez-Bustos, Associate Professor, Gender Studies, National University
of Colombia, Bogotá (Colombia).
Greg Pierotti, Assistant Professor, School of Theatre, Film & Television,
University of Arizona (USA).
John Postill, Senior Lecturer, School of Media and Communication, RMIT
University, Melbourne (Australia).
Martin Savransky, Associate Professor, Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of
London (UK).
Anthony Stavrianakis, Chargé de recherche, Laboratory of Ethnology and
Comparative Sociology, Université Paris Nanterre/Centre National de la
Reserche Scientifique, Paris (France).
Monika Streule, Urban Researcher and Marie-Skłodowska Curie Fellow,
Latin America and Caribbean Centre, London School of Economics and
Political Science (UK).
Maka Suárez, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, University
of Oslo (Norway) & Co-founder, Kaleidos – University of Cuenca
(Ecuador).
Contributors xi
Christos Varvantakis, Co-Director, The Children’s Photography Archive -
https://childphotoarchive.org/ (UK).
Helen Verran, Professorial Fellow, Northern Institute, Charles Darwin
University (Australia).
Leah Zani, public anthropologist, author, and poet based in Oakland,
California (USA).
Introduction
The ethnographic invention
Adolfo Estalella and Tomás Sánchez Criado
‘inquiry is always a matter of “invention” ’

(Martin Savransky (2016, 38)
This inventory bears witness to the relational inventiveness that is essential

to the field practices of ethnography. The projects inventoried neither follow
standard techniques nor fit into established methodological conventions.
Instead, the anthropologists carrying out these investigations have creatively
engaged in devising the conditions for their ethnographic encounters: cre-
ating digital infrastructures for collaboration, arranging workshops to map
together, curating exhibitions while investigating with artists, scripting
interviews in the city with their companions, and poetically disposing their
attention in the field. We call these situated arrangements that dispose the
ethnographic situation field devices. They emerge out of the integral rela-
tional inventiveness of all ethnographic encounters and bear witness to the
creative practices of anthropologists in their endeavours to find relevant
anthropological questions.
The explicit call for invention in this inventory should not be understood
as an advocation of creative methods or methodological innovation: we
are not proposing novel techniques or replicable formulas. Our proposal
responds to the widespread realization – experienced by ourselves and many
others – that our methods are incapable of responding to the challenges
of the contemporary and the resulting urge to renovate the relevance of
our inquiries, a task that, as Martin Savransky has compellingly argued,
demands ‘speculating on the possibility of inventing new and different modes
of asking questions’ (Savransky 2016, 4). The accounts in this book convey
the improvisational and creative activities of anthropologists engaging in
this challenging endeavour. In the collective effort represented by this book,
we sideline the persistent framework that envisions (and describes) the
empirical practice of anthropologists in methodological terms. Instead, we
argue for a conceptualization of the ethnographic encounter as an act of
invention: anthropologists always invent how to pose relevant questions in
the field.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003253709-1
2 Adolfo Estalella and Tomás Sánchez Criado
The idea that invention is integral to anthropological practice is not
entirely novel. Forty years ago, Roy Wagner (1981) proposed that rather
than discovering the cultures they studied, anthropologists were inventing
them. Wagner’s groundbreaking work unveiled the creativity that takes
place in the conceptual work of anthropologists. A vision originated in his
conception of social worlds as fundamentally creative; thus, the activity of
anthropologists is as inventive as that of the social worlds they investigate.
A decade later, his contribution was to be extremely influential in the rhet-
oric turn and the provoking claim that anthropological writing is essen-
tially a creative practice (pervaded by poetics and politics) and not a mere
unmediated representation of social worlds (Clifford and Marcus 1986).
While the discipline has come to terms with the notion that its conceptual
and representational activities are suffused with creativity, an admission
that field practices are essentially creative and inventive has rarely been
made. The language of improvisation, creativity and invention is seldom –
if ever – present in conceptualizations of ethnographic practices, which are
usually described as an expression of what we call method – a framework
that suffocates and invisibilizes any trace of creativity. However, our field
experiences – like those of the Inventory’s contributors and many others –
demonstrate that the opposite tends to be the case: the empirical practice
of anthropologists is thoroughly imbued with creative improvisations and
inventive activities.
The contributions presented in this book are quite unlike the natural-
istic accounts that portray anthropologists as mere participants in the
social worlds they investigate. Instead, they manifest the agential role of
anthropologists in devising the conditions of their ethnographic encounters.
Each piece provides a glimpse of the multiple agencies, material interventions,
spatial arrangements, and sensorial dispositions entwined in their respective
ethnographic projects. Certainly, field devices lack the stability and stand-
ardization typically attributed to methods but are nonetheless essential
dispositions for the ethnographic projects in which they have been devised.
The argument we advance here combats the idea that the figure of method
exhausts the complexity of the ethnographic encounter. The accounts here
demonstrate that method is both an insufficient guide for, and an inadequate
description, the field situation. To reiterate, this book is not concerned with
treating ethnography as a method, rather, we posit ethnography as a creative
and improvisational practice, the distinctive condition of which is the rela-
tional invention that emerges from the ethnographic situation.
Anthropological creativity
The advocation of a more inventive and creative anthropology has become
central in certain circles of the discipline since the 1980s. It has been a common
descriptor for the practices developing at the intersections between art and
anthropology over the last two decades, can be found in anthropological
Introduction 3
incursions into the digital realm and, more recently, has become integral to
debates about multimodality. The programmatic proposal of a multimodal
anthropology by E. Gabriel Dattatreyan and Isaac Marrero-Guillamón
(2019), for instance, promotes an anthropological practice that overcomes a
fixation with text and embraces other modes of representation and engage-
ment. They envision ‘an anthropology yet to come: multisensorial rather
than text-based, performative rather than representational, and inventive
rather than descriptive’ (220). This is an anthropology that explores a pol-
itics of invention, an argument that can be retraced to the influence of Roy
Wagner (1981). Dattatreyan and Marrero-Guillamón’s proposal has cer-
tainly been inspiring for us, but while we are responsive to their theoretical
arguments and programmatic prospectus, our line of reasoning in this book
follows a different track.
Wagner’s central idea that invention is an integral condition of anthropo-
logical activity paved the way for the rhetorical turn of the mid-1980s, when
anthropologists admitted the creative nature of their writing. As George
Marcus and Michael J. Fischer (1986) argued at the time, anthropological
texts are not merely transparent representations but constructed accounts,
replete with rhetorical artifices; a declaration that opened room for an
abundance of creative explorations with various writing genres. However,
writing is not the only anthropological practice that relies on creativity,
as demonstrated by Andrea Ballestero and Brit Ross Winthereik’s recent
volume on anthropological analysis, an activity that has been mystified or
obfuscated within the discipline, reduced to a singular creative spark or
mechanical procedure. Acknowledging ‘the conceptual creativity and rela-
tional commitments that sit at the core of ethnography in its best forms’,
they propose ‘that analysis is a creative and organized process of gener-
ating insights’ (Ballestero and Winthereik 2021, 3). Recent calls for cre-
ative ethnographies (Culhane and Elliott 2016) and all kinds of creative
experimentations (Estalella and Sánchez Criado 2018) demonstrate that
fieldwork has not been left out of these debates. To a large extent, this is a
response to an intense experience that ‘fieldwork is not what it used to be’
(Faubion and Marcus 2009) and the realization that our modes of inquiry
are not sufficient for the challenges of the contemporary. As Paul Rabinow
attested some time ago: ‘[t]he currently reigning modes of research in the
human sciences are, it seems to me, deficient in vital respects’ (Rabinow
2003, 2). Years later, this diagnosis was followed by a clear and straight-
forward appeal: ‘it is time once again for experimentation and invention’
(Rabinow 2011, 116).
The core of our argument here is sensitive to these debates but differs in two
fundamental ways. First, although Marrero-Guillamón and Dattatreyan’s
(2019) call for a politics of invention within the discipline has been inspir-
ational, we are not presenting a programmatic proposal – what anthropology
should be – but rather a conceptual discussion about what anthropological
activity already is, and how we can better understand this. Our argument
aligns with Wagner’s idea that ‘the task of building an awareness of inven-
tion constitutes the goal and culmination of the social sciences’ (Wagner
1981, 110). There is a second important divergence from the invocations for
creative ethnographies made by Dara Culhane and Denielle Elliot (2016),
or even the call for inventive methods in neighbouring disciplines made by
Nina Wakeford and Celia Lury (2012). The object of our discussion is not
a ‘method’ but the integral creativity and inventiveness of anthropological
practice. Thus, since we do not subjugate creativity under the strictures of
method, we are aligned with those colleagues who simply invoke the cre-
ativity of anthropological practice when referring, for instance, to writing
and analysis.
In brief, our discussion seeks to expand Wagner’s idea that creativity is
integral to anthropological activity to include field practices. Although his
argument centres on the anthropologist’s conceptual activity, we not only
believe it can be extended to other instances but that it has already been over
the last few decades. We are thus not calling for more creative anthropology
but arguing that this inventive condition is integral to anthropological activity
within the field. The problem, we suggest below, has been the tendency of
anthropology to conventionalize its activity, masking and invisibilizing its
creativity. Thus, rather than an alternative programme for anthropology,
this book aims to provide a different conceptualization of its empirical prac-
tice: one that acknowledges its creative and inventive condition.
‘Devicing’ inquiries
The ethnographic projects in this book have been carried out in highly
diverse empirical sites and field situations. They take place in urban contexts
within the intimate gatherings to embroider together in Colombia (Pérez-
Bustos), in the complex circumstances of assisted suicide in Switzerland
(Stavrianakis), in collaborations with minors across different countries
(Nolas, Varvantakis and Aruldoss) and in the rhizomatic contours of digital
viral worlds across the Americas (Patel and Postill). In these many situ-
ations, contributors do not merely become involved in existing contexts
but actively devise the conditions under which ethnographic relations are
established: designing digital data infrastructures (Núñez and Suárez), cur-
ating art exhibitions in collaboration with artists (Martínez), engaging in a
perpetual re-design of games (Farías and Criado), actively working through
disconcertment (Verran) or flowing after materials in various ecologically
inspired interventions (Harkness). Each contribution offers an ethnographic
description of one of these situated arrangements – and its distinctive mode
of inquiry – that has been essential for the corresponding ethnographic pro-
ject: what we call field devices. Beyond observation and participation, habit-
ually used to describe empirical anthropological activities, these accounts of
field devices pay attention to the diverse materialities, spatialies and agencies
involved in the ethnographic encounter.
Introduction 5
The Asthma Files project carried out by Kim Fortun, Mike Fortun and
many other collaborators is perhaps a paradigmatic example, involving
as it does the design of a digital infrastructure (PECE) to gather diverse
participants into collaboration. In their contribution, they describe their
work with GREEN-MPNA, a neighbourhood association in Santa Ana
(California), and with other scientists through PECE-The Asthma Files. Their
engagement is not restricted to attending association meetings and following
their political activity. On the contrary, they take an active role in designing
and implementing a digital infrastructure to practice a form of collaborative
hermeneutics in which interpretations of the same object (an image, a datum,
etc.) can be brought together. We appreciate The Asthma Files as an illu-
minating case of contemporary ethnographic projects that stand apart from
naturalistic visions of the ethnographic encounter. Here the anthropologist
does not merely step into a situated social context; she gets involved with her
ethnographic counterparts in the activity of disposing conditions to inquire
together. EthnoData, developed by Jorge Núñez and Maka Suárez, is another
exemplary project where the process of designing data platforms – in this
case investigating statistics about violence – opens all kinds of unexpected
collaborations within the ethnographic endeavour. These two cases exhibit
how certain projects in the contemporary are carried out through activ-
ities involving the design of digital infrastructures to sustain ethnographic
relations. In contrast to visions of the field encounter exclusively focused on
social practices (participation, rapport, etc.), these projects demonstrate the
relevance of devising material conditions for the ethnographic encounter.1
We have found the methodological sensibility of Science and Technology
Studies (STS) particularly relevant for illuminating the material dimen-
sion of this kind of ethnographic project. The STS scholars John Law and
Evelyn Ruppert have elegantly captured the materiality integral to any
inquiry by envisioning research methods as devices, an insightful heuristic
for understanding the projects inventoried in this book. The two authors
conceive devices as teleological arrangements that ‘assemble and arrange
the world in specific social and material patterns’ (Law and Ruppert 2013,
230). Devices are thus modes of patterning the social, devised to gather data,
produce knowledge, and articulate questions. In contrast to the abstract and
standard quality characteristic of research methods, they imagine devices
as provisional arrangements that result not from polished design but from
tinkering practices. While certain visions of research methods (and method-
ologies) tend to abstract these from the social, we value the insight of Law
and Ruppert on the social condition of methods: they are historical products
of their time, tentatively striving to put some order into the social.
Andrew Irving’s contribution illuminates further aspects of the endeavours
anthropologists engage in when they are – as we describe it – ‘devicing’
their inquiries. Irving’s interest is the interior imagination of people experi-
encing terminal illness, a difficult phenomenon to grasp and one for which,
he argues, conventional methodological approaches are ill-equipped. Under
these circumstances he repurposes and adapts the conventional interview
arrangement, staging an encounter between his interlocutors when walking
in places they deem relevant. The situation goes as follows: one participant
walks and narrates her thoughts while the other asks questions, interjects,
takes photographs, and records the conversation. These movements through
the city create a situation able to elicit thoughts and memories of their diffi-
cult experiences of living with HIV/AIDS. This intimate encounter is possible
because Irving has previously established a collaborative relation with his
counterparts, Margaret Ssewankambo and Nalongo Kaweesa. Irving posed
a question to these two HIV+ Ugandan activists: how would you like to
represent your experience to someone living in my country, England? While
The Asthma Files highlights a material intervention in the field, Irving’s con-
tribution captures the scenographic condition of the ethnographic encounter
and calls attention to the spatial arrangements so often demanded by an
empirical situation.2 These two accounts shed light on how anthropologists
device the social, material and spatial dispositions for ethnographic relations
to emerge. Drawing inspiration from Law and Ruppert’s proposal, we con-
ceive these arrangements as field devices; that is, devices that grow out of the
field situation to devise the dispositions for ethnographic relations.
Drawing inspiration from an STS sensibility, we have highlighted the
material and spatial arrangements devising the dispositions for an ethno-
graphic encounter. Yet, there is a second sense for the concept of disposition
that reveals a different dimension of field devices, one closer to an anthropo-
logical sensibility. This draws on Bourdieu’s understanding of disposition as
an inclination constitutive of habitus. We understand Leah Zani’s concep-
tualization of fieldpoems as a mode of attention in the field in this sense.
Zani followed explosive clearance technicians in Laos working their way
through the incendiary remains of covert bombing campaigns by the United
States during the 1960s and early 1970s. As the slightest click may be the
indication of a trigger, their work demands an complete silence, a stark con-
trast to the tremendous noise of controlled explosions. Zani was captivated
by the soundscape of her field. Developing a particular attention to sound
led her to create field notes in the form of sound poems. Far from a mere
writing technique or form of representation, these fieldpoems are a poetic
disposition – in her own words – that seeks to enliven her attention to the
sensoriality of the ethnographic encounter. The field device constituted by
Zani’s fieldpoems is not a spatial or sociotechnical arrangement but a par-
ticular sensibility able to grasp the inhabited soundscape and emotional
landscape. Anna Harris’ contribution on how to disrupt certain field habits
illustrates that these dispositions are not inherent: training may be required
to enable the ethnographer to notice what is relevant in the field.3
Field devices – as these projects and the other contributions demon-
strate – are emergent accomplishments that respond to challenging field
conditions.4 They emerge from the life trajectories and epistemic sensibilities
of anthropologists, as well as the diverse expectations and abilities of their
Introduction 7
counterparts. As Andrew Irving demonstrates, they allow anthropologists
to pose questions that they didn’t have: had it not been for the scenography
that situates the dialogue between Margaret Ssewankambo and Nalongo
Kaweesa within the city, it would have been impossible for him to find cer-
tain questions that emerged between his two counterparts. It was only due
to the particular situation – talking to an interlocutor with a similar living
experience while walking through known places – that relevant memories
emerged and participants were able to recount these experiences.
While invoking the concept of field devices we explicitly set aside the
figure of method, for this seems entirely insufficient for apprehending
and describing what is taking place in many contemporary ethnographic
projects. The concept of method is too wide to offer a faithful description
of many empirical situations and its standard condition leaves no room – or
pays no attention – to the many improvisational gestures that are essen-
tial to the ethnographic encounter. In contrast, the concept of field device
provides a fine-grain texture of the composite condition of ethnography,
making visible the many diverse entities, trajectories, and agencies that are
part of the ethnographic situation. Following this argument, it is possible
to envision ethnography as an assemblage of various devices, some conven-
tional techniques such as participant observation, note taking, interviews,
etc., others improvisational arrangements that repurpose some of these
devices, and others that are invented from scratch.5 Anthropologists com-
bine these different devices in their empirical encounters: they follow the
conventions and recommendations of method, but not only,6 since, as we
describe in the next section, the ethnographic encounter always exceeds our
methodological knowledge.
An alternative to method
Research methods are undoubtedly valuable practical knowledge for
anthropologists: they anticipate situations and offer guidance for the
always complex task of fieldwork. The handbooks, seminar, and lessons
on methods were certainly relevant in our own anthropological training,
in learning how to approach people, build relations of rapport, and the
different ways to account for these experiences. Yet the ethnographic
encounter always exceeds the method: its conventions and anticipations
are insufficient for coping with the complex and unexpected situations
that occur in the field. In contrast to the profoundly established culture of
method within anthropology, we subscribe to George Marcus’ account of
the ethnographic encounter as characterized by ‘the essential unpredict-
ability of fieldwork, its virtuous unruliness, and its resistance to standard
ideas about research design and methodology in the social sciences’ (Marcus
2009, 23). The accounts assembled in this Inventory demonstrate that which
seasoned anthropologists know well and those in the early stages of training
guess very soon: the practice of anthropology requires its practitioners to
constantly engage in creative improvisations within the field. The accounts
of field devices here bear witness to this fact: far from standard techniques
and methodological conventions, these field devices are the outcome of cre-
ative improvisations growing out of the ethnographic encounter.
The creativity we invoke has nothing to do with popular conceptions of
this figure. What we have in mind is not the romantic idea of the individual
quality of exceptional persons engaged in the production of novelty, particu-
larly in domains such as art, design or technology. Instead, we draw on a rad-
ically different vision that emplaces creativity in the mundane situations of
everyday life and acknowledges its centrality in social relations. We owe this
vision to authors like Roy Wagner (1981) who have presented a description
of culture and social life as a phenomenon pervaded by creativity and impro-
visation. Far from an individual quality of certain people, anthropological lit-
erature has shown that creativity and invention are emergent phenomena, the
outcome of relations that people establish with other people and materials
(Ingold and Hallam 2007; Rosaldo, Lavie, and Narayan 2018). Irving’s
account is illuminating in this respect since the walking dialogue between his
counterparts Ssewankambo and Kaweesa is not his achievement alone, but
a relational outcome of those involved in the situation. His agential role in
the entire process is ambivalent: he is the one prompting the situation, but
once the dialogue takes place, he assumes a secondary, passive part in the
activity. Field devices are thus not the mere outcome of the anthropologist’s
individual activity, but an emergent accomplishment growing out of the rela-
tional entanglement of the ethnographic encounter.
Although the projects we have brought together move away from the
(imagined) conventions of ethnography, we make no claims of novelty, and
certainly do not invoke any kind of methodological innovation: such an
approach would once more risk endorsing romantic understandings of cre-
ativity. Instead, the creativity involved in these projects describes an activity
that recombines and recontextualizes objects to produce outcomes that are
deemed valuable. These valuable objects are, in this discussion, what we have
called field devices. They emerge as adaptations of standard techniques such
as interviews (Streule, Irving), draw on previous life experiences (Pierotti
and Giordano), extend previous ethnographic insights (Pérez-Bustos) or
are the outcome of experimental remediations of ethnography (Estalella).7
Further, we argue that even the most conventional ethnographic practice –
say, participant observation or interviews – requires a quantity of creativity.
We believe the ethnographic encounter has the same nature as any social
interaction, as Tim Ingold and Elizabeth Hallam have argued: ‘There is no
script for social and cultural life. People have to work it out as they go along.
In a word, they have to improvise’ (2007, 1).
The invention we invoke is not equated to innovations that overcome
conventions. The ethnographic invention we signal is a moving ratio that
tensions the relation between invention and convention: it is not in the
nature of things but in the relational act (or description) of our relations
Introduction 9
within the field. Let us consider, for instance, Letizia Bonanno’s contribu-
tion, a personal take on the practice of ethnographic drawing, a technique
that has become widely popular among anthropologists over recent years.8
Whilst some hail the novelty of this approach, we should perhaps acknow-
ledge that since the end of the 19th century, anthropologists as diverse as
Alfred Cort Haddon, Arthur Bernard Deacon, and Claude Lévi-Strauss
have used drawings in their fieldwork. Certainly, present-day ethnographic
drawing differs in its orientation, function, and articulation, but it is not a
newcomer to anthropology. Depending on how it is related, ethnographic
drawing could thus be described as a conventional technique or an inventive
approach. This case illustrates the ever-present tension between convention
and invention, insightfully described by Wagner: ‘[i]nvention and conven-
tion stand in a dialectical relationship to one another, a relationship of sim-
ultaneous interdependence and contradiction’ (Wagner 1981, 43). Hence,
invention and convention are mutually dependent in his account and, even
more interestingly, tradition (and its conventions) is the outcome of an
inventive process that masks its own presence: in other words, we invent
our own conventions.
For too long, anthropology has masked and obviated its creative prac-
tice by conventionalizing its tales of the field under the figure of method.
By invoking the integral creativity of the ethnographic encounter, we seek,
on one hand, to counter the absolute primacy of method as the descriptive
figure used to account for empirical situations, and on the other, to offer a
conceptualization that acknowledges the inventive condition of the field situ-
ation. This invention takes expression in unstable, provisional and situated
arrangements that we have called field devices. Far from totalizing meth-
odological approaches, these should be regarded as concrete interventions,
made relevant by their capacity to respond to specific ethnographic situ-
ations. There is thus a certain irreducibility to each and every field device,
since they bear the imprint of the field from which they emerged. Lacking
the formal abstraction and replicability of method, they are nonetheless of
exceptional value: when a method cannot cope with the unruliness of the
ethnographic situation, field devices ‘open possibility for other possibil-
ities […] a structured space for improvisation’ (Ballestero 2019, 9). Andrea
Ballestero’s description of the technical instruments – that she also terms
devices – of activists and technicians involved in the production of know-
ledge about water is also an appropriate description here.
A shared quality of some accounts in this book demonstrate that field
devices are carefully devised sociomaterial dispositions, arranging spaces for
specific activities intended to produce generative situations for the anthro-
pologist and all involved in the ethnographic project. This is the case, for
instance, with the theatrical workshops of Greg Pierotti and Cristiana
Giordano – dedicated to Affect Theater – aimed at discussing how, whilst
fieldwork enables anthropologists to ‘get caught’ in research, their practice
enables ‘getting caught anew’ in the empirical material during the process of
collectively composing theatrical episodes. The counter-mapping workshops
organized by the 3Cs collective, Counter-Cartographies Collective (origin-
ally founded at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), illuminates
further elements of the activities through which anthropologists devise
spaces for collective inquiry, in this case around the activity of producing
maps that not only represent territory but are also able to create relations to
explore relevant issues. As we argue in the next and final section, it is out of
the possibilities opened by field devices that anthropologists may find rele-
vant questions.
Inventing relevant questions

Anthropologists have diverse ways of approaching and understanding eth-
nography, whether through the centrality of writing, the singular experience
of participant observation, or the learning qualities of fieldwork. These are
common conceptualizations that highlight relevant dimensions of the ethno-
graphic endeavour. This inventory grows out of a conceptualization that
seeks to bring to the fore a commonly ignored dimension: the relational
creativity of the field encounter. Ethnography, we propose, is an act of inven-
tion: anthropologists invent ethnographic relations in – and out of – the
field. In this formulation we draw on Marilyn Strathern’s (2020) vision of
the anthropological endeavour as one founded on relations. As she argues,
anthropologists use relations to investigate relations, producing analytical
relations in the elaboration of arguments and creating descriptive relations
in their expository representations. We extend Strathern’s argument to
include in this vision the empirical relations integral to the ethnographic
encounter: the relations that anthropologists establish in the field.
As we have recounted, anthropology is fully cognizant of the creativity
essential to the production of its descriptive (Clifford and Marcus 1986) and
analytical relations (Wagner 1981). In sharp contrast, it has rarely admitted
the creativity of relations in the field. This differentiated understanding
reproduces the romantic vision that restricts creativity to those practices
usually described as intellectual – writing, analysis, and conceptualization –
whilst ignoring the creative improvisation integral to everyday social relations.
However, as the anthropological study of creativity has demonstrated, our
social life is intrinsically inventive: ‘mundane activities become as much the
locus of cultural creativity as the arduous ruminations of the lone artist or
scientist’ (Rosaldo, Lavie, and Narayan 2018, 5). The contributions to this
Inventory demonstrate that anthropologists constantly engage in improvisa-
tional and inventive practices in their ethnographic encounter beyond the
conventions of methods, they always resort to invention. The field devices
described here account for the agential role of anthropologists addressing
the ethnographic encounter and creatively disposing the conditions for their
relations. The ultimate goal of these dispositions is always the same: to find
relevant questions.
Introduction 11
This is not a minor task. Much less so at a time when, as Martin Savransky
(2016) has argued, the relevance of the social sciences is under threat. To
reinvigorate this relevance in these particularly tumultuous times may
require partaking in what he describes as an adventure, one that demands
we ‘produce tools to cultivate a sensibility capable of opening up a different
care of knowledge for the contemporary social sciences’ (2016, 35) so that
we might be able to invent modes of posing relevant questions. Savransky
traces the notion of invention to its pre-modern sense when it involved an
activity of creative fabrication and discovery. Invention, in his elaboration,
encompasses ‘a singular attentiveness to the many versions of how things
come to matter in a specific situation, and a constrained creativity that might
allow the latter to find a manner of encountering the situation such that a
problem that matters can be defined’ (2016, 78). Our use of the notion
of invention stresses this twofold dimension: we conceive ethnography as
an activity aimed at devicing the dispositions for the ethnographic relation
in order that relevant questions may be discovered, or even invented. The
activity of devicing inquiries is thus a creative improvisational process that
explores what may be relevant for a given situation in a twofold sense: how
to respond to the conditions of the ethnographic encounter in a relevant
manner so that relevant questions may be invented.
Thinking of ethnography as an act of invention is our reaction to the
widespread experience that our modes of inquiry are not up to the challenges
of our contemporary worlds. By signaling the inventive condition of the
field encounter, we seek to provide a conceptualization of ethnography that
is faithful to what really occurs within the empirical situation. We expect
this effort will animate the creative engagements required to pose rele-
vant questions in ethnographic investigations. In a world on the verge of
collapse, it is more necessary than ever to come to terms with the way we
practice empirical inquiries and produce novel accounts of our ethnographic
practices. While Anand Pandian (2019) has formulated the challenge of
these uneasy times as one of imagining the world as it may yet be, we formu-
late a correlated endeavour that we deem as relevant: to speculate with eth-
nography as it may yet be. This enterprise demands anthropologists avoid
the historical obviation of the inventive condition of their field practices by
offering relations of them: thus, this Inventory. Perhaps the time has come
to take the invention of ethnographic inquiries more seriously. In our view,
this requires speculating with what ethnography might be by acknowledging
what ethnography has always been: an act of invention.
Notes
1 The relevance that material engagement and design practices have for constructing
ethnographic field practices is demonstrated in other contributions to the
Inventory. This is the case for Ignacio Farías and Tomás Sánchez Criado’s piece in
how the process of designing and testing a game enabled projecting field sites and
staging relations with activists and civic initiatives to study of housing and real
estate markets. A similar case is presented in Adolfo Estalella’s account of a pro-
ject of urban pedagogy involving the design of a digital infrastructure in collabor-
ation with his ethnographic counterparts in Madrid, the urban guerrillas Zuloark
and Basurama. In both cases, the practice of material design is an essential part
of their inquiry into the city. Finally, Rachel Harkness’ contribution discusses a
series of creative field devices that entail paying close attention to the life stories
of materials in the field. What is important is the ecological relations in which the
ethnographer is embedded and the possibility of flowing with materials.
2 We find this careful scenographic practice in Francisco Martinez’s discussion of
curatorial practices, where the exhibition is not merely an activity dedicated to
displaying objects but a device for ethnographic inquiry. The design activity is, for
Martínez, an interventionist practice that arranges objects and people in a careful
way and offers the anthropologist the possibility of cultivating surprise. Other
contributions pay similar attention to the careful design of situations in which to
relate to their counterparts.
3 This is the case with Helen Verran’s disconcertment, a response to those situ-
ations that cause the anthropologist epistemic trouble. Verran proposes culti-
vating the capacity for disconcertment and being attentive to ‘the sense of not
knowing how to know’, because this sensation is significant. In her case, it
demands assemblage stories able to foreground the disconcertment the ethnog-
rapher has experienced.
4 This is clearly the goal of the photo-stories device designed by Sevasti-Melissa
Nolas, Christos Varvatakis and Vinnarasan Aruldoss in their effort to investigate
the relationship between childhood and public life, a collective certainly difficult
to investigate. To make public the children’s experiences with public life, they
articulate a practice of photography carried out by children with exhibitions and
other techniques.
5 The contributions of Monika Streule and Tania Pérez-Bustos illuminate two com-
pletely different empirical trajectories through which field devices can emerge.
While Streule adapts conventional methodological techniques such as interviews
and participant observation to explore heterogeneous urban territories, setting
ethnography in motion in dialogue with recent developments in mobile methods,
embroidering together creates an intimate atmosphere for Pérez-Bustos and
her ethnographic counterparts, one that demands careful listening and where
questions are answered through embroidery.
6 The distinction we make between devices and field devices thus differentiates
between conventional arrangements – what we have called plain devices, such as
participant observation – and the improvisational and inventive ‘field devices’ that
emerge out of the field encounter.
7 As the contributions to this Inventory demonstrate, sources of inspiration for
devising field devices are manifold. The world of art and digital technologies are
certainly two primary sources of inspiration for a number of contributions (Núñez
and Suárez, Estalella, Patel and Postill, Pierotti and Giordano, Martínez). The
work on pathosformeln by Anthony Stavrianakis is illustrative of inspiration from
the world of art. The formula used to express pathos is a means for Stavrianakis
to attend to the gestures of people involved in the processes of assisted suicide.
In these extremely difficult situations, the concept of pathosformeln offers the
ethnographer a way to render visible the relevance of their interlocutors’ final
Introduction 13
gestures. The epidemiography of Shama Patel and John Postill is the outcome
of seizing the distinctive qualities of digital technologies to investigate viral phe-
nomena on the Internet, turning ethnography into an investigation of unfolding
digital mediated events.
8 See Illustrating Anthropology, an online exhibition supported by the Royal
Anthropological Institute: https://illustratinganthropology.com/ (Accessed May
31, 2022).
References
Ballestero, Andrea. 2019. A Future History of Water. Durham: Duke University Press.
Ballestero, Andrea, and Brit Ross Winthereik. 2021. Experimenting with
Ethnography: A Companion to Analysis. Duke University Press.
Clifford, James, and George Marcus. 1986. Writing Culture. The Poetics and Politics
of Ethnography. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press.
Culhane,Dara,and Denielle Elliott.2016.A Different Kind of Ethnography: Imaginative
Practices and Creative Methodologies. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Dattatreyan, E. Gabriel, and Isaac Marrero-Guillamón. 2019. ‘Introduction:
Multimodal Anthropology and the Politics of Invention.’ American Anthropologist
121 (1): 220–28.
Estalella, Adolfo, and Tomás Sánchez Criado, eds. 2018. Experimental Collaborations.
Ethnography through Fieldwork Devices. New York, Oxford: Berghahn.
Faubion, James D., and George E. Marcus, 2009. Fieldwork Is Not What It Used to
Be. Learning Anthropology’s Method in a Time of Transition. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press.
Ingold, Tim, and Elizabeth Hallam. 2007. ‘Creativity and Cultural Improvisation:
An Introduction.’ In Creativity and Cultural Improvisation, 1–24. Oxford,
London: Berg.
Law, John, and Evelyn Ruppert. 2013. ‘The Social Life of Methods: Devices.’ Journal
of Cultural Economy 6 (3): 229–40.
Lury, Celia, and Nina Wakeford. 2012. Inventive Methods. The Happening of the
Social. Oxon: Routledge.
Marcus, George E., 2009. ‘Introduction. Notes toward an Ethnographic Memoir
of Supervising Graduate Research through Anthropology’s Decades of
Transformation.’ In Fieldwork Is Not What It Used to Be. Learning Anthropology’s
Method in a Time of Transition, edited by J.D. Faubion and G.E. Marcus, 1–34.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Marcus, George E., and Michael Fischer. 1986. Anthropology as Cultural Critique.
An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago and London:
The University of Chicago Press.
Pandian, Anand. 2019. A Possible Anthropology: Methods for Uneasy Times. Duke
University Press.
Rabinow, Paul. 2003. Anthropos Today. Reflections on Modern Equipment.
Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Rabinow, Paul. 2011. The Accompaniment. Assembling the Contemporary. Chicago
and London: The University of Chicago Press.
Rosaldo, Renato, Smadar Lavie, and Kirin Narayan. 2018. ‘Introduction: Creativity
in Anthropology.’ In Creativity/Anthropology, edited by Smadar Lavie, Renato
Rosaldo, and Kirin Narayan, 1–10. Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press.
Savransky, Martin. 2016. The Adventure of Relevance: An Ethics of Social Inquiry.
London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Strathern, Marilyn. 2020. Relations: An Anthropological Account. Duke
University Press.
Wagner, Roy. 1981. The Invention of Culture. Chicago and London: The University
of Chicago Press.
Interlude I The principle of invention
(Outside in)
Martin Savransky
Nothing is given, everything is invented

When all is said and done, when all epistemic warrants and methodological
prescriptions have gone, when good sense and moralistic injunctions have
run aground, when all guarantees of stable ground have come undone –
all that is left is the principle of invention: Nothing is given, everything is
invented. It is this that Roy Wagner (2016, 35–36) taught us, is it not? It is
this that he encouraged us to (un)learn, when he put it to us that all learning
comes in the form of a shock, that all study is given over to an impro-
visation it barely manages to control, to a dance of forms out of which it
does not merely hallucinate but must invent that which it seeks to under-
stand, drawing it in, taking it on, transforming both knower and known
through the very dynamics of dance that render ‘culture’ itself nothing but
an act and process of invention and turn anthropologists as much as ‘all
human beings, wherever they may be’, into ‘fieldworkers of a sort, control-
ling the culture shock of daily experience through all kinds of imagined and
constructed “rules”, traditions, and facts’. It is this that he intimated when
he intimated that invention gives way not only to that which is learned but
to the very faculties that make learning possible in the first place, that by
which the world is deemed stable or changing, safe or perilous, cosmos or
chaos, such that order and disorder, ‘known and unknown, conventional
regularity and the incident that defies regularity are tightly and innately
bound together, they are the functions of each other and necessarily inter-
dependent. We cannot act’, he ruminated, ‘but that we invent each through
the other’ (2016, 51).
Nothing is given, everything is invented. Nothing could be more
groundless, more unhinged, more unprincipled. Groundless, for it tears at
the seams of every foundation, confronting every practice of knowledge
with the depths of its own abyss, with the hollowness of its commanding
authority. Unhinged, for it is radically anarchic, subjecting every act to a kind
of contingency no methodological justification, ethnographic or otherwise,
could allay. Unprincipled, for it includes the formulation of the principle
itself, inventing, like a defeated rationalist, one final rule for a world that
DOI: 10.4324/9781003253709-2
16 Martin Savransky
does not invent it for itself. Yet it is not a matter of dogmatizing on behalf of
an anthropologist that so explicitly – and so wisely – refused the company
of one Immanuel Kant, of one Alfred Schütz, and sought to preempt (with
whatever degree of control any invention can hope to exert) becoming the
subject of spurious philosophical analogies. And it is certainly not a matter
of reading Wagner’s (2016, 138) The Invention of Culture ironically, as part
of the symptomatology of a (modern, Western, anthropocentric) culture of
invention that, enthralled by the power of its own symbolism, made ‘Man’
a ‘mediator of things, a kind of universal catalyst’, capable of making and
unmaking worlds at will.
Rather than inventing a philosophy for an anthropologist who didn’t
invent it for himself, to take seriously (for now, anyway) what I am calling
‘the principle of invention’ is to give oneself over to a speculative impro-
visation, to the possibility and necessity of a counter-invention. It is to try
and learn Wagner’s lesson through another kind of dance that might not
only take us past what he called ‘the allegory of man’ but in so doing might
allow us to step outside. Which is to say that, through the artifice of this
most radical and most inoperative rule, what I am after is the chance to veer
out to a zone The Invention of Culture opens a door to, leaves ajar without
crossing, a shatter zone out-on-the-outside where ‘the general phenomenon
of human creativity’ is not what explains the fact and process of invention
but that which the principle of invention itself must explain (2016, 10–11).
After all, if ‘wolves treat one another with the tempered gentility of rococo
courtiers, and tigers kill for the abandoned young of other carnivores, why
single man’s forebears as the only real beasts in the zoo?’ (2016, 134). If
nothing is given, if everything is invented, does not the spider invent its
own web, the bird its own nest, with a style humans could only strenuously
imitate? Do not forests, as Eduardo Kohn (2013) teaches, invent their own
language and forms of thought? Do not baboons themselves invent forms
of sociality that lead them to wonder whether humans have culture at all
(Despret 2016)? Is not Jane Roberts, her writing as much as herself, invented
by Seth, by the late William James, and all those whom she channels (Skafish
2023)? Does not every organism have to invent, be shocked and learn in
the ongoing and unfinished dance it performs with its milieu, the singular
manner by which it might come to inhabit and be inhabited by it? Does not
life itself refuse the imperative to passively adapt to prefigured forms so as
to ‘create a form for itself, suited to the circumstances which are made for
it’ (Bergson 2003, 58)? (Aren’t some of these forms, sometimes, what we’re
wont to call ‘human’ if not ‘Man’?)
It is not in the spirit of some post-humanist cri de cœur that these questions
are asked, however. It is not to make a point about ‘humans’ that I suggest
it is perhaps not so much from them that invention flows but through them
that invention passes. If I invent the principle of invention and in so doing
attempt to push invention over the guardrails, out of bounds, beyond all
reason, it is to rediscover a passion for the outside. Which is to say that
Interlude I: The principle of invention 17
it is in order to step out, to escape the modern epistemological terms of
order that, when it comes to knowledge-making – especially, perhaps, when
it comes to forms of knowledge-making such as ethnography – inevitably
render all forms of invention suspect, the last recourse of the faithless, the
trick of the twice-born souls who in the grips of an epistemological crisis
have ceased believing in the world only to become infatuated with the power
of their own words. If it is not to ‘human creativity’ that invention refers
but to a more radical principle of invention that ‘human creativity’ belongs,
what is invented and what is real no longer oppose or displace but neces-
sarily implicate one another. Nothing is given, everything is invented, and
whatever is invented is in some way real, whatever is real is in some sense
invented.
The problem has changed – the anxiety of modern epistemology over a
knowing subject that would confuse her own symbolic creation with the
world from which her symbols are drawn suddenly begins to dissipate. But
in one and the same breath, we no longer know what ‘invention’ means,
where it comes from, what it involves, or what risks it poses, when it is
no longer merely the outpouring of a beautiful soul, when it is the world
itself that invents us and invents through us. And yet it is in the throes of
this unformed dance, in the opening to the outside, that perhaps, just per-
haps, the very act and process of invention might become perceptible in
a different light. It is here, out there, that one might once again read the
word invention for what it has always intimated, that to which it has always
pointed and to which we’re given over again and again: in·vention – from
the Latin in venire – that which comes or is brought into the world, that
which irresistibly connects us to the Outside. In the end, in the beginning,
that is what the principle of invention might render perceptible: the ver-
tiginous worldquake, the perilous practice and experience of opening to a
radical exteriority with which all inventive practices communicate, to the
unformed and inappropriable zone of indeterminate forces out of which
invention draws that which is not into existence, by which it transforms
what is. In other words, a pragmatics of the outside.
Outside in
It cannot be denied that such a way of approaching the question of inven-
tion has something eccentric about it, appealing to an elusive zone of
reality – the Outside – which resists every attempt at epistemic capture;
demanding that one take the armour off, lose oneself, step outside, escape
from the technical equipment of representation so as to give oneself over to
an improvisation with the unformed and undetermined, with the impossible
and the inappropriable. But it cannot be accepted that there’s anything gra-
tuitous or arbitrary about such eccentricity – for the ex-centric is one of the
marks of the outside. And after all, it was only very recently, in the course of
the eighteenth century, that the notion of ‘invention’, retaining the senses of
18 Martin Savransky
fabrication and creation until today, was severed from its evident connection
with the sense of discovery, with the ‘action of coming upon or finding’,
with the process of ‘finding out’ – senses which only some dictionaries now
appear to recall (Savransky 2016, 78). And if this is no coincidence, it is
because that was roughly also the time of the Western rejection of the out-
side: the time of ‘progress’, as the intellectual flame-keepers of European
empires were wont to call it; of the ‘Great Confinement’, as Michel Foucault
(2009) more perceptively named it in The History of Madness, one which
involved not only the interiorization of the outside of reason – unreason,
vagrancy, blasphemy, prostitution – but also the very attempt to turn the
world itself into a Great Interior, a systematic universe subject only to gen-
eral laws, to universal principles, rational knowledges, and timeless truths
(Toulmin 1990). A world, in other words, all given in advance, a through-
and-through universe whose unruly edges and unformed exteriorities could
be safely ignored, and eventually confined to mere footnotes in the provi-
dential unfurling of History.
Which is why to refuse to prolong the recent history that turned inven-
tion into an affectation of the mind, to escape the story that made of inven-
tion a ‘necessary illusion’ humans have to participate in so as to impose
meanings upon situations that are bereft of them, is also to step out of the
ready-made world, to throw it out of whack. In relay and return, to affirm
the principle of invention, to reclaim the forlorn history of invention as fun-
damentally bound up with discovery and fabrication, is to accept the risk
of learning to live in a world that is ongoing and unfinished, fundamentally
incomplete, and not certain to be saved, at all times subject to addition and
liable to loss. It is to affirm, in other words, that if there is invention at all
it is because – when all is said and done, when the seams of reason have
come undone – reality ‘is still in the making, and awaits part of its com-
plexion from the future’ (James 1975, 122). In this incomplete world, inven-
tion is but the event that regularly punctuates the wait, the improvised dance
through which reality gets made. It is an apprenticeship in the discovery of
the outside coming in, the fugitive habitation of an interstice through which
one can conjure a relation with exterior forces (of life, of thought, of the
Earth, of the otherwise) and draw something in, thereby engendering new
forms out of the unformed, creating possibles out of the impossible. What
does the bird do except invent the very possibility of home and of refuge
out of the very fugitive space which is the experience of flight? What does
the spider do except weave into existence a surface and force of capture out
of that which was not? If to discover is to invent, then invention is also a
response. It is a matter of responding to an insistence that precedes what the
invention, once achieved, will make exist. It is what thinker of the outside
Maurice Blanchot (1992, 58) calls ‘a response to what is not yet heard, an
attentive response in which the impatient waiting for the unknown and the
desiring hope for presence are affirmed’.
Such is the radical gesture clandestinely harboured in the effort to think
the act and process of invention ethnographically, as a matter not only of
symbolic mediations but of situated practices, generative devices, techniques
of sociality, and methodologies of life. Much more than an extension from
‘theory’ to ‘practice’ is at stake. For if it is true that the ‘anthropologist
makes experiences understandable (to himself as well as to others in his
society) by perceiving them and understanding them in terms of his own
familiar way of life, his culture’, (Wagner 2016, 36) such that, in the course
of her practice with others she ‘invents them as “culture” ’, it is neither her
perception nor the reality of others that she invents. It is with others and in
their presence, in what Adolfo Estalella and Tomás Sánchez Criado (2018,
18) appositely call the ‘joint problem-making’ they together improvise, in
the unformed dance to which they’re given over, that ethnographers and
those to whom they relate respond to an outside that belongs to no-one but
insists in their midst. It is as and through their collective improvisation that
they conjure exterior forces and draw them in, inventing not only in words
on a page but in and through the very devices their improvised sociality
has articulated, the sounds and noises they generate in their responses to
what has not yet been heard, the stream of thoughts that begins to circulate
through them in their collective poking of the unthought, the possibles their
own experimental collaborations have snatched from the impossible, the
forms their unformed dance has brought into existence and by which worlds
are transformed.
This is the reason why, if our ‘symbols do not relate to an external
“reality” at all’, it is not because there be no reality ‘out there’ to which
they could relate, or because ‘at most they refer to other symbolizations’
by means of which they translate (Wagner 2016, 42). It is rather because
the ‘out there’ from which they’re invented, whose forces their practices
draw in, ‘is farther away than any external world and even any form of
exteriority, which henceforth becomes infinitely closer’ (Deleuze 2006, 86).
Becoming at once infinitely farther and closer, the first transformation to
which ethnographic invention gives way is of course none other than that of
ethnographers themselves, who become not so much the practice’s subject as
its prey, themselves invented in the very process of collective improvisation
which they then – in lettered or multimedia reinventions – proceed to make
their own. And in relay and return, the others whom the dance implicates
are transformed by the manner in which the conjured forces of the outside
enter into a relationship with other forces configuring their own worlds,
entertaining questions and matters of shared concern they might not have
posed alone, elaborating new forms of assembly and collective storytelling
for the invention of stories and histories which henceforth become their
own. As such, if there is no translation without invention, there’s also no
invention without intranslation: a collective but nonsymmetrical act, at once
conceptual, political, and pragmatic, of introducing (‘intraduire’) generative
20 Martin Savransky
forces of alteration, contingent curves of divergence and runaway variations
that do not create possible openings in the world without simultaneously
opening the world up to an infinite cartography of other impossible worlds
(Cassin 2014, Savransky 2021).
Pragmatics of the outside

Far from recoiling from reality, far from trapping us in the imperium of
our own epistemes, in the deepest interiority of our own worlds, there-
fore, it is the outside that is the active force of invention, but it is invention
that, in destituting the established terms of order, constitutes the affirmative
power of the outside. Which is to say that it is by way of invention that
reality grows, in a metaphysics of call and response that draws the outside
in whilst pushing the inside out of bounds, over the guardrails, rendering
it a mere folding, a fragment of a fragmentary exterior, another impatient
wait for the unknown, another desiring hope for presence. ‘In this way the
outside is always an opening on to a future: nothing ends, since nothing
has begun, but everything is transformed’ (Deleuze 2006, 89). Because the
principle of invention prompts us to step out, to turn human creativity into
an anoriginary vector of what has always escaped ‘the allegory of man’,
we can follow Wagner outside when he writes that if ‘man has “changed”
over the past few hundred millennia, if his inventions and possession of
“self” has increased in control through the gain in control over his external
creativity (and vice versa), then nature itself has changed quite as much
as man; we have not “diverged” from nature at all’ (Wagner 2016, 138).
Indeed, it is not ‘man’ that invents ‘nature’ for himself but both of them
that diverge by virtue of a process of invention which turns them into some
of its multiple means – foldings of an outside through which its exterior
forces pass. It is as and through them and more, each through the other,
that the outside contingently comes in, engendering the always precarious
invention, the possibility and necessity of ongoing transformation, of what
we usually call ‘world’.
Nothing is ever given, and what is invented does not depict, represent,
or mediate the comings and goings of an indifferent world. Instead, every
invention – in words or in place, in thing or in thought, in method or in life –
enjoins the adventure of a radically incomplete world, ongoing and unfin-
ished, underway and in the making, open to the outside, subject to addition
or liable to loss. ‘Now the empiricist world can for the first time truly unfold
in all its extension: a world of exteriority, a world where thought itself is in a
fundamental relation to the Outside, a world where terms exist like veritable
atoms, and relations like veritable external bridges – a world where the con-
junction ‘and’ dethrones the interiority of the verb ‘is’, a Harlequin world of
coloured patterns and non-totalizable fragments, where one communicates
via external relations’ (Deleuze 2002, 163). It is only fitting that, in such a
strung-along and loosely connected world, the principle of invention – the
most groundless, unhinged and unprincipled of all– would offer neither
guides nor guarantees. It is only fitting that it would confront every prac-
tice – of knowing and making, of thinking and living – each in their own
way, with the riskiest and most perilous question, one that is posed even
when the answer can never be readily available. Not, that is, the question
of whether or how the invention relates to a pre-existent reality which it
destitutes, but that of its consequences, of the differences it is liable to make
to the ongoing and unfinished reality in which it will inevitably participate.
‘What difference will it make?’ (James 1975, 62). The risk of invention –
ethnographic and otherwise – is therefore that of a radical pragmatics of
the outside, of the indelible debt that binds every drawing in of the outside
to the effects and transformations it is liable to precipitate. For if the world
remains forever incomplete, ongoing and unfinished, without warrants or
guarantees, open to the outside and uncertain to be saved, inventions consti-
tute novelties as much as losses, beginnings as much as endings, joys as much
as tragedies. As such, when all is said and done, the question concerning all
invention, the problem posed to every practice that in giving itself over to
an unformed dance also gives to the outside the power to make it think and
create, is none other than this: With your invention, with your collective
improvisations and your affirmation of the outside, with every ‘and’ which
your practice inevitably adds to the ongoing metamorphosis of the world,
does the world ‘rise or fall in value? Are the additions worthy or unworthy?’
(James 1975, 122–123).
References
Bergson, Henri. 2003. Creative Evolution. Mineola: Dover.
Blanchot, Maurice. 1992. The Infinite Conversation. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Cassin, Barbara. 2014. Sophistical Practice: Toward a Consistent Relativism.
New York: Fordham University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles. 2002. Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974. New York:
Semiotext(e).
Deleuze, Gilles. 2006. Foucault. London: Continuum.
Despret, Vinciane. 2016. What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions?
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Estalella, Adolfo and Sánchez Criado, Tomás. 2018. Experimental
Collaborations: Ethnography Through Fieldwork Devices. New York &
Oxford: Berghahn.
Foucault, Michel. 2009. The History of Madness. London and New York: Routledge.
James, William. 1975. Pragmatism and the Meaning of Truth. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the
Human. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Savransky, Martin. 2016. The Adventure of Relevance: An Ethics of Social Inquiry.
Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
22 Martin Savransky
Savransky, Martin. 2021. Around the Day in Eighty Worlds: Politics of the Pluriverse.
Durham & London: Duke University Press.
Skafish, Peter. 2023. Rough Metaphysics: The Speculative Thought and Mediumship
of Jane Roberts. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Toulmin, Stephen. 1990. Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Wagner, Roy. 2016. The Invention of Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
1 How to counter-map collectively
Counter-Cartographies Collective (3Cs)
From their conception and design to their production and distribution,

mapmaking processes can become part of a research process and source
of insight. An ethnographic device, cartography becomes a graphic form
of thick description, representing information and analysis emerging from
situated knowledges. The process of mapping can facilitate exchange and
catalyze the formation of shared identities and collective forms across
differing lived experiences and positionalities. Mapping in this way, ethno-
graphic endeavours become `weaving practices’ within crowded fields of
knowledge-makers. Under this interventionist agenda of ‘knitting’ among
affected yet fragmented populations, counter-mapping intends to trans-
form the territories being represented.
File card
Field device: Counter-mapping.
Mode of inquiry: Spatial and collective thinking and acting (reasoning/
thinking/digesting/imagining).
Geographical location(s): Yes! (multiple universities).
Duration / time: 2 hours to multiple years.
Ethnographic counterparts: All y’all.
Resources: Paper, art supplies, a space to gather.
Substantive outputs: DisOrientation Guides (1.0 and 2.0), Counter\
mapping Queen Mary (https://countercartographies.org/).
Degree of difficulty: Easy to hard to impossible, depending on who is
involved and the outputs desired.
Apartment complex, Carrboro, North Carolina, USA,

September 2009
Members of 3Cs, a counter-mapping group, sit on the floor of a member’s
apartment, piecing together, like a jigsaw puzzle, the draft components of
their most recent project. In doing so, they bring together sheets of paper
containing printed ink, edits and markings in pen, marker, and pencil, and –
at this late stage – more than a little pizza grease. Even as members work in
pairs or individually, they do so in the same room, with the map as the hub to
which everyone returns with their latest ideas, drafts, and questions.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003253709-3
24 Counter-Cartographies Collective
Feminist Geography Conference, University of North Carolina at

Chapel Hill, USA, May 2017
Conference participants gather around large sheets of butcher paper, collect-
ively tracing geographies of care which do not appear on their campus maps
but have been built with the same sweat and blood as the campus buildings.
Some draw their own bodies onto the map – or even map their bodies – as a
refusal of separating body and territory.
‘Mapping Loss in the Anthropocene’ Workshop, University of

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, February 2020
Workshop participants stand before an enormous barebone outline of the
city, imagining environmental pasts and futures through drawings, markings,
shadings, and notes on the city’s rivers, streets, hills, and neighbourhoods.
They try to grasp the landscapes and lifeforms that have been lost, while
working together to reimagine – and to draw! – the materialities of a more
sustainable and just city.
These experiences, bringing together bodies around paper to collectively

think through and map – from multiple perspectives and with multiple
formats – the different spaces we co-inhabited, reflect the trajectory of the
Counter-Cartographies Collective. We propose our development of counter-
mapping as a mode of insurgent ethnography a la Jeff Juris. Our collective,
also known as 3Cs, for the three Cs in Counter-Cartographies Collective,
is named for the practice of mapping as a mode of open-ended research, to
explore, intervene in, and create anew the spaces we inhabit. Concretely, we
use counter-cartography as a technique to question the university as a space.
Our method of inquiry and intervention has produced multiple resonances,
developing over time and travelling to different contexts, mainly spaces of
higher education, unbounding the ivory tower of the university. 3Cs was
born in 2005 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA, formed by students
and professors from Geography and Anthropology departments out of a
common interest in bringing together the practice of cartography, social
theory, and political organizing.
Initially, we drew inspiration from the cartographic and spatial experiments
of different social movements we participated in or studied, such as precarious
labour organizing and student activism: Universite Tangente, Hackitectura,
Precarias a la Deriva, EuroMayDay, Precarity Webring, anti-sweatshop stu-
dent movements, Edu-Factory, etc. Those initiatives were actively involved in
processes of simultaneous research and intervention, paying careful attention
to the spatial dynamics of both power and counter-power strategies. At the
time, we were all spatially and socially located in universities, and we grew
frustrated with the incredible potential for radical political analysis combined
with the inability to problematize and politicize our own site. While by no
How to counter-map collectively 25
means limited to university spaces, a critical – or counter – appropriation of
cartography allowed us to break through our spatial blindfolds, to reimagine,
reinhabit, and intervene in our campus.
The opening vignettes of collective mapping show simple ways that
different spatial experiences of the same site and understandings of its
rhythms can be altered. This collective exercise is one step in a longer
mapping process. Our insistence on mapping collectively and prioritizing
the use of hand-drawn maps, in combination with other methodologies,
relates to our politicization of the mapping process. At a time when cartog-
raphy is dominated by mapping done on computers, largely in isolation, and
for corporate or military interests, we have pursued social and democratic
forms of mapping that reject the ‘God’s eye’ perspective of masculinist car-
tography and insist on mapping as an embodied and situated process. To
these ends, getting ‘bodies around a map’ has been an important part of our
mapping process – from initial questions to each stage of design and produc-
tion, to the presentation and circulation of the maps.
For 3Cs, mapping wherever we happen to be is a response to a logic of
research and knowledge production that reinforces a misleading spatial and
power divide between ‘out there’ and ‘in here’, which also evokes the epis-
temological trap of the split between researcher and researched, subject vs.
object. The ‘ivory tower’ myth functions to sweep under the table urgent pol-
itical and economic questions about how universities function and how they
themselves shape space. Mapping in the first person does not mean wallowing
in self-centred reflexivity or limiting our scope to the local. On the con-
trary, pulling threads through research into the everyday, a process in which
each participant starts where they are, lays a strong foundation for building
connections across places and scales as well. This process can be more explicit,
too – ‘How does the university contribute to processes of climate change?
How is white supremacy embedded in the campus landscape?’ A situated gaze
is crucial to the process of counter-mapping: taking a deep look at the spaces
that we inhabit. Mapping in this situated way allows for rethinking our living
and working spaces, building new relationships, and constructing alliances.
As such, counter-mapping is adaptable to different communities and places,
working to ‘re-discover’ a space that seemed familiar to people who already
inhabit it or ‘familiarize’ one group with another group of new inhabitants.
In this way, our mapping – the process and the result – act as a form
of counter-cartography, that is, mapping that seeks to challenge dominant
power relations, as well as dominant cartographic conventions and their
Western, colonial, and masculine biases (Mason-Deese 2019). As such,
counter-mapping enhances the ethnographic mission par-excellence: ‘to make
the strange familiar, and the familiar strange’ – only here with heightened
attention to spatiality. Yet, counter-mapping distances itself from classical
ethnographic endeavours, based on a clear distinction between the expert
observer and the native observed. Rather, we find keen affinities with more
relational approaches such as those coming from feminist epistemology of
‘situated knowledges’ and ‘thinking with care’ (Haraway 1988; Puig de la
Bellacasa 2017). Our research process is grounded on this kind of relational
epistemological and ontological foundations, described by Arturo Escobar
as ‘pluriversal’ (2018), having important repercussions on how we look and
perceive, ask and take notes, map and move, as well as relate and inter-
vene in our respective fields of politicized study. It also draws on the work
of militant research collectives, especially Colectivo Situaciones rooted in
Argentina, that have further worked to break down the distinctions between
the research subject and the research object and between research and action
(Colectivo Situaciones 2003, Dalton and Mason-Deese 2012). Having these
theoretical inspirations in mind, in what follows we explore two of our
counter-cartographic strategies: 1) ‘feminist drifts’; and 2) mapping as
ethnographic devices able to connect people and build alliances.
Plan a drift!
Drifting was part of our very origins as a mapping collective. Inspired by the
feminist version developed by Precarias a la Deriva in Madrid (Spain), a mili-
tant research project which resonated internationally among many different
activist collectives, 3Cs adopted this method to our own site, conducting
several planned drifts within the campus of the University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill, around 2005.1
We were fascinated by the possibilities of re-appropriating the
Situationist dérive to explore emerging forms of precarity within the con-
text of neoliberal higher education. Situationist researchers wandered the
city, allowing for encounters, conversations, interaction, and micro-events
to be the guide of their urban itineraries. The result was a psychogeography
based on haphazard coincidences. However, Precarias a la Deriva (2004)
argued that this version was appropriate for a bourgeois male individual
without commitments, but not satisfactory for a precaria, a feminized pre-
carious worker. Instead of an exotic and unplanned itinerary, the precarias’
version of drifting consisted in deliberately following an already-lived tra-
jectory. With each drift led by a specific person speaking in first person, this
planned drift would bring together a unique cohort of precarious profiles,
researching similarities and differences among them, by travelling through
their respective everyday-life settings. We agreed with Precarias a la Deriva
that instead of casual drifts, open to the serendipities of an urban context,
the ‘derive a la femme’ opened more possibilities for engaging in transforma-
tive research. A series of drifts, each led by a different precarious woman
worker, and each grounded in the individual’s life trajectory, made it pos-
sible to recognize shared conditions among previously unconnected people.
This transformed the participants into the researchers of their own precar-
ious conditions and created connections and possibilities for shared struggle
among often atomized precarious individuals.
Years later, as our campus maps traveled and inspired initiatives in other
universities, members of 3Cs were invited to London to participate in the
Countermapping QMary Collective. Along with other students, staff, and
activists, we engaged in a long and rich drift through the campus space as
part of a collaborative research process. The outcomes of that drift were
later incorporated in the Countermap of Queen Mary.
Scene: Queen Mary University campus, London, UK, May 2010

Each participant carries a clipboard, a blank map, a marker, and a set
of questions as we slowly walk through the campus space in a group.
Questions range from ‘Where do you see security cameras?’ to ‘Where do
you feel safe?’ or ‘Which areas of campus are accessible?’ to ‘Where do
you see power? Where do you see resistance?’ As we walk, we take time
for each participant to mark those notes on the blank map they carry on
their clipboard as well as for conversation, in response to the questions or
just sharing stories of their experiences at the university. We get strange
looks, and sometimes questions, from people passing by, as our slow pace
and questioning manner disrupts the campus’s normal rhythms, recasting
the university as an object of research and of political intervention. Later,
after our drift, we come together to share what everyone has marked on
their maps, launching a broader conversation about what was seen and
felt on the drift. This conversation serves as the launchpad for producing
a common map and board game focused on the role of different types of
borders in university life.
The research drift, in its multiple manifestations, serves as a powerful
tool to produce unexpected questions given the opportunity to share a spa-
tial fragment of lived experience. It is also a situated way to gather data, by
making observations as one drifts through a space. Also, the drift implies
occupying that space differently – in groups and questioning it. These drifts
can take multiple forms, based on the context, objectives, and participants,
and are a key step not only for gathering data, but also for constructing a
collective subject that will move on to the next stage of mapmaking. Our use
of the method directly builds on the feminist appropriation of the drift by
Precarias a la Deriva, in order to allow participants to share their daily tra-
jectories and experiences with others along the drift. In our practice, we seek
to both provoke responses to previously planned questions and leave room
for the unexpected questions, which can only occur through the process of
occupying a space differently and walking while questioning.
Connect people and build alliances!
Scene: Radical Rush, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,

September 2014
Members of different student and campus organizations fill into a room and
gather around a table. Participants work in groups on blank campus maps,
responding to cards that pose questions, such as: ‘Who is memorialized on
Figure 1.1 Counter/mapping Queen Mary map (2010). This map, produced by 3Cs and the Counter\
mapping Queen Mary collective, explores the relationship between bordering practices and
institutions in the UK and the UK system of higher education. It was produced in response
to an effort to institute a points-based visa system for foreign students in the UK (Counter-
Cartographies Collective).
campus?’ ‘Who do we want to be memorialized on campus?’ ‘Where do we
see struggle embodied on campus?’ ‘What new spaces would you like to see on
campus?’ Participants start to name all the buildings named after enslavers or
racist state leaders, but also the results of campus struggles: the Black Cultural
Center and LGBTQ Center, and those of struggles yet to come. We start to col-
lectively imagine new possibilities for the space: how could we rename those
aforementioned buildings, what other spaces would we need to make campus
truly welcoming for everyone? Conversations emerge about what we do (or
do not) have in common, how we can support each other in our struggles and,
then, specific strategies to embody our desires on the landscape.
This scene captures a fragment of one of the collective mapmaking
workshops which the 3Cs has led on university campuses over the past
decade of work. This particular series of workshops took place at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in the context of local and
national organizing around how institutions in the United States should
reckon with the legacy of slavery and racism in their spaces. 3Cs’ work
was done in solidarity with the Real Silent Sam Coalition, a diverse group
of local and campus activists renewing public attention to and discussions
of monuments and place names honouring white supremacists, as well as
a specific collaboration with FLOCK (Feminists Liberating Our Collective
Knowledge), a group of geographers working to sustain the momentum
built by decades of struggle around place names on campus. The Real Silent
Sam movement, which came to be led by black women students, focused
attention on the building containing the Geography Department, named
then for the founder of the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina, along with the
confederate soldier monument on campus nicknamed ‘Silent Sam’.
In this context of organizing, the 3Cs workshop representing a genre of
similar workshops, drew not only on individuals’ experiences on/of campus
but also on their organization’s histories and collective trials, as well as the
tireless efforts of a number of historians and other campus researchers over
the years to uncover what lies beneath the glossy surface of official univer-
sity history. Group walking tours, archival research into campus history, and
collective mapping workshops are part of a much broader and more expan-
sive project to remake the campus landscape, to share knowledge from gen-
eration to generation, and to build the necessary relations and alliances to
transform the campus.
Later, we come together with our maps and research as part of FLOCK
to make a zine about the campus landscape and its struggles. Working in
this coalition, the final map shows not only the racist and sexist history
embedded in the landscape, but also shared imaginaries for the future,
for what campus could become. The maps are passed down from student
activists year after year and play a role in teaching new students about
hidden histories of campus and inspiring them to take direct action to tear
down racist monuments.
The mapping process – from research, to design, to distribution of the
map – is thus productive in a second sense through the production of new
alliances, networks, and collective subjects. Mapping – collectively – allows
for visually exploring our common issues and problems, working together
in a concrete process that builds relationships that can endure into lasting
alliances and foster the creation of strategies and campaigns. Crucially for
counter-mapping, the entire process of mapping is collective, which makes
this process of connecting people and building alliances essential, as the
resulting collective participates in each stage, from initial research through
analysis and distribution.
Conclusion
These two examples of counter-mapping practices – feminist drifting and
maps as alliance-builders – are ones we have used over the past 15-odd
years. Counter-mapping as a research process is not limited to attaining
one single product (a map, for example) or completing one spatial exercise
(such as a drift or workshop). Since maps are never ‘totally finished’, the
mapping process is not limited to the research and design of the map itself
but also includes the distribution of that map – the many lives the map
takes on as it travels, initiates, and engages in new encounters. These new
encounters produced by the map as it moves and is re-appropriated, the new
connections it creates between experiences and organizations in different
places, go beyond the mapmakers’ design or intentions, demonstrating the
map’s own agency and its productive power. While we never try to ‘control’
this process, it is important to consider how the map may travel and facili-
tate potential uses.
Remember, beyond the steps and points presented here, what we are
trying to achieve with counter-cartography is a political and methodological
intervention, a distinct form of knowledge production. This is why each
point in the process becomes a potential moment to rethink our analysis.
Map design becomes an analytical method – a process of doing co-analysis
to present results or conclusions, to communicate something different
about a given space. Distribution also becomes part of method: Who do we
‘bring together’ with our maps? What other examples of counter-mapping
do we reference? It is in doing these steps of mapping together, and in the
frustrations and stumbling blocks that appear, that we create our counter-
cartographic analysis.
Finally, we would like to share 3Cs responses to the question ‘why maps?’
First, maps are not textual, grammatical, or linear in the same way as texts
or drawings. While there is a ‘sort-of’ grammar to maps, a map’s ‘language’
‘speaks’ in different ways. The visuality can be accessible to different people
in alternative ways and can make the general contours of a space quickly
graspable. Second, maps are easy to produce or expand upon in a collective
manner. Generating participatory and militant research practices based on
textual production, with co-authoring of texts can be quite a challenge for
anything larger than a small group of people. The graphic and non-linear
format of mapping can facilitate intervention at different points and from
several people at the same time. Third, maps demand space and create place.
And fourth, maps never need to be considered finished. Maps can always be
doodled on, written on, have post-its placed on them, etc. This is especially
important to remember when thinking of the distribution and potential
future uses of a map. The map’s future interventions in a space will depend
on how they are remade or scribbled upon.
The ethnographic method provides rich qualitative-based research from
within a given social process, usually centering upon everyday life experiences
as the landscapes where social hierarchies and power relationships unfold.
By including mapping in the research endeavour, the ethnographic qualita-
tive appraisal is enhanced by engaging the spatial underpinnings of social
processes. As such, by mapping, everyday life and power relations are both
spatially grounded, allowing different analytical insights and unexpected
possibilities for interventions -mingling, knitting, tinkering-, to emerge.
How to
In any mapping project, different basic phases are needed, even if they look
different each time or are adapted to each place:
1. Bringing people and/or organizations together, data collection and

research (keeping in mind that data takes many forms and that research
can also be a way of intervening in a space).
2. Design, understood as a process of visual co-analysis, collective know-
ledge production, including analysis in the holistic process of research,
not separating data collection from analysis.
3. Distribution, through existing networks and the construction of new
networks and alliances.
4. Careful attention to how each phase is thought out, collectivized,
critiqued, carried out, etc. is key. Don’t worry – it’s cool to learn from
past mistakes and from trial and error! A few tips we’ve found useful
along the way are:
• All maps are (sort of) fictions: map to make the truths that we want
or find useful. Map to call the world we want into being.
• The process of mapping is productive in itself.
• Map from your own situation, not from above.
• Map systems of oppression, not oppressed peoples.
• Use the power of maps strategically, in relation and accountable to
movements/communities/struggles.
Note
1 See our origin myth story, ‘Drifting through the Knowledge Machine,’ in Casas-
Cortes & Cobarrubias, 2007.
Sources
AREA Chicago. 2012. Notes for a Peoples Atlas project. Chicago: AREA Chicago
Imprint. https://peoplesatlas.com/
Casas-Cortes, Maribel, and Sebastián Cobarrubias. 2007. ‘Drifting Through
The Knowledge Machine. In Collective Theorization.’ In Constituent
Imagination: Militant Investigations, edited by Casas-Cortes, Maribel, and
Sebastián Cobarrubias, 112–126. Oakland, CA: AK Press.
Colectivo Situaciones. 2003. ‘On the Researcher-Militant.’ Translated by
Sebastian Touza. Transversal. https://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/0406/
colectivosituaciones/en.html
Dalton, Craig, and Liz Mason-Deese. 2012. ‘Counter (Mapping) Actions: Mapping as
Militant Research.’ ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies
11: 439–46.
Feminists Liberating Our Collective Knowledge (FLOCK) Collective. 2016. https://
flockgeographies.wordpress.com
Haraway, Donna. 1988. ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism
and the Priviledge of Partial Perspective.’ Feminist Studies 14 (3): 575–599.
Kolektiv Orangotango, eds. 2018. This Is Not an Atlas. Berlin: Transcript.
Mason-Deese, Liz. 2019. ‘Counter-Mapping.’ In International Encyclopedia of
Human Geography, 2nd ed., vol. 2, edited by Audrey Kobayashi, 423–432.
Amsterdam: Elselvier.
Precarias a la Deriva. 2004. A la Deriva por los Circuitos de la Precariedad Femenina.
Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños.
Puig de la Bellacasa, María. 2017. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than
Human Worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Stallmann, Timothy. 2012. ‘Alternative Cartographies Building Collective Power.’
Master’s Thesis submitted to the Department of Geography at the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
2 How to produce responsive
ethnography of data
Jorge Núñez and Maka Suárez
Collaborative and interdisciplinary digital platforms open up novel

modes of inquiry for engaging with the production of data on pressing
social issues, like violence and carcerality. Ethnography is particularly
well positioned to explore the understandings of different knowledge
communities as well as documenting power relations among various
actors. Media such as data visualizations, podcasts, film, photography,
and illustrations, official (and unofficial) statistics, legal and bureaucratic
archives, economic and sociological surveys, policy memos, essays, and
interviews, all provide different compositional resources for including
diverse voices, viewpoints and aesthetics. The possibilities of combining
ethnography with digital platform-driven research has the capacity to
generate unexpected collaborations and allow novel connections between
seemingly unrelated issues. The result is an experimental digital space for
the production of responsive scholarship.
File Card
Field device: Digital platform-driven research.
Mode of inquiry: Interdisciplinary ethnography of data and collaborative
production of statistics.
Geographical location(s): Ecuador.
Duration / time: 2019 – ongoing.
Ethnographic counterparts: feminist collectives, human rights
organizations, justice system authorities, prosecutors, police officers,
families affected by disappearance, inmates and their families,
anthropologists, filmmakers, computer engineers, economists, lawyers,
epidemiologists, and journalists.
Resources: Funding from international cooperation agencies and
Ecuadorian universities.
Substantive outputs: EthnoData, www.ethnodata.org/es-es/
Degree of difficulty: Medium
After a year of interdisciplinary and collaborative ethnographic research

with public institutions including National Police, General Judiciary
Administration, Attorney General’s Office, and civil society organizations
working on femicides and missing people, we launched EthnoData in
November 2020, an STS-inspired multimodal and multimedia platform
DOI: 10.4324/9781003253709-4
34 Jorge Núñez and Maka Suárez
for the study of data concerned with violent deaths in Ecuador. EthnoData
began as a hermeneutic tool to investigate state statistics but soon developed
into a more complex platform. EthnoData’s team assumed the challenge of
anonymizing and cleaning official datasets to make them publicly available.
This process was accompanied by another methodological aim of the plat-
form that sought to include users in the labours of data storytelling. Our
purpose was to generate a collaborative mode of inquiry with an emphasis
on the politics behind state-produced databases.
One of the modules within EthnoData allows users to produce visualizations
by plotting data onto regional maps. Users can filter homicides from the
total number of violent deaths and create geographical visualizations. These
graphs and maps have been particularly useful for journalists, scholars, and
students. EthnoData also offers a series of essays on the politics of data
meant to generate discussion forums about violent deaths. Users are also
invited to interact with other ethnographic experimentations such as short
crime narratives based on information from police reports, curatorial data
exhibits on femicides and police infrastructure, and podcasts on violence
and bureaucracy. All the ethnographic material comes from databases of
violent deaths kept by public institutions. EthnoData’s first iteration also
included short documentaries on missing people co-produced with the fam-
ilies of the disappeared.
Data governance became a policy priority in Ecuador a decade ago. Since
2010, improving statistics on violent deaths has been a pressing subject
matter for government officials, giving way to frequent intergovernmental
commissions and committees. In the process of building EthnoData, we
interacted with different government agencies and realized how little they
knew about each other’s ways of producing statistics. They all employed
similar metrics but insisted they had different numbers, yet when we
combined their datasets, we found only minor discrepancies. This raised
new ethnographic questions such as why government agencies perceived
their numbers as different – and better – than other public institutions.
Sally Engle Merry (2016) conceptualizes the ‘culture of the indicator’
as a growing prominence of quantification in governance, through which
technical and technological rationalities define what counts as a problem
in terms of policy. There is nothing new in asserting that state numbers
are not neutral. Official statistics cannot be separated from their moral and
political economic purpose. At the same time, governments are not alone in
the statistical arena of official data. There are multiple stakeholders behind
what David Ribes (2019) calls the politicization of data. An official number
is a site of contestation and negotiation. Our experience working with
EthnoData was seeing this play out on the ground. For instance, Ecuadorian
feminist collectives challenged official femicide statistics yet, worked col-
laboratively with the justice system to standardize methodologies and har-
monize data collected from various sources. EthnoData was part of that
process and the platform served as a model for devising a public website on
How to produce responsive ethnography of data 35
femicides. Our role as ethnographers of data was to open new spaces for
collaboration and critical inquiry. Different government agencies provided
us with large datasets on femicides, while at the same time, we learned why
civil society organizations challenged the very production of such data. In
parallel a feminist collective produced alternative datasets as a response to
what they saw as faulty numbers. EthnoData also included that dataset.
In turn, some government agencies questioned that alternative database
because they argued it was produced to represent their ‘ideological’ views
of femicide. The challenge for EthnoData was to design a digital ecology
that allowed for previously incommensurable data to become analyzable in
different contexts and by contrasting publics.
EthnoData turned into an experiment in conceptualizing and depicting
critical data stories, and in doing so, the platform became a digital space
‘in the making’. EthnoData was inspired in STS debates in ‘critical making’
(Ratto 2011) and joined other authors in proposing a ‘material interven-
tion’ in academic scholarship as a way of ‘build(in)g alternative forms of
technoscience’ (Tirrell et al. 2020). EthnoData was – and continues to be – a
collective instrument that allowed us to share and produce knowledge, make
data, and present interpretations to build more just, diverse, democratic,
inclusive, and equitable societies. In this light, we understood EthnoData,
following Lyndsay Poirier (2017, 72), as a knowledge production tool to
‘intervene in status quo design, establishing opportunities for surprise that
trigger reflection’.
What interested us most in building data infrastructures and capaci-
ties like EthnoData was the impact it could have on policy and account-
ability, and the possibilities to make ethnographic research responsive to
statistical demands in times of crisis. The platform was developed so that
users would be able to contrast datasets and produce multiple interpret-
ations and contestations. We focused on the ways in which ‘ethnography,
like other technologies, can also be designed to challenge and change
existing order, provoking new orderings of subjectivity, society, and culture’
(Fortun 2012, 450). EthnoData was inspired by other experimental and
collaborative digital platforms like PECE (the Platform for Experimental
and Collaborative Ethnography) developed by Kim and Mike Fortun (this
volume); as well as the BioEthnography platform developed by Elizabeth
Roberts (2021). However, our platform tried to push the boundaries of col-
laborative critical platform-driven research by also producing data.
In 2021, in the aftermath of a prison massacre, EthnoData incorporated
a new module on carcerality. This module was less interactive and less
focused on storytelling. Rather, it was more oriented towards activism and
the production of numerical evidence. In addition to interdisciplinarity
and collaboration, the new approach embraced what we call ‘respon-
sive scholarship’, which not only advances a critique of data produced
by institutions but also generates data as a critique of institutions. We
did not move away from EthnoData’s original ethos. On the contrary, the
Figure 2.1 Entrelazados (Entwined). Illustration by La Arisca ©.
prison module benefited from existing resources. For instance, Figure 2.1
is one of four artistic collaborations rendered from our discussions around
data, different forms of violence, and silencing of prisoners’ families. It is
based on information gathered in EthnoData and in conversations with
the research team that produced the platform as well as the artist who
made it. The image was included in the Diagnostic of Ecuador’s Prison
System 2021, an official report produced by Kaleidos in response to four
violent riots that took place in 2021, taking the lives of more than 350
inmates (Núñez et al. 2021). The data produced was used by prison abo-
lition activists and human rights organizations to challenge the official
narrative of the mass killings.
In thinking of data as a scholarly response to massacre we designed a
collaborative survey with prisoners’ families. Our goal was to illuminate
what the institution overlooked in terms of statistics or even tried to hide
with numbers, for example, the transfer of incarceration costs from the gov-
ernment to prisoners and their families. Before undertaking the quantifica-
tion of these problems, we conducted an ethnography of ‘prison data’ in a
broad sense – examining institutional statistics, prison records, biometric
information, and institutional reports. We began with the official forensic
report given to the prosecution days after the massacre, which revealed 79
names and described numerous beheadings, hundreds of mutilations, and
more than a thousand lacerations. It indicated that body parts and corpses
had been found in different places within the three supermax prisons where
the killings took place, including wing hallways, courtyards, and cell blocks.
The report included photographs of bullet casings and ballistic traces as
well as photographs of recovered blades and knives. However, this evi-
dence file did not mention that the list of missing inmates was significantly
larger than the bodies counted in the process of forensic human identifi-
cation, which we knew through interviews with the criminalistics team in
charge of forensic human identification. The exact number of killings was
still unknown months after the massacres. Biometric information, which
included prisoners’ photographs, fingerprints, and voice recordings, was
incomplete. To identify the bodies, criminalistics relied on a decommissioned
mugshot database and a series of massacre mobile phone videos filmed by
inmates and circulated on social media.
The lack of biometric information was only part of the problem with
prison data. The Ecuadorian carceral system did not even have a clear stat-
istical picture of inmates. During the 2014 prison reform, the Ecuadorian
government put in place a centralized Penitentiary Management System (SGP
for its Spanish acronym) intended to institutionalize data governance. The
SGP was developed on a software called Odoo (On-Demand Open Object),
an open-sourced platform for data management applications that allows cus-
tomization of user needs. At the same time, however, modifications required
extensive development skills and expensive updates, which the government
never carried out. This resulted in rapid digital obsolescence and loss of cru-
cial information. The night of February 2021, when the massacre took place,
and the months that followed made evident just how outdated the system
was. Our experience shows that the SGP is a relevant example – though not
the only one – to illustrate the need for increased ethnography of data.
In its early stage, the SGP platform was an attempt to cut off red tape, but
the digitization process only created more bureaucratic hurdles for prisoners
and their families. It also produced an insurmountable learning curve for
public servants. The average prison employee lacked the technical skills to
navigate the system, which evolved into a chaotic production and circulation
of Excel worksheets, which were generated by each prison and reintegrated
by headquarters administrators to draft official reports. Paradoxically, the
SGP simultaneously decentralized and recentralized prison data, allowing
for a hybrid data infrastructure, with paper records and digital files not
always in accord.
We had access to the full SGP dataset. Part of our collaboration included
combining all existing datasets, as well as cleaning and de-identifying the
SGP dataset. At the time (April 2021), the database totalled 240,960 indi-
vidual registers for the years between 2014–2021 despite the prison popu-
lation nearing 39,000 in 2021. The main problem with the dataset was the
multiplicity of records for a single inmate. A new register could be generated
at various points in an inmate’s time within the prison system. For instance,
when they entered the system, when they were transferred, if their sentence
was commuted, if they passed away, or if they left (and sometimes returned
to) the system. Thus, one single individual could have numerous registers
making it hard to correlate data or base any analysis on the information on
the SGP alone. To use this dataset, we needed to do what computing engin-
eers defined as ‘making data operational’. For this we followed a two-part
process. First, we eliminated multiple entries for the same inmate. Second,
we recategorized inmates according to status: present, free, transferred,
other. These four variables resulted from downsizing 22 categories into four
simplified variables to reduce inaccuracies. What we want to highlight in
EthnoData’s evolution into a digital platform for responsive scholarship is
how we approached the cleaning of data as a political practice. The SGP
made evident how the bureaucratic logic of numbers operated: statistics
were produced not only to meet institutional requirements but also to cover
up corruption. Moreover, we also realized that, in this case, more data or
better data would not solve the situation because institutional numbers were
deeply interlinked with the conditions of confinement that gave way to the
massacres. We needed to produce data otherwise.
The politicization of numbers: a critical production of data

In the Ecuadorian prison system, the use of data as a cover-up of everyday
corruption occurs through ‘security indicators’ that represent the ‘progression’
of an inmate within the ‘rehabilitation process’. Based on a series of numerical
calculations, a security indicator provides information on whether a prisoner
should be incarcerated in a minimum, medium, or maximum-security area.
The assessment behind the security indicator is done by a technical team and
uses legal and psychological parameters to determine the security threat of
each individual. The production of these indicators is based on reports, basic-
ally official forms that different bureaucrats must fill out. However, in practice,
these indicators are commodities within penitentiaries. The bureaucratic paper-
work behind an indicator can be bought and sold to manipulate calculations.
This practice is commonly known as refile in Ecuador (Núñez 2007).
In addition to corruption, prison data was either nonexistent or redundant.
According to Ecuadorian legislation, all incoming inmates should receive an
initial medical checkup to determine their health status – including, STEs,
infectious diseases (HIV, TB), and mental health. This meant that, at the
very least, there must be one medical file per inmate. However, reviewing
medical data, which was managed by the Ministry of Health, we found that
many prisoners had no medical history. Moreover, medical records should
be included in the SGP, but the Ministry of Health used their own data man-
agement system called PRAS, which in turn had a number of shortcomings.
For instance, it needed a stable internet connection, which was often unre-
liable within the prison system. This resulted in partial data collection or a
mix of paper documents and electronic information, often producing incom-
plete, inconsistent or inexistent digital medical files for inmates. According
to a former physician of the prison system, the lack of precision in data
collection was more often used as an excuse to delete data than to correct it.
The problem with scant health data is not only the detriment to prisoners’
physical and mental conditions, but their actual imprisonment depends on
this information. For instance, during the COVID-19 pandemic, clinical his-
tories became the legal tenets for commuting sentences and for early release
of prisoners based on medical records.
In this context of scant data, we conducted a collaborative survey with
inmates’ families to produce numerical evidence useful for those who lived
behind bars, and to a certain extent counter the official narrative based on
incomplete data. Methodologically, we replicated our experience in co-
producing short documentaries with families of missing people. In 2020,
EthnoData worked with Asfadec, an association of families affected by dis-
appearance in Ecuador in the co-production of short films about the human
suffering behind people’s disappearances. A 30-person production team
carried out what we thought of as an experiment in collaborative ethno-
graphic cinema. The project was carried out with eight families of missing
persons, who became film directors, and who had complete control over
the final product. Kaleidos staff were assigned production roles such as
researching, script writing, and editing. Despite social distancing due to the
COVID-19 pandemic, we were able to create a fluid online conversation
that lasted for nearly a year. We got to know each other and to develop a
common agenda; debating what we wanted to address and how. The cre-
ative process included elaborating questions, playing with digital resources,
and overcoming silences. It built a complex narrative – not without difficul-
ties and negotiations. Making the documentaries meant rewriting the script
several times, adding images, music, voices, agreeing on what kinds of scenes
we wanted and which we were able to film during lockdown.
The collaborative survey was premised on the idea that producing
numbers could recreate the critical potential of film, which meant, in our
view, giving prisoners’ relatives control over the data to be produced, and
thus part of the narrative that was being told about prisoners and the car-
ceral system more broadly. We worked with family members through a
WhatsApp group chat, though Jorge Núñez had conducted long term field-
work with prisoners and their families before (Núñez 2006; 2022). A human
rights organization invited us to join this WhatsApp group months earlier so
we could interact and interview people for our research. We also met with
them on Zoom to explain the survey and opened another group chat with
those interested in co-designing the questionnaire.1 Families were receptive
but cautious with the survey. The promise of statistics detached from control
or corruption sounded quite naive in their ears. They had first-hand experi-
ence with numbers populating Excel worksheets that turned into pricy com-
modities within prison. We discussed corruption, and how we envisioned
the survey as a way to expose it. We also showed how EthnoData helped us
politicize statistical biases and miscategorizations in homicide and femicide
cases. In the end, we collectively decided to focus on how inmates and their
families bore the cost of incarceration and how already precarious prison
health services deteriorated further during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The survey gathered information about expenses covered by inmates
and their families, including access to health, food, bed space, security, and
telecommunications. It was applied digitally as well as in-person during
inmate visitation days. Depending on whether families were covering bare
minimums, which included food and basic hygiene goods, or if they were
required to pay for communication and security protection within prison,
costs ranged from $124 USD to $251 USD per month. The survey also
showed that most families came from low socioeconomic backgrounds, and
that women were the primary providers and caretakers of prisoners from
outside prison walls. It also revealed several forms of bureaucratic violence,
ranging from verbal abuse and mistreatment to various instances of harass-
ment during visitation days.
The Diagnostic Report included the collaborative survey’s results and
our ethnography of the SGP and prison bureaucracy. It was written to be
a resource for activism and advocacy rather than a policy memo. However,
upon a formal request from human rights organizations, the study was
included in the National Assembly’s official report on prison massacres. It
was also presented several times to high-ranking government officials and
in parliamentary hearings. In addition, the dataset cleaned for EthnoData
was used by international organizations and various government agencies
to elaborate their own reports, and the Diagnostic was referenced by inter-
national human rights agencies, including the Inter-American Commission
on Human Rights, and numerous local and international media sources.
Beyond the political relevance gained by the Diagnostic, the prison module
turned EthnoData into an alternative data source.
In creating EthnoData we learned how to engage with civil society
and government institutions in a productive way and avoid opportunistic
partnerships. We also learned that collaborations must be based on trust, but
they are not free of frictions and competing political agendas. For instance,
The Diagnostic came into fruition after a year of negotiations with govern-
ment officials, who were wary of our critical approach to prison data and
our collaborative methodology. They wanted a traditional consultancy that
would allow them to carry out specific prison reforms following the incre-
ment of prison homicides. These had often already been pre-designed ‘higher
up’ (like the previous prison reform in 2014), and they were more interested
in confirmation of their policies rather than actual changes in the politics of
confinement and security. EthnoData could not offer them that kind of affirm-
ation, and yet, we reached a collaboration agreement after the first massacre,
when other contributors to EthnoData, particularly the Ecuadorian National
Police, pressured prison authorities to allow us to conduct the research. It is
important to mention that police support to EthnoData did not ensue from a
sudden interest in scholarship on their part, but from their institutional reluc-
tance to take control over the prison system.
To summarize, EthnoData is a digital research platform for experimen-
tation with ethnography in the form of written texts, films, illustrations,
podcasts, and statistics. As a mode of ethnographic inquiry, it focuses on
small details, collaborative efforts, situated practices, and ‘minor’ histories.
As a mode of digital engagement, it allows multimodal and multimedia com-
positional narratives. EthnoData is a space for the production of responsive
scholarship understood as ethnographic interventions in the face of crisis,
disaster, and massacre. EthnoData works with civil society organizations
and government agencies but does not work for them. The basis of the plat-
form is the interaction between data, images, words, and sounds interwoven
in a critique of violence and death.
How to
The selection of collaborators is key to building productive research
relationships and informing the politics of the platform. In designing an
ethnographic digital platform, it is useful to have enough time and space
for collaborative relations to develop. This includes regular and formal
meetings as well as informal gatherings. In our experience, building trust
among collaborators is the first task at hand, and platform trust ensues from
people working together on a given task or solving a specific problem.
There is a certain level of intellectual complicity among collaborators
needed to create and maintain a digital platform. When participants know
their voices are considered and their input is taken as feedback to make
improvements, the platform becomes a common infrastructure.
Being open to move swiftly from an interesting yet complicated idea
to another one more feasible is instrumental in keeping the collaboration
dynamic and engaging (basically being flexible to change). It is also crit-
ical to share institutional shortcomings and constrains among collaborators.
A platform is the result of constant negotiations and compromises among
institutions, organizations, and individuals.
It is necessary to embrace friction and find ways to resolve disagreements
respectfully. We took as much time as was required to come to an
understanding of the decision-making process. Many times, we disagreed on
a solution but we were always on the same page regarding design decisions.
Taking care of collaborators in relation to their professional fields and
institutional affiliations is paramount. Platforms are built by people and
their well-being must take precedence over innovation or experimentation.
Giving credit to collaborators keeps a platform alive by giving people
a sense of purpose. Collaborative projects require a great amount of work
from participants, and such labour should be recognized, accounted for, and
celebrated.
A platform is built to be used by different publics. Keeping in mind diver-
sity and accessibility constitutes an ethical, epistemological, and political
requisite for designing novel modes of inquiry, sensitive to context-specific
conditions and challenges.
Note
1 Sofia Carpio oversaw the survey methodology. She is currently writing an article
on the topic.
Sources
Fortun, Kim. 2012. ‘Ethnography in Late Industrialism.’ Cultural Anthropology 27
(3): 446–64.
Merry, Sally Engle. 2016. The Seductions of Quantification: Measuring Human
Rights, Gender Violence, and Sex Trafficking. Chicago Series in Law and Society.
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Núñez, Jorge. 2006. Cacería de brujos: drogas ilegales y sistema de cárceles en el
Ecuador. 1. ed. Tesis. Quito: Flacso Ecuador & Abya-Yala. https://biblio.flacsoandes.
edu.ec/libros/103556-opac.
Núñez, Jorge. 2007. ‘Las Cárceles en la Época del Narcotráfico: Una Mirada
Etnográfica.’ Nueva Sociedad, ¿Sin salida? Las cárceles en América Latina
208: 103–17.
Núñez, Jorge. 2022. ‘Territories of Extreme Violence in Ecuador’s War on Drugs.’
NACLA, March 16, 2022. https://nacla.org/ecuador-drug-war-prisons.
Núñez, Jorge, Maka Suárez, Mayra Flores, Sofia Carpio, Pedro Gutiérrez, Ronny
Zegarra, Miller Rivera, María Elissa Torres, and Daniela Idrovo. 2021.
‘Diagnóstico del Sistema Penitenciario del Ecuador 2021.’ Cuenca: Kaleidos –
Centro de Etnografía Interdisciplinaria (Universidad de Cuenca) en colaboración
con la Universidad de las Américas (UDLA). www.ethnodata.org/es-es/
diagnostico-de-sistema-de-penitenciario-del-ecuador/.
Poirier, Lindsay. 2017. ‘Devious Design: Digital Infrastructure Challenges for
Experimental Ethnography.’ Design Issues 33 (2): 70–83.
Ratto, Matt. 2011. ‘Critical Making: Conceptual and Material Studies in Technology
and Social Life.’ The Information Society 27 (4): 252–60.
Ribes, David. 2019. ‘STS, Meet Data Science, Once Again.’ Science, Technology, &
Human Values 44 (3): 514–39.
Roberts, Elizabeth F. S. 2021. ‘Making Better Numbers through Bioethnographic
Collaboration.’ American Anthropologist, April, aman.13560.
Tirrell, Chris, Laura Senier, Sara Ann Wylie, Cole Alder, Grace Poudrier, Jesse DiValli,
Marcy Beck, Eric Nost, Rob Brackett, and Gretchen Gehrke. 2020. ‘Learning
in Crisis: Training Students to Monitor and Address Irresponsible Knowledge
Construction by US Federal Agencies under Trump.’ Engaging Science, Technology,
and Society 6 (January): 81–93.
3 How to use disconcertment
as ethnographic field-device
Helen Verran
Disconcertment pinpoints the happening of concepts in ways that

are problematic epistemically, ethically, culturally, and/or politically.
Concepts here are seen as coming to life as entities, in particular sets
of collective practices. Disconcertment brings moments of contention
in situated knowledge-making and doing, into the foreground. The
felt disturbance of disconcertment arises as epistemic discomfort and
ethnographers can hone and tune that discomfort as an indicator of
troubles. Ethnography pursued in mobilizing disconcertment is relation-
ally experiential rather than empirical, since it does not gather data to test
empirical assumptions. Relational experientialism evades the authorial
displacement that necessarily characterizes ethnographic empiricism.
Instead, inquiry made through the field-device of disconcertment has
the concept of the knower who experiences trouble, embedded in
the troubled concept as it becomes a known, as a multiplicity. The
conceptualized knower is inextricably caught up within the very trouble
they know. In being constituted within it, albeit in attempting to resist
and/or subvert in naming, as conceptualized entity the ethnographer as
knower as much as the known are one with the trouble in being changed
by it.
File card
Field device: In situ experience of disconcertment as epistemic affect.
Mode of inquiry: Storied analysis as frame and interpretation as
intervention.
Geographical location(s): Ile-Ife, Nigeria; Arnhem Land, Australia;
Melbourne, Australia.
Duration: 25 years.
Degree of difficulty: Time-consuming and difficult.
Disconcertment
Moments of affective disturbance which I would later name as epistemic
disconcertment, first began to assail me in Nigerian classrooms as I was
attempting to understand the practices in which numbers in mathematics
lessons were being ‘done’ (Verran 1999: Verran 2001). I write about such
DOI: 10.4324/9781003253709-5
44 Helen Verran
disconcertments as equally a feature of my work with Aboriginal Australians
in northern Australia (Verran 2013). To feel disconcerted is to feel put-out,
to experience a feeling of not being quite up with, and certainly not on top
of, what is happening around you and in some sense to you. The experience
rankles despite that you recognize that you as knower are not the object of
interest, not what matters in the situation, that you as ethnographer merely
participate as witness. Of course, someone might set out to disconcert you,
but there what you would likely feel is offence rather than disconcertment.
Disconcertments come in many forms, epistemic disconcertments impinge
our sense of knowing, of being a knower, and of knowing the ways of the
world. Or, to say that another way, epistemic disconcertment upsets our
knowing and hence our doing-of, and responsibly being-in, happenings of
sociomaterial realities. Our becoming as knowers of knowns is always part
and parcel of such happenings. Treating disconcertment as a device is crucial
if we are to attend to ontology of ourselves as present knowers of present
knowns, a crucial beginning in a form of imaginative cultivation of other-
wise sociomaterial realities. In this we are attributing to experience the cap-
acity to alter ‘the relation we entertain to our own reasons’ (Stengers 2021,
71), and when we begin to feel this happening we recognize that we are
getting somewhere as we struggle to use the method.
In choosing to qualify the disconcertment of my field-device as one of epi-
stemic affect, distinction is made in the meanings of the adjectives ‘epistemic’
and ‘epistemological’. Epistemic aspects of experience can be named as sev-
eral types. Perceived tension might concern what is known and/or how the
figure of the knower is formulated. These are ontological aspects of know-
ledge doing and making. Yet to characterize something as epistemic might
also concern ‘the how’ of knowledge doing and making – its method. Politics
around method include ‘the how’ of being certain (enough) – epistemology.
Epistemology is ‘the how of delineating the aims of epistemic practices’, and
specifically that is of concern to many practitioners of the discipline of phil-
osophy. Epistemology is usually of less concern in the everyday.
There are other aspects of knowledge doing and making that might cause
trouble too. Contestation over the worth of say religious knowledge are
common in modern secular life where axiology is no less important to many
than epistemology. Knowledge’s purposes might also be contested: tele-
ology. Here the question of ‘Who benefits?’ arises. Here I am speaking of
epistemics as sets of practices, of collective doings that inevitably, are col-
lectively enacted in particular forms. All of those are aspects of knowledge
doing and making.
Epistemic trouble is a vague and non-specific naming of tensions in the
sociomaterializing fabric of the here and now. Such tensions hover around
and emanate from particular concepts as they come to life in particular
places and times; they are the tensions within which and as which, concepts
live their lives. Epistemic troubles can be felt, experienced in place and time.
They are focused through a particular concept. To develop capacity to feel
How to use disconcertment as ethnographic field-device 45
and articulate epistemic tensions, and to feel confident in deploying it as a
basis for analysis, takes practice; it is a set of skills to be honed.
A forest reinstated – that’s good isn’t it?

The story of experiencing disconcertment that I tell in the story below arose
in my attempt to know a tiny sliver of temperate rain forest whose existence
I had been alerted to in my reading. The literature claimed this little forest
as one whose exact financial value would in future be known and precisely
enumerated through the concept environmental services values. Like all
concepts, I see this concept ‘environmental services values’, as accomplished
in practices. Doings of environmental services values is planned, implemented,
and perhaps evaluated as administrative process. These days in Australia the
concept is treated as vague, a hand-waving gesture, but when it was first
introduced into Australian environmental governance in a collective fit of
enthusiasm for Costanza’s bad-faith number (Verran 2012), it was named in
the singular and proposed as naming a precise dollar value.
Recognizing the bureaucratic intention of using the forest as a demon-
stration of the reality of the concept ‘environmental services values’, I felt
a strong need to experience the forest as valuable in and of itself, in an
embodied way. I made an excursion to meet it ‘face-to-face’ so to say. As
I understand the emergent life of the concept environmental services value,
it has its existence in various sociomaterial modes: in discourse, which
I where I first met and got to know it, but also in sets of physical and organ-
izational practices, enactments on the ground, literally. The concept also
sociomaterializes in institutional procedures like meetings and contracts. As
part of the research project I was attempting to establish, hoping I would be
able to pursue this emergent concept in each of those contexts – discourse,
field, and office – I set out to make this concept of environmental services
value as my familiar, while recognizing that I was in some way allergic to it.
I sensed that as it went from strength to strength and sociomaterialized in
more and more situations, the life of this concept was privileging the devel-
opment of economic activity and promoting that activity as part and parcel
of environmental governance. A state project of instituting a new political
economy was initiating troubles, in part epistemic troubles, but also political
and ethical troubles. I wanted to discern and locate those troubles, to inter-
vene in the concept’s seemingly unstoppable rising influence.
A novel working epistemic imaginary was being constituted with and
through the concept of environmental services values replacing the eco-
logical science concept of ‘healthy ecosystem’. Seeking to experience that
concept as expressed in a newly emergent regime of environmental govern-
ance I make an excursion to visit a tiny roadside forest in a remote corner
of the state of Victoria in Australia. Having been following the work of
newly minted semi-government environmental authorities through trawling
websites I knew of the existence of this sliver of forest. I also knew that it
46 Helen Verran
had been brought into being in a local project of environmental rehabili-
tation funded by a government grant. The local semi-government environ-
mental authority had been contracted by the state to disburse a small grant
in buying environment intervention services – earth moving, tree planting
and the like – from a range of newly established small businesses and volun-
teer organizations. The forest would express high environmental value and
serve to promote the use of the concept in effecting market-based environ-
mental governance.
Knowing that this particular little patch of re-established temperate rain
forest in remote East Gippsland had been designed as a ‘demonstration
forest’ I went to experience the forest’s value – bodily – wanting to enhance
and extend my familiarity with this concept. I understood the theory in
which the concept had life through reading the discourse of government and
scientific papers, but I felt uneasy, a sense of epistemic disquiet, and hoped
that embodied experience would quiet that vague sense of unease. Instead
of consolation, however, the experience of my excursion plunged me into an
unknowing apory where the only thing I knew was absurdity.
I present this story as part of accounting for how disconcertment is
an ethnographic field-device. The story accounts the happening of the
disconcertment as experienced by the ethnographer. In that sense the
important work the story does here is to illustrate. But in the overall scheme
of the sociomaterialist ethnography of concepts in which the recognition
of the experience of epistemic disconcertment is a first step, such stories do
several further sorts of work, one of which is to account the practices as
and in which, the concept at issue – here environmental services values –
comes to life. I preface my telling of the story here to alert readers that this
is not narrative in the sense of literature where denouements of stories have
a moral, a take-home message. There is no moral to this story; it is ethno-
graphic description in the form of a story about ethnographic experience.
Like the embodied disconcertment the story describes, the story itself is a
method device, albeit that as such, both are unusual method devices.
Story
A stile has been constructed over a wire fence that runs along one
side of a road in the far east of Victoria. It’s not a rickety farmer’s
stile, but an unlikely solid construction of treated pine timber. Next
to this government-issue stile, a very large sign has been erected. The
information on the sign, and there’s a lot of it, identifies the many
local organizations that nurtured and still cultivate the young forest
that grows a luxuriant green on the other side of the fence. Maybe
the stile was constructed for the volunteer workers from local envir-
onment organizations who established and regularly tend this patch
of young temperate rain forest. Logos of organizations representing

the various levels of the state dominate the sign. We also get details
of the particular species of birds and animals who now visit this little
oasis of green. This is the site of my planned experiential ethnog-
raphy. The little forest is a startling feature in a flat landscape of
paddocks of rank, dry grassy sedge that stretch away on both sides of
the river here. Once, not too long ago, although probably not within
living memory, a wetland thrived with populations of plants and
animals that are now rare in these parts. The likes of this little forest
used to dominate the edges of what was once a large swamp-land
delta. A few years ago, when we passed along this road, this forest
did not yet exist.
Of course, the stile and its sign and this patch of unexpected rain
forest that has reared up alongside the river are an almost irre-
sistible invitation for tourists like us, driving to the Croajingolong
National Park at the mouth of the Snowy River. I clamber over the
stile and plunge into the green, probably more susceptible than most
tourists to delight in this forest since I have already burrowed into
many of the documents through which it came to life. Before I met
this forest face-to-face, I had a rather intense textual acquaintance
with this patch of rain forest, but that knowing is all set-about with
numbers. Having previously read about its origins, I enter bodily
into this charming little patch of forest. I am feeling about, trying
to experience its here-and-nowness; to know it as itself, even though
I also know it is the outcome of accomplished collective knowledge
practices in the very particular modern knowledge world of contem-
porary Australian environmental governance.
I imagine the teams of young men and women enrolled in a working
for the dole scheme in order to get unemployment payments, dressed-
up in hi-viz fluro vests working with contractors driving machines
which ripped and hoed, and fussed about with fence-hole augurs
attached to the back of tractors. Then I thought of the groups of
more elderly volunteers, planting, watering, staking, and setting
plastic guards. The trained horticulturists poring over lists of plants
available from local community nurseries. All these collective activ-
ities expressing an impressive collective knowing about what tem-
perate rainforest should consist of, rendered in the dynamic terms of
plant ecology and the messy, muddy, and demanding practical work
of getting plant seedlings to grow. And just as present I felt, here
buried within the richness of this little green patch that I joyfully
pushed my way through, the hours of meetings some held in per-
haps cold council chambers, others in warmer government meeting
48 Helen Verran
rooms. I imagined words uttered, the technical exchanges between

ecologists, or the sometimes loud political debate between local land-
owners, environmentalists, and amateur fishers – all identified as
stakeholders in the writing on the sign.
No one ever has or ever could list and define the totality of what
those administrative activities are that make up the practices that
made the forest, but people knew how to go on with and in them.
Such activities were not always carried out in the form they now
take. Even fifteen years before, the sets of activities that induced that
forest, that brought it into being, did not exist as a set of practices
that now has life as the concept environmental services value. And,
it is likely that the practices by which concept comes to life and
the actuality of the forest, would have been beyond the imagin-
ation of those who traversed the road then. In the early years of
the twenty-first century, in the workings of the newly gazetted semi-
government authority, the Natural Resource Management Region of
East Gippsland, new sets of activities came together as the practice
of Australian environmental governance enacting environmental ser-
vices values. The concept works largely with unwritten rules – a new
epistemic infrastructure.
The actuality that the forest grows here, its naturalness vouched
for by on-going families of birds and mammals who live in its com-
fortable surrounds, and the generations of plants already making it
their own, attests that a vast array of activities – social, material,
textual, and the story-telling practices of the working imaginary that
choreographs them all as environmental governance, were enacted
well enough. When taken as expression of collective administrative
practice, albeit complex and complicated, this little forest is exemplar
of the new governance regime. In my slightly ridiculous experiment,
I seek to know the ontological happening of environmental services
values in the form of this forest. I seek to experience tensions between
the forest as environmental services values and forest as experiential
entity particularly located and accomplished by those material elem-
ents that ‘do’ forests.
This place where now a little forest grows, was once a boggy plain
of sedge and grass where cattle were occasionally set to graze, and
before it became that, it was a wetland where among others, long
neck tortoise made their home. Those changes in the mode of being
of this people-place, track changes in Australia’s environmental gov-
ernance regimes. Its transformation from wetlands, to boggy grassy
plain marked the lurch from a governance regime perpetrated by
people who called themselves Gunai-Kanai, to one enacted by and
with people who called themselves English or Scottish or Irish –

settler families. The shift in practices which has a rainforest coming
into being is rendered by local workers, people who call themselves
Australians, possibly recognizing those Gunai-Kanai and English-
Scots-Irish as their ancestors.
After I have paced its length along the riverbank I push my way back
towards the stile and the car, through the mat of trees being careful
in placing my feet, enjoying the smells and the cool, delighted by the
apparent healthy state of the plants, and by the observation that no
rows of anything (apart from fence posts) can be detected. I stood
there in the little forest, in its actuality in a then and there, all the
while telling myself the story of its origins that I had from texts.
Summoning up the stories of the forest in experiencing the actuality
of the forest and carried memories of reading about it in the archive;
I attempted to feel the complicatedness and the complexity of the
forest as outcome of planning, as historical and political moment.
In completing my ethnographic experiment, standing atop the stile
I take several photographs of the sign and its text. As I take the
photograph, up there on the stile, leaning back and crouching down
so as to frame the entire sign with the forest, I am in imminent danger
of falling off. Balanced in this precarious position, it comes to me
that the area of the out-size sign covered by a crowd of organiza-
tional logos jostling with each other for the visitor’s attention, is a
significant fraction compared to the area of the patch of rainforest.
The idea that one could actually enumerate the ratio of the relative
sizes of sign and forest comes to me. Further increasing the likelihood
of an inelegant tumble from the top of the stile, I laugh out loud as
I remember the Borges story of the map and the territory.
Suárez Miranda, ‘Travels of Prudent Men’, Book Four, Ch. XLV,
Lérida, 1658
... In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection
that the Map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and
the Map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In the course of
time, those Extensive Maps were found somehow wanting, and so
the Cartographers Guilds evolved a Map of the Empire whose size
was that of the Empire, and which coincided with it point for point.
Less attentive to the Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations,
came to judge a Map of such Magnitude cumbersome and not
without Irreverence was it, they abandoned it to the Rigours of Sun
and Rain. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered
Remains of that Map, sheltering the occasional Beast or beggars; in
all the Nation is no other relic is left of the Disciplines of Geography.
(Borges 1975, 131)
50 Helen Verran
How to
Having cultivated a capacity for disconcertment as ethnographer, when, in
the course of an inquiry you experience it, savour it, and stay in the experi-
ence. Keep it with you, perhaps make notes of details you might forget.
Refuse the temptation to make evaluative, diagnostic, or interpretive notes.
Tarry within the depth of the apory, the sense of not knowing how to know
meanings; value the not knowing how to know. Taking your time, com-
pose an auto-ethnographic story, adumbrate the stages in the experience
in numbing detail, allow analysis and diagnosis to arise in your choice of
words. Foreground the disconcertment experienced and name the concept
that the disconcertment hovers around and take care to carefully articu-
late the practices by which that concept had life in the situation that was
disconcerting (Verran 2021a).
As a story, the short text makes a rather simple and clear-cut truth
claim: this happened. That truth claim is not what makes the story part of
epistemic practice using the method of auto-ethnography. The work of the
story is to situate and frame the exegesis that will follow. The event the story
relates is located in a particular temporal flow of sociomaterial manifest-
ation. Your telling practices might be judged as more or less felicitous: does
the story stay true to and not betray the happening by being either too wild
or too literal? There is no sharp divide between the analytic of the story and
the exegesis of the commentary which will follow. The linguistic register
shifts around constituting both elements of the essay.
Ontologically speaking the significant point is that in experiencing, and
storying analytically and felicitously, and then in interpreting the event related
in the story in commentary, the ethnographer, the knower, is co-constituted
as conceptualized knower along with their known concept – here environ-
mental services values. The three elements of experiment as ethnographic
inquiry that begins with using disconcertment as field-device – experience,
analytic story, and interpretive exegesis, follow and constitute a particular
knower-known as ontologically one; known and knower are thoroughly
entangled and situated, albeit enacted in alternative sociomaterial modes in
the duration of the experiment that becomes as essay.
An experience is had by an embodied author who, as alternative
sociomaterial expression, a wordy ‘I’ in the text, stories the experience they
had; a minor episode of everyday trouble. In storying the experience, the
author lays out the tensions, reveals some insides of the happening. Of
course, given the vast temporal flow that is a sociomaterial manifestation,
stories are only ever very partial. That ‘I’ in the text of the story goes on to
offer exegesis, claiming expertise in proposing interpretations, explaining
the significance of the event with respect to some past, and arguing for a
future that is different in some way from that past.
When such an essay comes together it is literally an essay, a form of
experimenting that implicates the knower in both their fleshy and wordy
manifestations, as inquirer into that present they experienced. To inquire
this way requires that an inquirer allow themself to be seriously affected by
the here and now they experienced, by what that present presented to them.
Can the inquirer allow it to change how and what they know as knower?
That is the test. In not ducking this test as a scholar who problematizes a
concept, we are giving to experience the power to modify the relations that
we nurture and enact as our knowing selves.
Sources
Borges, J. L. 1975. ‘Of Exactitude in Science.’ In A Universal History of Infamy tr.
N.T. Giovanni, 130–131. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Stengers, I. 2021. ‘Putting Problematization to the Test of Our Present.’ Theory,
Culture & Society 38 (2): 71–92.
Strathern, M. 1986. ‘The Limits of Auto-ethnography.’ In Anthropology at Home,
edited by Anthony Jackson, 59–67. London: Routledge.
Verran, Helen. 1999. ‘Staying True to the Laughter of Nigerian Classrooms.’ In Actor
Network Theory and After, edited by John Law and John Hassard, 136–155.
Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
Verran, Helen. 2001. Science and an African Logic. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Verran, Helen. 2011. ‘Imagining nature politics in the era of Australia’s emerging
market in environmental services interventions.’ The Sociological Review 59
(3): 411–431.
Verran, Helen. 2012. ‘Number.’ In Inventive Methods. The happening of the social,
edited by Lisa Adkins and Celia Lury, 110–124. London: Routledge Books.
Verran, Helen. 2013. ‘Engagements between disparate knowledge traditions: Toward
doing difference generatively and in good faith.’ In Contested Ecologies, edited by
Lesley Green, 141–161. South Africa: HSRC Press. www. Hsrcpress.ac.za
Verran Helen. 2021a. ‘Writing an Ethnographic Story.’ In Experimenting with
Ethnography: A Companion to Analysis, edited by Andrea Ballestero and Brit
Ross Winthereik, 233–245. Duke University Press.
Verran, Helen. 2021b. ‘Structures and Relations: Seeing the Entwined Lives of
Concepts in an Exercise of Conceptual Flocculation.’ History of Anthropology
Review 45. https://histanthro.org/notes/structures-and-relations/.
4 How to draw fieldnotes
Letizia Bonanno
Drawing is a mode of fieldnote taking in ethnography, an experiential

and experimental mode of seeing without words; it defines a mode of
encoding fieldwork experiences besides and beyond the verbal system.
Drawing is a process of making sense that activates sight and memory,
cognition and imagination. Drawing is ultimately a perceptive tool and
an enabling device whose function and value are mostly contextual
to the unfolding of ethnographic encounters. It proves to be an apt
practice to capture the minutiae of fieldwork, those that often escape
the rigour of academic arguments. Ethnography through drawing is
a practice and a method that enables and enhances attentiveness and
(self)reflexivity.
File card
Field device: Illustrated fieldnotes.
Mode of inquiry: Drawing ethnographic fieldnotes.
Geographical location(s): Athens, Greece.
Duration: 2015–2017.
Ethnographic counterparts: Volunteers in grassroots solidarity initiatives,
packs of various medications, residents in a southern neighbourhood
of Athens.
Resources: Funding for fieldwork, fieldwork permission, a notebook and
ballpens.
Substantive output: Of Athens, medicine and other crises (2022) American
Anthropologist.
Degree of difficulty: low – it is the process that matters, not the aesthetics
of the drawings you produce.
I have not drawn fieldnotes in a while because I have not done fieldwork for
a few years now and writing about how to draw fieldnotes does not feel like
the easiest task I can embark on at the moment. Furthermore, there seems
to be a looming paradox in the very idea of writing about drawing; drawing
has the capacity to free the ethnographer from the burden of writing, from
the disciplinary power of words. Given the temporal and spatial lag that
separates me from my fieldwork and field-site, writing about drawing
fieldnotes in its aftermath configures an ethnographic exploration in its own
right. As such, what follows is a meta-ethnographic tale about methods and
methodologies. It is both auto-ethnographic, as it traces and retraces how
drawing has become a valuable field device, and methodological, as it wants
DOI: 10.4324/9781003253709-6
How to draw fieldnotes 53
to open up novel margins to reinvent practices and practicalities of doing
ethnographic fieldwork and experiencing the field-site.
I focus on drawing as a methodological and analytical tool for the eth-
nographer. I consider drawing as an enabling, flexible and portable device
for fieldwork, and I add to the anthropological scholarship that describes
ethnographic drawing as a valuable methodological addition to the toolbox
of the ethnographer (Causey 2016). Drawing ‘in the field’ has been described
as enhancing modes of self-reflexivity (Bonanno 2019) through auto-
ethnographic and/or dialogical interventions (Theodossopoulos 2020); as
facilitating access to otherwise inaccessible orders of reality (Taussig 2011);
as providing unexpected insights into the ethnographic realities the ethnog-
rapher faces.
Despite the renewed academic interest that it has recently attracted,
drawing in anthropology is hardly new (Geismar 2014). Drawing has trad-
itionally been part of the field devices the anthropologist has had at hand
during their ethnographic explorations. What has changed is how we now
think of drawing and the values we attribute to such practice: drawings are
no longer just paratextual elements used to visualize, categorize, present and
represent ethnographic material (Bonanno 2019). The practice of drawing
no longer produces static representations of others and otherness. Rather, it
allows us to capture the complexities and ambiguities of the ethnographic
fieldwork and the encounters it undergirds. And it does so beyond and
besides words. And it does so because, paraphrasing John Berger (1972),
drawing entails, enables and enhances certain ways of seeing.
Regardless of the specific and contextual circumstances in which we carry
out ethnographic fieldwork, I dare say that any fieldwork primarily pertains
to the realm of the indefinite and subjective, of the sensual and sensorial des-
pite the rationalizing efforts we may pour into the process. The analytical
insights often come at a later time, mostly when we start writing an article,
a monograph or a dissertation. Writing is that which allows us to gain some
distance and clarity from the experience we have made of certain ethno-
graphic moments. Writing is the ultimate work of rationality, that which
makes ethnography and theories logical, intelligible and accessible. There is,
however, yet another kind of writing that is foundational to the discipline
of anthropology: writing fieldnotes while in the field. Fieldnotes are textual
monuments to the rite of passage that ethnographic fieldwork is to all of us.
Fieldnotes are, more often than not, just records of events and encounters
and recollections of impressions punctuating our daily life in the field. Spare
attempts of analysis, wordy descriptions and lengthy yet often useless the-
oretical speculations can indeed unfold from one page to another (either
flipping the page of a notebook or scrolling the page down on a laptop!).
Diverse fieldwork conditions may enable diverse modes of engagement
with different ethnographic realities; what prompted me to draw fieldnotes
certainly differs from what have prompted others to engage with drawing.
My engagement with ethnographic drawing came out of my very personal
54 Letizia Bonanno
and often troubling experience with fieldwork. My experience in Greece was
at times intense and unsettling: a woman alone, in Athens at the heights of
the so-called economic crisis, with no kinship network to support and vouch
for me, lost in translation, in fact lost in a multitude of languages which,
at the time, made me feel isolated more than connected to the reality I was
trying to make sense of. Despite the specificities of my fieldwork experi-
ence, I do believe that there are some methodological aspects that are worth
exploring.
While I was doing my fieldwork in Athens, between 2015 and 2017,
I could not really write fieldnotes; therefore I started drawing them. Drawing
allowed me to fill in the gaps that words opened and to see, create and
trace connections and relationships that escaped the discursive linearity
of anthropological arguments. My research project wanted to explore the
birth of the social clinics of solidarity (KIA, acronym of Koinonika Iatreia
Allileggiis); grassroots, self-organized medical facilities that spread across
Athens, and Greece more generally, since the 2008 economic crisis. Its
severity triggered the implementation of austerity measures which were
aimed at curbing the public debt. While the public health care system was
progressively being dismantled under the Troika’s demands to reduce public
expenses, the social clinics started reconfiguring new modes of care through
a grassroots, free provision of primary health care services and pharma-
ceutical drugs. Rephrasing Michel Foucault (2003), the birth of the social
clinics of solidarity not only generated novel discourses on the motives of
the economic crisis and its impact on the Greek population but contributed
to producing a new language whereby solidarity became synonymous with
the free distribution of medicines against the market constraints and in the
face of the state’s demise.
Without dwelling on further details, my fieldwork was uneventful to the
point of being boring: I spent most of my time sitting at a table in the social
pharmacy attached to the KIA; I counted pills, repaired blisters and packs
of medications, ordered them alphabetically on shelves while entertaining
chats with a group of middle-aged, middle-class women who had recently
turned into volunteers. Back to my little studio flat up the hill of Pangrati,1
I would torment myself with questions about my place in the grand
scheme of anthropological knowledge production. While trying to write
fieldnotes, I would probably question their values in the face of another
uneventful, hardly meaningful day of fieldwork. I would try to writing
them though, because fieldnotes are ethnography themselves. Or so they
say. In the silence of my kitchen, the buzzing noise in my head would blast
even more loudly: Greek, Italian, English words sentences, translations,
misinterpretations and misunderstandings would make me dizzy.
As a long-term foreigner in the UK, I am used to living with two languages;
as I moved to Athens for fieldwork I had to learn Greek. Since then, I have
been thinking about how each of these languages seems to govern different
experiential realms and how each of them allows me to voice different
experiences, respectively pertaining to the academic, the emotional and the
experiential. As of today, English is the language of the anthropology I have
learned and I have made; Italian is my mother tongue, the one I am sup-
posedly more proficient in; and Greek is the language of my fieldwork, the
language I learned as an adult, with all the challenges and the overload
of expectations it entailed. Without entering the spiral of psychoanalytic
approaches to languages and affects, I would be prone to retrospectively
link the shift in the medium that occurred in my fieldnote-taking praxis to
the inadequacy of languages and words to capture the overwhelming experi-
ential load of my days in Athens.
I would draw fieldnotes, adding only a few and spare (often even cryptic!)
verbal cues, either in English or Greek or Italian. I would draw them in
my notebook, using a cheap, black ball pen. I would neither report many
dialogues nor write lengthy captions. I would sometimes write down a few
lines of the song I would be listening to at that moment, or some sentences
from the book I would be reading at that time. These cues would be enough
to remind me of the mood or the atmosphere that the drawing is meant
to evoke. After switching from writing to drawing in the early days of my
fieldwork, I soon realized that a drawing can be revealing, descriptive and
evocative even without words: words would oversaturate with meanings
and information the drawing, which can in fact be perceived, understood
and fully appreciated without and beyond textual cues. Beyond words.
Indeed, drawing has an ekphrasisi power, which lies on both the (almost)
meditative and embodied act of drawing and the capacity of seeing that
the practice of drawing as a mode of visual thinking sharpens. In this
sense, drawing is a field device that helps us cope with and overcome the
anthropological fixation with text as the canonical form of ethnographic
recording and anthropological representation. At the same time, it affords
us to shift our ethnographic attention from just verbal interactions: drawing
fieldnotes becomes a mode of ethnographic engagement that prioritizes
seeing over listening. While I do not intend to deny the importance of
verbal interactions, languages and words in our ethnographic endeavours,
experimenting with alternative modes of engagement with fieldwork is a
critical exercise, which helps expand the reach of ethnography beyond text.
Indeed, by restoring the centrality of seeing in processing fieldwork and
field-site experiences, we decentre hearing/listening from their sensory pri-
macy in fieldwork practices.
Paradoxically enough, participant observation is one of the methodo-
logical pillars of ethnographic fieldwork, yet it seems to me that we are
expected to actively listen more than observe: words are the primary means
and source of ethnographic knowledge and through words, anthropological
knowledge is produced and disseminated. Resorting to drawing as a mode
of fieldnotes taking is more than a mnemonic strategy to retrieve salient
moments of fieldwork; it configures a non-textual approach to explore
the social worlds we dwell in. Drawing fieldnotes is both a raw record of
56 Letizia Bonanno
ethnographic moments and an analytical moment in its own right: drawing
not only helps overcome (and cope with) the difficulties of writing but
also identify, trace and quite literally draw connections and relationships
between events, places, people which would not otherwise be visible or
obvious. As such, drawing configures a powerful perceptive tool for ethno-
graphic fieldwork: the process of drawing is intrinsically ethnographic as it
proceeds to deconstruct and break down the broader ethnographic picture
(metaphorically intended) into discreet details. These are fragments that,
when recombined on the paper, create novel associations and generate new
insights. I am aware that all this might sound rather esoteric and abstract,
but it is, in fact, much easier than it seems. I will now try to trace and retrace
the passages that I go through when drawing my fieldnotes. However, this is
nothing like a prescriptive recipe on how to draw fieldnotes; rather this is a
retrospective, methodological reflection on how to draw fieldnotes.
Since my ethnographic fieldwork in 2015, drawing has been for me an
alternative mode of fieldnote taking. In Athens, I would draw my fieldnotes
at home, at the end of my day, as I would have done if I had written my
fieldnotes. I would draw after my shift in the social pharmacy or after being
out and about in Athens. More often than not, I would start working on
and with an impression, a feeling or an idea: I would start imagining and
visualizing details about these otherwise ineffable, fleeting and ephemeral
sensations. Let’s consider an ordinary Friday in my fieldwork: I spent four
hours (normally from 10am to 2pm) sitting at the big, bulky table, ful-
filling my task as both an ethnographer and one of the many volunteers
in the social pharmacy – I shared the labour of ‘counting pills’ with five
volunteering women, squeezed in the tiny space between the table and the
shelves that run up to the ceiling. The room is crammed with plastic bags,
shoes-boxes, cardboard boxes full of medicines. On Friday morning, the
social pharmacy is open to patients; this means that the people from the
neighbourhood would come in to get their prescriptions or to anxiously
check with the pharmacist if the medication they need is available. It is
not uncommon for mild altercations to explode: those registered as patients
with the KIA would vocally claim their right to be served first or would
forcefully make it clear that the medication they are given is not of their
liking. Contrary to what one would imagine, biomedicine and medications
are a rather favourable ground for contentions of social and often political
nature: differential access to medicine can index different modes of citizen-
ship and of inhabiting illness.2 Oftentimes, medications are also gendered
and carry with them meanings and conditions that transcend the symptoms
and ailments they are meant to treat.
After having witnessed one of such scenes and trying to fix it in my head,
I would go on with my tasks until the end of my shift. I would never take
notes during my shift in the social pharmacy: it would feel like an intrusive
practice and, more importantly, would attract the reproaches of both my
fellow volunteers and senior supervisor. When I am in the social pharmacy,
I would really do participant observation, in fact I would learn about it by
actually doing things together with the others. When I return home, I would
make myself a coffee and sit at my table. I would focus on remembering
what has just happened, if anything has actually happened: who was in
the social pharmacy or came in later, what we talked about, how people
moved in the claustrophobic space, who was the person who yelled at the
pharmacist, which was their claim, what I was asked to do. More import-
antly, I would try to remember, or perhaps to evoke, the atmosphere of the
day, the looming mood and how I felt.
I would start doodling something and scribble down some words, some-
times in English, some other times in Greek or Italian. Sometimes a verbal
cue or a quote. Sometimes I would strip a conversation down to minimal
verbal exchange. Monosyllabic, almost. I would draw some lines, in the
shape of a face or a blister of Lexotanil, quite likely. Lexotanil is the medica-
tion that constantly transits in the social pharmacy: a gendered medication,
which is also present in almost any house, and this is one explanation for
the massive amount of Lexotanil stored in the social pharmacy. Its donation
never fails to decrease. Interestingly, Lexotanil makes my fellow volunteers
in the social pharmacy talk: as they handle the package, they recall stories
of kinship and care, tales of women and the emotional labour they have to
perform. In drawing a pack of Lexotanil, I am already evoking the stories
and the relationships it carries with it.
Most probably I would draw myself somewhere on the page, motion-
less yet in tension. By drawing myself, I would locate myself in a time
and a place: as soon as I draw a self-portrait, I would start seeing where
I stand. I am positioning myself already. In this sense, the process of
drawing a self-portrait ignites a process of self-reflexivity which, in turn,
entails first-hand, raw observations about positionality. These are implicit
considerations though: they are seamlessly integrated into the process of
drawing; they are organic to the act of transposing myself onto the blank
page. These considerations are shaped by and, at the same time, shape the
way I would draw.
As I keep drawing, tensions would emanate from my outlined body and
run across the page; they would get even heightened as soon as I start adding
details, adding people, contextualizing myself within the scene of the ethno-
graphic encounter I am drawing. I would then start roughly sketching my
surroundings, the rooms of the social pharmacy, where I spent the Friday.
Tensions keep on reverberating through the drawn lines: as I outline other
bodies on the page, I am already defining and visualizing forms and modes
of relationalities. Through drawing I can better engage and immerse myself
in the setting while entering in dialogue with the people I met and the stories
I came to know. In this sense, drawing is an ongoing mode of engagement
with fieldwork, is open-ended and self-reflexive as well.
58 Letizia Bonanno
Figure 4.1 Medicine for all. Hand-drawn fieldnote by the author; Athens 22
April 2016.
Lines, visible and invisible, also connect different gazes and in the
connections that these lines entice and create, I already decentre the point
of observation: I am laying out on the page multiple points of view. At their
intersection lies the possibility of multiplying the perspectives, which make
me the observer and, at the same time, the observed. I am caught up in a
net of intersecting gazes and relationalities, on the page as in the everyday.
I do not use drawing to classify, categorize, monumentalize relationships.
Drawing does quite the opposite; it allows tensions, movements and com-
plexities to surface and become visible and tangible. Drawing unsettles what
I have taken for granted. Drawing is a very apt way to unsettle the search
and quest for anthropological certainties.
I would keep drawing; as I draw, I start visualizing details and imagining
strategies to render and evoke the sense of precarity and improvisation that
looms over the very existence of the social pharmacy. The disorderliness of the
bulky table standing in the middle of the room, the precarious arrangement
of the shelves, the casually piled up bags and cardboard boxes: all those
details are not only descriptive but telling of how medicine can be actually
improvised in spaces and modes other than the purely biomedical.
I would keep drawing the interior of the social pharmacy: I would visu-
alize it first as a whole and then I would break down such sort of Gestalt-
like perception of the space in smaller details. And so they emerge: the
handwritten labels on the shelves, the international book of pharmacology,
the many notes of what has yet to be done, the register of the outbound
medications, a brownish box with the leftover baklavas, a handful of pens
and pencils held together by elastic bands, a few rolls of transparent tapes
that we use to repair the blister. Plastic cups of freddo espresso lie on the
table surface, next to ten, twelve packs of medication that still need to be
checked: they have been sent from France and the person in charge of their
metafrasi (translation) has not shown up that day. A pack of cigarettes has
been left on the shelf where psihiatrikà (psychiatric medications) are stored.
As I would draw these details, I start making sense of the social pharmacy
and the different rationalities that underpin its very existence: everyday
objects of domestic socialities (coffee, baklava, cigarettes) stand together
with biomedical objects, with medications. And there seems to be no paradox
in such uncanny coexistence. Perhaps, contrary to what we are led to think,
medicine is inherently social: medications are part of our everyday life and
that is why the people I meet in the social pharmacy treat them with a dis-
arming easiness and some unexpected familiarity. Medications are everyday
objects of care: that is what I start understanding while I draw the social
pharmacy, when I populate the page with the women that I met and sat
with. Drawing is what allows me to make sense of what I have seen. Quite
crucially though, the practice of drawing has also sharpened my capacity of
seeing and capturing the minutiae of the field-site.
A mode of visual thinking

Retrieving and relying upon my personal experience of fieldwork, I have
described ethnographic drawing as an alternative mode of field-note taking,
which functions beyond and besides words: drawing in the field is a way
of seeing, which is at once experiential and experimental. What I describe
as visual thinking is the raw, unfiltered and immediate process of sen-
sorial elaboration of the ethnographic material that is activated through
drawing. In the process, strategies of representation are first explored. As
such, drawing in the field-site configures a first analytic attempt as it acts
upon the ethnographic reality we face. Drawing is a process of ‘making
sense’ which activates sight and memory, cognition and imagination, while
it also stimulates the search for alternative strategies to make sense of those
ethnographic encounters in which we participate through observation and
we observe through participation. However, unlike Taussig’s approach to
drawing, drawing fieldnotes is not just about accessing more mystical or
magical orders of realities (2011). Rather, drawing is about exploring the
everyday and ordinary events which punctuate fieldwork and field-sites,
in their multiple and more mundane manifestations. As an ethnographic
60 Letizia Bonanno
method, drawing can contribute to expanding taken-for-granted notions
of what is worthy of scholarly attention. Overall, ethnographic drawing
defines a mode of encoding fieldwork experiences besides and beyond the
verbal system.
How to
1. Sit down, take a pen and open your notebook.
2. Think about the day: how did it feel like to you? What happened?
3. Visualize the ethnographic encounter or a moment that more imme-
diately comes to your mind. What were you doing? Where were you
standing? How did you feel? What did you think?
4. While you ask yourself these questions, start drawing yourself, that is,
draw a self-portrait. Position your ethnographic persona on the page.
You might want to ask why you are drawing yourself in a corner instead
of the center of the page. Become aware of your positionality, and try to
remember whether, for instance, you were participating in any activity.
What were you doing in that moment? Interviewing someone? Engaging
in some work? Or were you just observing other people?
5. While drawing yourself, think about movements and interactions. Try
to visualize who else was there. What were the people doing? What
activities were they engaged in? Start sketching the protagonists of your
ethnographic encounter: were they standing? Sitting? Moving around?
Looking at each other? Talking to or at each other? Were they quiet?
Upset? Friendly? As you draw your informants, become aware of where
you position them on the page and how they relate to you, in reality and
on the reality of the page. Also, remember that eyebrows are powerful
elements to convey emotions; eyes are equally powerful when it comes
to surface tensions and creating more dynamic interactions.
6. Now focus on the context and its details: what makes that ethnographic
moment salient? Try to imagine and visualize what can best describe
that ethnographic moment. Think about the context, the place where
that specific ethnographic moment occurred: Which elements make it
recognizable? Which features make it unique?
7. Keep focusing on details and draw them slowly and patiently: draw as
you think, think as you draw.
8. Keep in mind that you do not have to reproduce the encounter in real-
istic terms. Drawing is mainly meant to retrieve memories and sensations
and to rework them in ways that privilege your subjective experience of
it and prioritizes your perspective.
Notes
1 Pangrati is a neighbourhood in North-East Athens, where I lived during my
fieldwork.
2 Stefan Ecks (2005) argues that in Kolkata, the biomedical promise of effective
treatments that antidepressants retain comes with a notion of pharmaceutical citi-
zenship. Ecks uses this concept to ask whether legal citizenship determines the
rights of access to pharmaceuticals and whether one’s status as a citizen might
change when given access to therapeutic resources.
Sources
Berger, John. 1972. Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting Corporation and
Penguin Books.
Bonanno, Letizia. 2019. ‘I swear I hated it, therefore I drew it.’ Entanglements.
Experiments in Multimodal Ethnography 2 (2): 39–55.
Causey, Andrew. 2016. Drawn to See. Drawing as an Ethnographic Method.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Ecks, Stefan. 2005. ‘Pharmaceutical Citizenship: Antidepressant Marketing and
the Promise of Demarginalisation in India.’ Anthropology and Medicine
12(3): 239–254.
Foucault, Michel. 2003. The Birth of the Clinic. An Archaeology of Medical
Perception. London and New York: Routledge Classics.
Geismar, Haidy. 2014. ‘Drawing it out.’ Visual Anthropology Review 30 (2): 97–113.
Taussig, Michael. 2011. I swear I saw This; Drawings in Fieldwork Notebooks,
Namely My Own. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Theodossopoulos, Dimitrios. 2020a. ‘Solidarity Dilemmas in Times of Austerity: Auto-
ethnographic Interventions.’ Cultural Anthropology 35 (1): 134–166.
5 How to do a digital epidemiography
Shama Patel and John Postill
Digital epidemiography is an ethnographic approach to studying internet

virals and digital epidemics generated during moments of disruptive
change in society. As a world-making project, digital epidemiographers
map the seeming chaos of the internet to unpack the drama and drama-
tization of a big bang event by exercising field devices of viral world-
making, rhizomatic searching and mind mapping. Conceiving of viral
worlds as affective flows within a sociomaterial assemblage, digital
epidemiography shifts focus from situated and localized modes of analysis
and equips ethnographers with the tools to qualitatively problematize the
conditions and consequences of big bang moments at a global scale. In
doing so, digital epidemiography brings an affective, emic, and qualita-
tive sensibility to the study of dynamic phenomena unfolding in digitally
mediated spaces.
File card
Field devices: Viral world-making, rhizomatic searching, mind mapping.
Ethnographic method: Digital epidemiography.
Mode of inquiry: Online digital ethnography.
Geographical location(s): United States (remotely).
Duration / Time: December 2020–April 2022 (17 months).
Ethnographic counterparts: Activists, journalists, ordinary citizens.
Resources: Self-funding.
Substantive outputs: The present contribution, PhD thesis, public
mind map.
Degree of difficulty: Medium.
On 25 May 2020, George Floyd, an African American man, was detained

for allegedly buying cigarettes with a counterfeit $20 note in Minneapolis,
USA. During the ensuing arrest, a police officer knelt on Floyd’s neck for
over nine minutes1 while he was handcuffed and lying on the ground. Police
transcripts show Floyd crying, ‘I can’t breathe’ more than twenty times and
calling for his mother over a dozen times. ‘Mama … Mama I love you.
I can’t do nothing’, were some of his last words.2 Once a star athlete who
rose from a life of poverty and prison, the 46-year-old Floyd was known
for his humility and tenderness.3 On this day, the ‘gentle giant’4 became a
rallying cry for racial justice and police reform around the world.
A bystander captured the event on video, posted it on Facebook and the
post went viral. The killing, enacted again and again in our digital feeds, led to
DOI: 10.4324/9781003253709-7
How to do a digital epidemiography 63
a tidal wave of outrage. Within 24 hours, protests broke out in Minneapolis,
swiftly spreading across the United States and much of the Western world.5
Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, citizens who rarely contemplated issues
of racial justice loudly demanded it this time, resulting in one of the largest
protests in United States history.6,7 The effects were felt almost immediately,
as calls for police reform swept across the country, confederate symbols
were taken down, and organizations pledged to stamp out their own insti-
tutional racism.
Here was a big bang moment, as Frances Piven (2006) terms seismic
events that disrupt established norms, institutions, and social structures.
These events unfold with extraordinary velocity, spreading in all directions
without spatial or temporal contiguity and generating a tsunami of digital
content across the global ‘hybrid’ media system – a dynamic constella-
tion of old and new media technologies and practices (Chadwick 2013).
Qualitatively studying these big bang moments can be challenging for con-
ventional ethnographic methods designed for situated practice through par-
ticipatory engagement.
In this contribution, we propose digital epidemiography as a novel
approach to studying big bang moments that materialize a dynamic,
unbounded field. In doing so, we open digital ethnography to the study of
internet virals and digital epidemics in a hybrid media system.
Conceptualizing digital epidemiography

In 2014, John coined the term ‘epidemiography’ – a portmanteau of ‘epi-
demiology’ and ‘ethnography’ – as a heuristic to reconstruct the digital big
bang that in May 2011 ushered in a new techno-political universe in Spain
in the wake of pro-democracy protests (Postill 2014, 51). He argued that
events such as the Arab uprisings, Spain’s 15M movement and the Occupy
movement signalled the coming of an era in which political reality is increas-
ingly shaped by transmedia virals – an era of ‘viral reality’ (2014: 51).
The idea of an epidemiography chimed with our interest in the viral
spread of the Floyd video as its effects unfolded during a global lock-
down due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Glued to our digital screens, we
were struck by the ‘digital epidemic’ of information generated by this big
bang moment and decided to pool our resources to co-create a digital
epidemiography that would allow for a qualitative study of such moments
using digital archives.
At first, it seemed counterintuitive that an event as vast as the global reac-
tion to Floyd’s killing would be amenable to ethnographic research, with its
customary preference for small-scale, everyday life. Surely, only quantitative
researchers were equipped to handle the masses of data generated by a his-
toric event of this scale. Casting aside these doubts, we embarked upon a
year-long journey to develop this methodological approach while remotely
studying the Floyd big bang.
64 Shama Patel and John Postill
A dramatic flow of events

We began by gathering digital archives with a Google search of ‘George
Floyd’ on 15 December 2020, nearly seven months after Floyd’s death. Our
archives spanned a wide variety of publicly available digital sources on the
internet, free or through paid subscriptions. These included national and
local news media, magazine publications, social media platforms, research
websites, podcasts, editorials, television broadcasts, and radio interviews.
Working independently, we absorbed the information streaming through
our digital feeds and experimented with different ways of practicing an
epidemiography. While Shama found a messy web of varying social and
material intensities in which Floyd manifested in digital art, artefact, music,
memes, murals, messages, etc., John explored the big bang and subsequent
Turnerian social drama (Turner 1974; Postill 2018) triggered by Floyd’s
killer’s ‘breach’ of the precarious moral order governing race relations in the
United States. These insights made us aware that our methodology needed
to be sensitive to both the material and social in unfolding the drama and
dramatization of Floyd’s killing.
As digital epidemiographers, our first task was reconstructing the dra-
matic flow of events linked to the viral spread of the Floyd video. Using
Google Trends, John determined that the period from 25 May to 4 June
2020 experienced the most intense online activity. We also found numerous
articles documenting the chronology of events that led to extraordinary
online and offline engagement. From these materials, we documented the
dramatization of a rising action of protests, followed by a steep fall as some
demands were met, promises were made, and police officers were charged.8
Conjuring a viral world

In our preliminary analysis of the Floyd digital archives, the slain African
American emerged as an icon against white racism. As we reconstructed
the drama through online archival research, we pondered the widely
debated issue of ‘why it felt different this time’.9 Numerous folk and ‘expert’
explanations were shared online, including the idea of a nation struggling
economically during the pandemic, an increased use of digital media under
lockdown, the morbid spectacle of a public execution, the rapid mobiliza-
tion of racial justice activists, a polarizing president, and the forthcoming
national election.
As we negotiated the discursive and non-discursive rapids, we noticed the
sociopsychological effects of the Floyd video itself. Asking why this event felt
different, one person tweeted: ‘It’s the yell for help to a mom that isn’t there.
Moms across the world heard it and wanted to yank that monster off of
him’.10 We also found numerous accounts of how watching the video caused
pain: ‘When George Floyd called for his mama, I felt pain – because I’m
someone’s mama’,11 and how it propelled people into action: ‘Just hearing in
that video with Mr. Floyd, when he cried for his mom, that was the portion
that just really made me feel like I need to do something as a mom’.12 The
video made some viewers listen first and then act: ‘[W]e wouldn’t have
understood were it not for the video ... Now, we’re listening [and acting]’.13
Although George Floyd’s death came after decades of pent-up frustration
with institutional racism and police violence, the scale of the response to
the video was unprecedented. In our reading, man and video were fused in
the social imaginary, symbolizing people’s collective anger, fear, and hope,
‘[w]hen I see the video of George Floyd’s murder, I see myself on the ground
begging for my life’,14 and ‘[w]hat if there were no George Floyd video’,15
became a recurring refrain.
This entanglement of the social and material video helped us conceive of
Floyd’s viral world, where the idea of Floyd persists as an ‘image of thought’
(Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 36). Our viral world-making attends to the
unfolding of a world, in which the original Floyd video sets off a chain of
events materializing a chaotic, shifting, unbounded field as an evolving web
of sociomaterial assemblages. By ‘sociomaterial assemblages’ we refer to
the entanglement of the social and material as transient configurations that
include bodies (human and non-human), desires, affects, and discourses. An
example of such an ephemeral assemblage is described later in this contri-
bution, as an intertwined maze of material videos, social sentiments, values,
and beliefs forming a compelling nanostory in Floyd’s viral world.
Navigating the deluge

Sensitized to the idea of an unfolding viral world, Shama searched the internet
rhizomatically for articles, videos, interviews, memes, and commentary that
gave form and function to Floyd’s viral world. A rhizomatic search allows
researchers to make intuitive, proliferating, and decentered connections,
while resisting the urge to seek an underlying structure, hierarchy, or human
subjectivity. It facilitates multiple, non-hierarchical points of entry, with no
presumption of a beginning or an end, always in the middle (Deleuze and
Guattari 1988). Through our rhizomatic search we encountered artefacts
that inspired, events that motivated, actors that organized and practices that
mobilized.
Very soon, we were drowning in a deluge of digital content. We needed
a field device that allowed us to map this hyper-connected viral world, ‘not
[as] a network of connections but a meshwork of interwoven lines of growth
and movement’ (Ingold 2010, 3). Using Coggle, a mind-mapping software,
Shama plotted the digital archives as a referenceable catalogue of connections
and links to the underlying chaos of the internet. Mind mapping facilitates
a natural form of organizing and visualizing complex data. In a mind map,
words, pictures and/or short phrases cluster around emergent themes, and
individual ideas are represented as branches radiating in all directions. There
is no attempt to force-fit categories, hierarchies, or organization (Buzan and
Abbot 2005). The focus is on forming a free-flowing visual road map that
maps ‘archives of interest’ as entry points into the labyrinth of the internet.
Using mind-mapping software like Coggle, helps epidemiographers bring a
degree of order to a runaway event. Multiple researchers can collaborate and
publish mind maps for wider dissemination. Rhizomatic searching and mind
mapping are intertwined practices. While rhizomatic searches reveal stories,
atmospheres, moods, ideas, and discourses of a phenomenon ‘coming into
being’, the mind map emerges as a creative and intuitive mapping of the
underlying chaos of the phenomena.
A master mind map functions as the key organizing device that is con-
tinually updated. To date, our master mind map contains 300 archival links
clustered around 30 developing ideas, motifs, and topics. This device allows
us to zoom in and out to identify and place stories of potential interest.
When we need to dive deeper into these stories, Shama conducts story-
specific rhizomatic searches and creates new mind maps with additional
details. One such story-specific mind map is shown in Figure 5.1 and its
story is elaborated on later in this contribution.
Conducting an epidemiography of a global event presents several scoping
challenges that can influence the line of inquiry. For example, consistent
with our interest in social justice, our data collection is limited to pro-Floyd
narratives. In making this choice, we are aware that our rendering of Floyd’s
viral world is incomplete. Like all ethnographers, digital epidemiographers
make research design choices, while resisting the urge to limit the inquiry to a
single group, locale, platform, or practice. Accordingly, guided by a strategy
of purposive sampling (Patton 1990) we selected archives that aligned with
our empirical interests. Given that web links tend to persist over time, the
selection of archives need not be exhaustive, but a purposeful sample that
Figure 5.1 A sketch of Keedron Bryant’s nanostory in the form of a mind map, created
by the authors in Coggle (click here to enlarge and engage with the mind
map through Coggle). https://coggle.it/diagram/YTxyaiLcamFYv9oY/t/
keedron-bryant’s-nanostory/96d3166d863a388c80629852e159af20c5b
1bd21a8ae0e4ec3964f061e3ce5bb.
serves as a portal into Floyd’s viral world that can be ‘qualitatively mined’
as the research progresses.
The use of digital archives acquired from the internet raises several
challenges for the digital epidemiographer. While many digital archives can
be retrieved through hyperlinks, these hyperlinks can expire. Also, digital
traces of events that occurred in the distant past may be harder to locate
through internet-based searches. The epidemiographer also faces authen-
ticity dilemmas. Digital archives can be altered by the content publisher,
potentially modifying the data used in the research. Additionally, search
engines personalize page views, potentially biasing the purposive sample
(Kallinikos et al. 2013). These concerns can be mitigated by saving digital
archives, disclosing conflicts and/or triangulating with other methods and
field devices.
Digital nanostories
Equipped with our master mind map, we were ready to weave both the
grand narrative and the smaller stories that sustain this particular viral
world. In his bleak account of American politics in the late 2000s, Bill
Wasik (2009) describes the country’s ‘viral culture’ as being awash with
short-lived photos, videos, and catchphrases in an endless parade of trivial
‘nanostories’. A few years later, John found that Spain’s indignados also
produced, and shared countless nanostories via social media. Although
as ephemeral as Wasik’s nanostories, cumulatively they formed ‘a grand
narrative of popular struggle against a corrupt political and economic
order’ (Postill 2014, 57). Similarly, Floyd’s viral world, as captured in our
master mind map allows us to craft a grand narrative about its explosive
origin, rapid growth, and steep decline. Undergirding this narrative are a
multiplicity of nanostories that quickly vanish from public memory yet live
on in digital public archives.
These nanostories range from embodied experiences of police brutality
and institutional racism to a plethora of political-aesthetic material forms
(visual art, music, storytelling, poetry, graffiti …) and social expressions of
grief and outrage. In Floyd’s viral world, protest art and tributes spring up
in both digital and physical spaces. As one activist puts it, ‘[a]rt can reach
so many people in ways that the news or political analyses can’t’,16 with
countless citizens feeling compelled to act.17 The original Floyd video raises
many thorny ethical questions. There are calls to not share it, equating it to
‘pain pornography’.18 Many admit they ‘could not bear to watch the video’,19
others see no benefit in ‘being ambushed by scenes of black death’.20
A complex dynamic between institutional actors emerges, as city mayors
defy President Trump whose tweet ‘when the looting starts, the shooting
starts’,21 is hidden by Twitter. In addition, many note the systemic nature of
the event, ‘I feel like the core problem is internal, within us, in our homes,
families, and most of all a broken system’.22
As we tried to make sense of these nanostories, we were struck by the
affective mood and atmosphere that pervaded this viral world. It gradually
dawned on us that we had stumbled upon a field of viral affects, of bodily and
atmospheric intensities ripe with potential for an emergence, a breaking free
of bodily constraints (Massumi 2002). Floyd’s world was a web of affective
sociomaterial assemblages as nanostories that pulled at heartstrings, moved
people to tears, made blood curdle, breath shorten, palms sweat, and other
visceral reactions, that often translated into an urge to ‘do something’. These
short-lived affects haunted George Floyd’s viral world and presented us with
opportunities for deep dives.
Viral affects
Here we retell but one such affective nanostory. Shama first came across
Johnetta and Keedron Bryant on YouTube through a video interview on
NBC’s Today show, conducted on 1 June 2020, a week after Floyd’s death.23
Hoda Kotb, the show’s host, was interviewing Johnetta Bryant and her 12-
year-old son, Keedron, whose song had gone viral days after the killing.
A few moments into watching the video, Shama was moved by Keedron’s
soulful singing:
I am a young black man

Doing all that I can ... to stand
Oh, when I look around ...
to see what is being done to my kind
Everyday I’m being hunted as prey
My people don’t want no trouble
We’ve had enough struggle
I just wanna live
Deeply affected, Shama watched the full interview and listened to the song
multiple times, aware that here was a nanostory that embodied the grand
narrative emerging from our materials. Rhizomatically following digital
clues about Johnetta and Keedron Bryant she conceptualized Keedron
Bryant’s nanostory as a sociomaterial assemblage and mind-mapped it (see
Figure 5.1).
The day after Floyd was killed, Johnetta wrote the song as a reaction
to hearing Floyd call for his mother on the video. In a later interview, she
explains that ‘[j]ust hearing in that video with Mr. Floyd, when he cried for
his mom, that was the portion that just really made me feel like I need to do
something as a mom. […]. So being that I’m still able to be here with Kedron
and guide him, I knew that was prompting me, as a mom, to do something’.24
To us, this was a clear instantiation of the viral affect of the Floyd
video moving people to act. The lyrics of the song rendered in Keedron’s
gospel voice, were but one example of a sociomaterial assemblage awash
in creative derivatives of the Floyd video expressed through music, poetry,
graffiti, memes, and other media forms resonating with the beliefs, values,
and sentiments of a people. Affective protest art and aesthetics underpinned
the solidarity of communities in pain across the United States.
One need only observe the reaction of the NBC show host, Hoda Kotb,
when she tears up on camera to feel the affective power of Keedron’s per-
formance. Within a single nanostory, we experience George Floyd’s viral
world as an ebbing and flowing of viral affects. We also experience Floyd’s
viral world as the latest episode in a “recurrent affair” (Postill and Epafras
2018), an episode that operated on multiple planes – as a portal into a tragic
past, a violent present, and the shared aspiration of a better future.
The song garnered praise from many quarters, not least from former
president Barack Obama,25 and earned Keedron a deal from Warner
Records.26 A reworked version of the song is now available on Spotify and
Apple Music.27 Listening to the commercial version against the backdrop
of the original, one stark difference is immediately apparent. The original is
raw and unaccompanied, lending affective expression to one specific corner
of Floyd’s viral world. By contrast, the commercial version is mainstreamed
through its sleek production and packaging.
From this insight, we understood a viral world as a web of transient
sociomaterial assemblages that achieve unexpected and extraordinary
virality through their affective expression, and rapidly dissipate as they
are integrated into the social milieu. While the viral world endures, the
assemblages are transient, as new assemblages emerge and old ones slip
away from public attention. A viral world comprises more than a network of
localized episodes, it is a meshwork of concurrent lines of flight, action, and
reaction that are revealed through the practice of digital epidemiography.
Contribution
Viral communication raises difficult methodological challenges, including
how to track ‘the kinds of networks of circulation and forms of communica-
tion of viral video (online videos, animations, etc. ...), whose “effects”, trails,
and links are harder to trace [than those of blogs]’ (Boler 2008, 15–16).
Digital epidemiography addresses these challenges head-on by recognizing
digital archives as ‘cultural agents of “fact” production [and] taxonomies
in the making’ (Stoler 2002, 87). Using the field devices of rhizomatic
searching, mind mapping and viral world-making, digital epidemiographers
harness internet virals and digital epidemics to craft a complex tapestry of
nanostories. In doing so, they open digital ethnography (Pink et al. 2015;
Postill 2017) to the study of fast-moving, unpredictable phenomena through
an online analysis of unfolding events.
In conceiving of viral worlds and engaging with the affects of digital
artefacts as performative video, art, image, music, or commentary, digital
epidemiography taps into an anthropological tradition of ‘bringing things
to life’ (Ingold 2010) and provides a methodological approach to quali-
tatively problematize the conditions and consequences of big bang events.
Our aspiration is that ethnographers engage with the ideas and field devices
presented here, in the study of such explosive moments and contribute to
this nascent research method.
How to
Digital epidemiography is a world-making project. The aim is to conjure
up an evidence-based viral world around an event unfolding in digitally
mediated spaces.
The objective of data collection is to gain participants’ multi-sensory,
affective experience of the digital epidemic using all relevant media forms.
The researcher navigates as best she can the chaos inherent in an infor-
mation deluge within the fuzzy boundaries of a loosely formed domain of
interest, without a priori hypotheses. The aim is to eventually find a virtuous
middle path between order and chaos.
The researcher reconstructs the dramatic flow of events primarily from
the archived materials, looking for key themes to guide the design of the
mind map by sifting through the materials, looking for phases of expansion
and contraction at various socio-temporal scales.
While digital archival work lies at the heart of this approach, other
key anthropological methods (e.g., participant observation and/or semi-
structured interviews) can be also be used if required.
Some useful tools include Coggle, Google Trends, and Zoom. If necessary,
the ethnographer can also draw from other research materials, including
quantitative data related to the digital pandemic in question or mainstream
media timelines.
It is imperative to ‘follow the virals’ across platforms, avoiding the temp-
tation to limit the enquiry to a single platform like Twitter, Facebook, TikTok
or Instagram. Staying within a single platform may prevent the researcher
from gaining a more complex understanding of the digital pandemic’s
significance.
Notes
1 www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52861726
2 www.twincities.com/2020/07/09/george-floyd-transcript-read-it-in-full-here/
3 https://apnews.com/article/george-floyd-profile-66163bbd94239afa16d706bd6
479c613
4 www.france24.com/en/live-news/20210420-george-floyd-gentle-giant-who-bec
ame-symbol-of-fight-against-racism
5 www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/6/11/a-timeline-of-the-george-floyd-and-anti-pol
ice-brutality-protests
6 www.nyti mes.com/ inte ract ive/ 2020/ 07/ 03/ us/ geo rge- floyd- prote sts- crowd-
size.html
7 www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/06/10/blacklivesmatter-surges-on-twitter-
after-george-floyds-death/
8 www.nytimes.com/article/george-floyd-protests-timeline.html
10 www.atla ntic coun cil.org/ blogs/ new- atla ntic ist/ geo rge- floyd- prote sts- world-
racism/
11 www.cbc.ca/ pare nts/ learn ing/ view/ when- geo rge- floyd- cal led- for- his- mama- i-
felt-pain-because-im-someones-mama
12 https://cafemom.com/entertainment/keedron-bryants-mom-discusses-what-its-
like-to-raise-a-young-activist
13 www.lati mes.com/ polit ics/ story/ 2020– 06– 28/ white- vot ers- rac ism- reckon ing-
george-floyd-killing
14 www.sandiegouniontribune.com/opinion/commentary/story/2021–05–27/opin
ion-george-floyd-memorial-day-similarities
15 www.nyti mes.com/ 2020/ 06/ 06/ opin ion/ sun day/ geo rge- floyd- str uctu ral- rac
ism.html
16 www.mic.com/ p/meet-the-women-behind-the-viral-protest- art- all-over-instag
ram-23004852
17 www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4su46Yrqdw
18 www.insi der.com/ geo rge- floyd- video- activi sts- are- begg ing- peo ple- stop- post
ing-2020–5
20 www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/opinion/george-floyd-video-social-media.html
21 www.npr.org/2020/05/29/8648183l68/the-history-behind-when-the-looting-sta
rts-the-shooting-starts
22 www.caribbeannationalweekly.com/cnw-tv/talkup/talkup-how-did-the-killing-
of-george-floyd-make-you-feel/
23 www.today.com/ video/ meet- the- 12- year- boy- who- sang- i- just- want- to- live-
about-george-floyd-84170821553
24 https://cafemom.com/entertainment/keedron-bryants-mom-discusses-what-its-
like-to-raise-a-young-activist
25 www.insi der.com/ geo rge- floyd- obama- keed ron- bry ant- i- just- wanna- live-
song-2020–5
26 https://news.sky.com/story/keedron-bryant-12-signs-deal-with-warner-records-
after-viral-protest-song-12010038
27 https://open.spotify.com/artist/2l5DDUyyMSmNBLCSa0BIIX#login
Sources
Boler, M., ed. 2008. Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times. MIT Press.
Buzan, T., and Abbot, S. 2005. The Ultimate Book of Mind Maps. Harper Collins.
Chadwick, A. 2013. The Hybrid Media System: Politics and Power. Oxford
University Press.
Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. 1988. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. 1994. What is Philosophy? Columbia University Press.
Ingold, T. 2010. Bringing things to life: Creative entanglements in a world of
materials. (Vol. 15: 1–14). Realities working papers.
Kallinikos, J., Aaltonen, A., and Marton, A. 2013. ‘The Ambivalent Ontology of
Digital Artifacts.’ MIS Quarterly, 357–370.
Massumi, B. 2002. Parables for the Virtual. Movement, Affect, Sensation. Duke
University Press.
Patton, M. Q. 1990. Qualitative Evaluation and Research Methods. SAGE
Publications, Inc.
Pink, S., Horst, H., Postill, J., Hjorth, L., Lewis, T., and Tacchi, J. 2015. Digital
Ethnography: Principles and Practice. SAGE Publications, Inc.
Piven, F. F. 2006. Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America.
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Postill, J. 2014. ‘Democracy in an Age of Viral Reality: A Media Epidemiography of
Spain’s Indignados Movement.’ Ethnography 15 (1): 51–69.
Postill, J. 2017. ‘Remote Ethnography: Studying Culture from Afar.’ In The Routledge
Companion to Digital Ethnography, edited by Hjorth, L., Horst, H., Galloway,
A., and Bell, G., 87–95. London: Taylor & Francis.
Postill, J. 2018. The Rise of Nerd Politics. London: Pluto.
Postill, J., and Epafras, L. C. 2018. ‘Indonesian Religion as a Hybrid Media
Space: Social Dramas in a Contested Realm.’ Asiascape: Digital Asia 5: 100–123.
Stoler, A. L. 2002. ‘Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance.’ Archival Science,
2(1–2), 87–109.
Turner, V. 1974. Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society.
Cornell University Press.
Wasik, B. 2009. And Then There’s This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture.
Penguin.
6 How to make ethnographic research
with exhibitions
Francisco Martínez
Exhibitions are usually understood in anthropology as representation

techniques; however, they can also be used as a mode of inquiry. This
piece outlines how to approach displays not simply as attempts to com-
municate research findings or existing social issues, but as a device to
challenge, invent or critically question a reality – being part of an ongoing
reconfiguration of what knowledge and the political could be. By making
use of exhibitions as experimental devices, we can display our concerns
and make the ethnographic field happen in an inventive collaborative way.
This mode of inquiry helps ethnographers to construct more distributed
settings of knowledge production, operating as both an object of inquiry
and a device available to different actors for acting-knowing. Hence, it
can be practiced to open up a space between knowledge and invention, as
well as new ways of being in the field.
File card
Field device: An exhibition.
Mode of inquiry: Approaching exhibitions as devices through which
fieldwork takes place and the social is redesigned.
Geographical location: Tallinn, Estonia.
Duration: 2018–21 (3 years).
Ethnographic counterparts: Art professionals, designers, open minded
scholars, museum staff, performance artists and a choir.
Resources: Funding from the Estonian Cultural Endowment, University
of Helsinki, Finnish Cultural Institute and the ERC Mobilitas Pluss
‘Eurorepair’ (over 14,000 euros in total).
Substantive outputs: ‘Objects of Attention’ (an exhibition, 2019) and
Ethnographic Experiments with Artists, Designers and Boundary
Objects (a book, 2021).
Degree of difficulty: High.
How to display our concerns

The exhibition Objects of Attention set out to instigate discussions about
public matters through ordinary objects in an exercise of acting-knowing. For
this show, ten artists were invited to revise an ordinary object into a political
DOI: 10.4324/9781003253709-8
74 Francisco Martínez
question, opening up innovative relationships between people and things, while
provoking visitors to think about migration, gender relations, environmental
sustainability, robotics, labour conditions, obsolescence, nuclear energy, global
capitalism or the existential meaning of failure. The list of artists was limited
to ten because of financial and spatial constraints, hoping to assemble a field
that is manageable in scale and duration. After introducing the key ideas of
the project, the kind of contribution to the show was discussed and negotiated
with participants individually, allowing each artist different margins to man-
oeuvre – as to select a political concern and the effort and materials dedicated
to their contributions (within a given budget and time frame).
Objects of Attention proposed a more experimental and political atti-
tude towards objects, here presented as artefacts of knowing and of relating,
available for being materially and epistemologically redefined. The objects
included in this exhibition can also be taken as ‘matters of concern’ (Latour
2005), modifying the presentation of the social and capable of triggering
epistemic and political re-negotiations. Hence the research is not meant to
capture social reality, but the responses to it (Lezaun et al. 2017). In doing
so, the curation of the field makes visible what is emerging and facilitates the
engagement with public issues that exist only in potential.
A collection of revised objects was assembled to articulate a re-
presentation of political concerns and aesthetic objections. Artists were
invited to find, manipulate, revisit or invent existing things as a mode of col-
lective politics – combining practices of contemporary archaeology, design
and anthropology. The exhibition took on objects as ethnographic operators
and intervention tools, triggering diverse perspectives on knowledge, col-
laboration and different social issues. As a result, objects lend themselves to
being used as keys in the representation of a complex realism, becoming part
of a heuristic to analyze and intervene in the social.
Consequently, the museum was turned into a space of activation of socio-
material relations, whereby aesthetics, an open-ended problem-making and
an engaged reflexivity intermingled. Following the aim of exploring how
locations of knowledge production are being reconfigured, we decided to
display ‘strange’ artefacts throughout the museum, destabilizing the rest of
the objects exhibited in the building. The glass-cased artefacts are usually
displayed to be admired because of their artistic value, or for what they
mean, representative of something. However, our boundary objects (Star
and Griesemer 1989) were ‘undoing’ the other ceramics, fabrics and indus-
trial design products through a process of ‘contagion’ (as noted by one of
the visitors, Kaarel).
Nevertheless, a gap between artists’ intention, the curator’s proposal,
and the encounter of visitors with those objects remained. Some of the
participants were disagreeing with me, the curator-ethnographer, about
the relevance of what I considered knowledge and about the interpret-
ation of the artworks. For example, artist Eva Mustonen contributed to
How to make ethnographic research with exhibitions 75
the exhibition with the installation Xena & Samba, which combined a bra
& a mixer-phallus to spark thoughts about our contemporary aversion to
physical proximity and sexual discomfort. The mixer-phallus reacted with
a defensive move once closeness to the female bra was sensed, so I wrote in
the booklet of the exhibition that Samba (the mixer) was expected to ward
off potential contenders for Xena’s affection (the bra). While reading my
notes, however, Eva rejected the idea of attributing gender to an artwork
and asked: ‘Why is Xena just a pretty bystander?’ Also, another curator,
with whom I shared my notes, commented that I was not being entirely
honest in my research, ‘because you are presenting as important details that
are not worth considering as knowledge. Indeed, one of the main tasks of a
curator is to choose what to ignore’, she explained.
Before, during, and after the exhibition, the feedback arrived through
different channels and was often unexpected. In some cases, comments were
made in the middle of public events at the museum; others derived from
people writing me a message or publishing reviews in the general media. An
example of this is the review written by art critic Hanno Soans, who pointed
out that the curator was abroad from his home discipline, conquering new
territories yet not behaving as a colonizer. Martin Pärn, a professional
designer who also leads the MA programme ‘Design & Technology Futures’,
was of a similar opinion, yet adding a rather bitter tone: ‘I was intrigued by
the strange feeling of someone stepping into my terrain, entering into my
kingdom, but with different rules’. Martin talked to me as if I were a kind of
Trojan horse, though I liked the idea of challenging the view of disciplines
as bounded contiguous territories to be defended.
Besides working with ten artists and five experts from the Estonian
Museum of Applied Art & Design, I also collaborated with two designers,
an illustrator, three scholars, three performance artists, two photographers,
three students of interior architecture and a choir. Such mixed composition
was for some bewildering. Marika Agu, curator of the Estonian Centre for
Contemporary Art, described the project as too eclectic: ‘it looks like a tapas
exhibition, in which one gets to taste a bit of different topics’. The cross-
fertilization of different kinds of knowledges and notions of relevance is,
indeed, the foundation of this mode of inquiry.
Before the opening, and while discussing details of the exhibition with
a local curator, he told me, visibly upset, that people like me were spoiling
the local art scene because of curating exhibitions for free (all participants
got paid a fee but me). I replied that the exhibition itself was not the final
outcome of my work, but was conceived as an ethnographic device that
would allow me to do fieldwork differently: making use of objects to create
experimental knowledge and raise concern about a series of social issues.
My interlocutor was unconvinced still.
I believe that besides aesthetic skills, what distinguished me from a pro-
fessional curator was the long hours spent at the desk transcribing my
notes, engaging with them in an analytical form, producing many drafts
that show different levels of abstraction. Indeed, as ethnographer, I wrote
myself into the processes of making sense and of making an exhibition,
taking fieldnotes while also activating a feedback loop into the curatorial
process.
As a form of making, an exhibition is never the result of a unitary single
work, but of multiple ongoing agencies and knowledges alongside. Hence,
two of the key concerns of this project were to make room (and time)
for my collaborators’ capacities to unfold, not being afraid of addressing
complications which might include asymmetric power relations. The second
key was to take documentation as part of the expansion of our repertoire
of ethnographic practices; Art documents helped to account and multiply
the knowledge that was mobilized during the making of the exhibition, as
well as to normalize mechanisms of intervention. Documents, constitutive
of relations as they are, also contributed to reaching and involving different
audiences.
A joint attention to objects

In the display, the field appeared as a reality under co-construction, and eth-
nography as an exercise of redesigning the social. I was exhibiting knowledge-
in-the-making and practicing epistemic promiscuity. In such an expanded
relationality, I had to oscillate between different roles and designations, not
being afraid of intervening in what I was studying. This affects, in turn,
how we design our work and with whom, making us reconsider what
commitments do anthropologists have in terms of research outcomes too.
Acting as a curator allowed me to lose control over the research and cul-
tivate surprise while taking part in the production of things. This take on
fieldwork is interventionist and demands from the ethnographer to be an
active (provocative) participant in the construction of the field, not just
observant. By doing that, we redistribute responsibilities and make room
for diverse skills and interests to create something together. However, this is
a gesture that requires generosity from the participants, and in some cases,
unlearning our own epistemic tools (Martínez 2021).
From personal experience, I can say that curating is a stressful, accelera-
tive, and tiring practice. It takes place in the middle of different tasks, time
regimes and notions of value, and requires constant allocation of resources
such as materials, funding, space, time and attention. For too long, the
field of anthropologists has been considered an ‘anti-lab’ whereby testing,
provoking and intervening were not allowed. Likewise, the ethnographer’s
contribution to exhibition-making has been rather limited to providing
representative content already closed (Sansi 2020). However, museums
and art galleries are not just containers of knowledge, but also have the
potential to be integral in its making and production – a fact that has
implications in the expertise demanded from museum workers as well as
in the kind of alliances and porosity towards epistemic changes that these
institutions can afford.
And yet, exhibitions tend to be presented to the public as unequivocal
statements rather than as the outcome of contingent processes and par-
ticular contexts. As a result, the different efforts, rationales, compromises
and accidents happening during the making are tidied away and hidden
from public view (Macdonald 1998). However, current changes in know-
ledge production impel us to reconsider the research process and include
actors in new ways, encouraging reciprocity between academic and non-
academic questioning. The role of ethnography is still to learn with others
and to generate a surplus of ideas, but there are lots of ways of practicing
fieldwork (Niewöhner 2016).
Here, the anthropologist joins the productive process. Hence, it is
oriented toward learning from and about, as much as with the people
and materials in our field – an interventive position that is unusual for
an anthropologist. As curator of Objects of Attention, my involvement
did not just consist of doing what a curator does: mobilizing material,
financial and human resources for creating exhibitions; but also to allow
collaborations to take place as well as to foster relations and reactions.
Indeed, in my fieldnotes written during the preparation of the show,
I describe how not only did I face the limits of my own ability to partici-
pate, but in some cases, the participants placed me at the periphery of what
was going on, making it impossible to project any sense of authority or
control over the field.
Hence, making ethnographies through exhibitions is a gesture of epi-
stemic promiscuity and generosity. This particular condition of immersion
reshapes the way in which we are available and alters the epistemic positions
of participants, thus it requires openness from the participants, which is not
always the case. Because this mode of knowledge production does not imply
that there is a clear-cut agreement on the set of problems, or even that the
people taking part in the project are always sensible or reasonable. It is in
this sense that the things on display acted as boundary objects, enabling
open-ended forms of cooperation, manipulation and doing together without
necessarily being narrated in the same fashion.
In Objects of Attention, the actors involved engaged on numerous nego-
tiations that changed the course of the exhibition. The display itself did not
begin with a systematic inquiry and clear design plans that would meet the
expectations of all participants in this venture. Instead, the exhibition was
the result of a tentative process of experimentation, disagreements, daring
negotiations and accidental trial and error. This was especially clear while
working with designer Hannes Praks and with artist Camille Laurelli, whose
work was explicitly dedicated to creating frictional openings during the
making of the exhibition.
For instance, Hannes left everything to the last minute, arguing that I was
just ‘his client’ and he had other priorities. He also showed himself inflexible
about the design solution for the gallery: it could only be a wall of blocks to
create a sense of confrontation and separation. In his view, and against the
design tradition of creating comfortable things not to be noticed, the wall
had to be the 11th object of the show, transgressing the monumentality of the
museum by planting something in the middle made of cheap materials. After
intense negotiations with the museum staff, the wall was finally accepted,
yet in a smaller size so it wouldn’t damage the wooden floor (which finally
did). Once we started the construction process, ‘someone’ ordered the wrong
materials in the Bauhaus store, so I had to negotiate with the managers of the
shop to exchange the materials with no extra cost. In the meantime, Hannes
was watching a YouTube tutorial on how to build a wall. Then, I asked him
why he was so inflexible about this design solution if he had no clue on how
to do it, to which he replied: ‘The fact that I have never built a wall in my life
does not mean that I cannot teach it or build it now’.
Certainly, not everything was harmonic with Hannes. Indeed, quite the
opposite. There were lots of tensions, to the point of almost getting into a
physical fight. Later on, in the seminar organized at the museum, Hannes
noted: ‘Our collaboration was not smooth, but it was real’. During the pro-
cess of making ethnographic research with exhibitions, one has to discern
which tensions are generative of learning, which to grasp and to refuse. As
an example, when I started to explain to Hannes the key ideas of the project,
he insisted on the need to use just keywords that he would then translate
into the space. I said ‘care’, ‘political concern’, ‘affective artefacts …’, then
he told me to be more specific about the effects I wanted to generate for the
visitor. I replied ‘suspension of knowledge’, ‘unlearning’, ‘to reduce the gap
between us and politics’, and still they were too abstract for Hannes, so he
asked me to suggest a film he should watch instead, and I spontaneously
said The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. For Hannes, words work against design
solutions. Knowledge sits rather in a piece of wood, in a wall, in a way of
walking up the stairs, sensing as a way of getting the design ready, which
made me aware of my own bodily ignorance and sensorial inexperience.
In some other cases, as with Camille, collaborators started to misbehave,
cheat, or simply be unreasonable. Camille’s contribution to the exhibition
was entitled ‘Failure is practice’, assembling a series of broken tools pre-
viously gathered in local mechanical workshops. He wanted to challenge
current notions of success in relation to the logics of practice. A day before
the opening, Camille suggested to ‘complement’ his installation with a wrong
etiquette referring to his work, yet the director, Kai Lobjakas, replied that an
etiquette with typos was not meeting the standards of a state museum such
as this. So, overnight, Camille printed an etiquette of his own, with a similar
design, and replaced the original without anyone noticing the action.
The day after the opening, and following the same playful will to enrich
his installation, Camille arranged a series of errors to happen during his
talk in the seminar organized at the museum. Then, he had his son dancing
behind while he was talking in front of an audience of over 30 people; after
this, his mum started to call repeatedly, so Camille had to answer the phone
asking the mum to call him later. Finally, he opened the laptop to start the
talk, but a glass of water fell on the computer, ruining it beyond repair. Then
he grabbed a second laptop and connected it to the projector, and suddenly
three porn sites appeared on the screen. I was the only one in the audience
who was aware of the fraud, as he had informed me of his intentions a
few minutes before the talk, or to be more precise, the performance. I was
internally crying of laughter, yet I had to hold myself not to unmask the
well-designed succession of failures. Looking out of the corner of my eye,
I noticed in the audience a mixture of embarrassment and astonishment.
The same feeling was shared by Viktor Burkivski, who was hired to docu-
ment the seminars yet decided on his own to stop the video recording to
prevent any documentation of such an idiotic act from being associated to
the museum.
Each of us took part in the exhibition making with our own techniques
and partial knowledges, turning the display into a device of epistemic trans-
formation due to the many imports happening unexpectedly. As I have
described, discrepancies between the analysis and behaviour of fieldwork
interlocutors and the work of the ethnographer can also be productive in
some instances. Yet this also brings up the question of how we can create
alliances with collaborators who are continually questioning the common
ground of the research.
Field-making
An exhibition is a collaborative engagement between different (rather
specialized) knowledge-makers. But what kind of knowledge is generated in
the process? And what is the role of the ethnographer in the middle of the
variegated know-hows taking place? Exhibitions and ethnographic practice
have in common the quality of enacting realities and of eliciting new ways of
knowing and acting in the world, yet what usually differentiates them are the
practices of presenting knowledge. In this sense, Objects of Attention was
a trans-epistemic device that allowed participants to chart how knowledge
is developed collaboratively, the shifting roles in the field and how different
communities of experts can be involved in anthropological research.
The process, meaning the actual construction of the exhibition, generated
discussions about what counts as data and how experiences of various
kinds come to matter academically; by doing so, the exhibition became a
device and a research procedure in itself – not just a site (Candea 2013). The
gesture of exhibiting the field demonstrates that ethnography can also be
practiced as an experiment of research creation, providing an opportunity
to generate our own epistemic tools and notions of evidence. This eventu-
ally opens up innovative relationships between people and things, yet also
reminds us of how that fieldwork brings about transformative knowledge,
but when, where and how it does so is not fixed.
Collaborative experimental research is a social act that impinges on the
behaviour of those implicated in the process: first, by decentring ourselves in
the field; second, by taking care of others’ capacities; third, by questioning
what knowledge is and face the need to unlearn what we know. Such a mode
of inquiry shows diverse engagements with matter and documentation; it
also approaches artists and designers as sources of epistemological inspir-
ation and producers of analytical knowledge, not merely objects of study.
But in order to make an exhibition into a field, we need to cross the safety
distance of the of (in which we are positioned as cold experts of something),
and step into the terrains of the with, within and through other fields and
communities of practice, not afraid of appearing as amateurs out of the dis-
ciplinary shelter. This mode of inquiry occurs by bringing our counterparts
into the interior of our institutional venues, co-constructing the field in a
plural and experimental form. It consists of displaying what we are studying
in public to provoke reactions and intensify relations in an open-ended way.
This enables the different participants to challenge existing positions in the
field and explore shared epistemic territories, and/or develop new ones.
By co-constructing the field through boundary objects on display, the
quality of being knowledgeable is multiplied, raising new forms of inves-
tigation and intervention, which allows us to reformulate questions with
our ethnographic subjects in open-ended ways (Estalella and Criado 2018).
Figure 6.1 Broken tools to be used in the installation ‘Failure is Practice’. Picture by
Camille Laurelli, 2019.
The show Objects of Attention provided a sustained form of ethnographic
experimentation, where knowledge was produced exploratorily, open for
unintended effects, questions and twists, with no sure idea of what the
results may be (Holmes and Marcus 2005). My fieldwork was practiced
as a practiced as a form of social redesign, adjusting, improvising, making
new sets of relations and negotiating professional canons while displaying
knowledge-in-the-making (Bjerregaard 2020).
We learn thus that the field might have different functions for the
different actors, generating different outcomes along the way. The gesture
of exhibiting the field entails being attentive to the co-existence of multiple
ways of thinking, diverse forms of relating to people and things, and also to
competing notions of what knowledge is. Such experimental intervention
challenges conventions in art, design and anthropology, exploring different
working definitions of relevance and evidence based on epistemic gener-
osity. This mode of inquiry contributes therefore to the discussions about
the capacity of exhibitions to generate research in and through themselves
(Macdonald and Basu 2007). Also, it shows how the materialization of
experimental fieldwork, redesigning the social through the field entangle-
ments and devices constructed for the exhibition, need not always be har-
monious and might involve both insurmountable gaps and productive
tensions.
How to
Making ethnographies through exhibitions is a procedure that generates
analytical knowledge while intervening in reality; open-ended and collab-
orative as a modality of action. Traditionally, mainstream scientific epistem-
ologies emphasize the value of studying social life as found, yet the novelty
proposed by this mode of inquiry consists in creating a real-life set-up (an
exhibition) in which the social issues under consideration can be experimen-
tally addressed, examined and redesigned. For that, one has to:
– Approach exhibitions as a device for ethnographic research and as a

form of acting-knowing. This form of interventive engagement will help
participants to reconsider how exhibitions enact both knowledge and
relations.
– Practice fieldwork as a curating gesture. By taking elements from one
practice to another, we will interrogate anew and expand our notion of
the field, since predefined roles are challenged, and alternative meanings
are explored.
– Devise exhibitions in a way in which the anthropologist engages in all
the steps of the art-making process while constructing the field to be
displayed.
– Practice epistemic promiscuity and generosity, as this mode of inquiry
entails being attentive to the co-existence of multiple ways of thinking,
diverse forms of relating to, and collaborating with people and things,
and in some cases, also to competing notions of what knowledge is.
Sources
Bjerregaard, P. ed. 2020. Exhibitions as Research. Experimental Methods in
Museums. London: Routledge.
Candea, M. 2013. ‘The Fieldsite as Device.’ Journal of Cultural Economy 6
(3): 241–58.
Estalella, A. and T.S. Criado, eds. 2018. Experimental Collaborations. Oxford:
Berghahn.
Holmes, D. and G. Marcus. 2005. ‘Cultures of Expertise and the Management
of Globalization: Toward the Re-Functioning of Ethnography.’ In Global
Assemblages, edited by S. Collier and A. Ong, 235–51. London: Routledge.
Latour, B. 2005. ‘From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik or How to Make Things Public.’ In
Making Things Public, edited by B. Latour and P. Weibel. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Lezaun, J., N. Marres and M. Tironi 2017. ‘Experiments in Participation.’ In
Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, edited by U. Felt et al., 195–222.
Cambridge: MIT Press.
Macdonald, S., ed. 1998. The Politics of Display. London: Routledge.
Macdonald, S. and P. Basu, eds. 2007. Exhibition Experiments. Oxford: Blackwell.
Martínez, F. 2021. Ethnographic Experiments with Artists, Designers and Boundary
Objects. London: UCL Press.
Niewöhner, J. 2016. ‘Co-laborative Anthropology. Crafting Reflexivities Experimen-
tally.’ In Etnologinen tulkinta ja analyysi, edited by J. Jouhki and T. Steel, 81–125.
Helsinki: Ethnos.
Sansi, R. (ed.) 2020. The Anthropologist as Curator. London: Bloomsbury.
Star, S.L. and J. Griesemer 1989. ‘Institutional Ecology, “Translations” and Boundary
Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology,
1907–39.’ Social Studies of Science 19 (3): 387–420.
7 How to write fieldpoetry
Leah Zani
Poetry and ethnography are twin forms of attention. Fieldpoems are

fieldnotes written as poems, or poems written out of fieldwork material.
Tapping into the senses, sound poems are an easy-to-learn fieldpoem
technique. These sound-based fieldpoems are written as sounds or
in response to sounds and the experience of listening. Fieldpoetry
encourages researchers to work through their material with a poet’s sens-
ibility for experience and writing, including a greater awareness of the
senses, syntax and line, word choice, mouthfeel, and sonics. Sensing and
re-sensing the world, fieldpoetry is both a research method and a genre
of writing.
File card
Field device: Fieldpoetry.
Mode of inquiry: Creative writing praxis.
Geographical location(s): Highlands of Laos.
Duration: 2011–2015.
Ethnographic counterparts: Explosives clearance technicians, village
residents.
Resources: Funding for fieldwork, visa, research permissions, protective
equipment, paper and a pencil.
Substantive output: Bomb Children (Duke University Press 2019).
Degree of Difficulty: Varies greatly.
During my fieldwork with explosives clearance teams in the old battlefields

of the Secret War in Laos, I developed a method of fieldpoetry for sensing
and re-sensing violence hidden in everyday life. These battlefields were
leftovers from a war that ended in the 1970s, but many villages were still
captive to its ongoing threats. The United States secretly bombed Laos from
1964 to at least 1973 without the knowledge of Congress or the American
public and in violation of the Geneva Accords declaring Laos neutral terri-
tory during the Vietnam-American War. The bombing was intended to pre-
vent the formation of a strong communist state in Laos. A half-century later,
these villages were still caught between parallel worlds: peaceful everyday
life and, buried in the ground beneath, an old secret war that sometimes
erupted into spectacular violence.
I noticed that technicians and residents used sound to move safely through
these buried battlefields. Little material evidence of this conflict was visible
above ground. At a glance, it could be difficult to distinguish a rice field
DOI: 10.4324/9781003253709-9
84 Leah Zani
from a minefield. In their efforts to sense history’s pressure upon the present,
technicians’ and residents’ senses became attuned to subtle material traces
and sensations. The ping of a metal detector helped technicians to safely
hear munitions buried underground without needing to dig down and risk
touching them.
Clearance sites were eerily quiet – until something exploded. Technicians
whispered to each other or spoke in hand gestures. As much as possible, they
suppressed loud noises during working hours, things like generator engines
and pumps that might distract them from their subtle work. In this zone
of expectant listening, the ambient noises of the village opened fully into
hearing, first the sounds of chickens scratching, shuttle on the loom, wind
in the roof thatch; and beneath these domestic sounds, sharpening into the
ears, came the sounds of explosives clearance, the scrap of soil, boots on the
earth, shaken handle of a bucket.
When a bomb explodes, blasts are only audible at their expanding edge
where the soundwaves soften into our human audible range. At the centre of
each blast, these soundwaves are so powerful that they tear apart bodies and
destroy the ability to hear. Deafness is a common injury among survivors. In
Laos, the ability to hear was a mark of personal safety, while also delimiting
a radius of safety surrounding each explosive item. Medics and village
residents moved through this radius of safe hearing, using the sounds of
explosions to keep track of demolitions and accidents from afar. Paying
attention to the skills of my research interlocutors, I tapped into my sense of
sound – and this greater attention to my senses lead me intuitively to a form
of field notation that I call fieldpoems (Zani 2019; 2021).
Fieldpoems are fieldnotes written as poems, or poems written out of
fieldwork material. In this how-to guide, I present a method of field-based
sound poetry that I developed while listening for explosions and hearing
how other people listened for explosions in Laos. This is one among
many poetic methods that I have used in fieldwork, and among the sim-
plest to learn. Sound poetry most often refers to poems that foreground
the sounds of words over their meaning (Hirsch 2017). While my sound
poems build on this poetic craft tradition, they might also be called ‘hearing
poems’ or ‘listening poems’. Learning to listen, my sound poems are about
the challenges of listening, recording, and making meaning out of sounds
that are destructive and disturbing. These poems plumb the gap between
experience and language (between hearing a bomb explode and hearing or
reading the word ‘bomb’). Lao is a tonal language and I worked hard to
properly hear and pronounce many words, including the word for bomb,
labaerd. Combining elements of sound poetry and field notation, my poems
are about sounds that I struggled to hear or did not want to hear yet listened
for. Just as explosions may destroy hearing, these poems are often about
unsounds – felt absences that hum at the peripheries of our senses.
While sound poetry was especially suited to my research with explosive
clearance teams, a similar technique could be adapted to other senses in other
How to write fieldpoetry 85
field sites: touch, smell, taste, sight, or another sensory register. Tapping into the
senses can be a door into poetry in any place. Poetic methods encourage us to
work through our material with a poet’s sensibility for experience and writing,
including a greater awareness of the senses, syntax and line, word choice,
mouthfeel, and sonics. This sound poem exercise will encourage you to mind-
fully hear the syntax and sonics of your fieldsites and fieldnotes. What arises
for you out of this activity may not be a poem, but I hope that it opens you
up to the greater possibilities of poetic attention in your research and writing.
Like ethnography, poetry is both a method and genre of writing. A classic
poetic form like the found poem uses a magpie method to collect words –
sometimes pulled from the pages of a book – to guide the writing of a poem.
The resulting poem is a record of the method in use, a record of the poet’s
search. Just as poets talk about found poems without distinguishing
between the method and the resulting poem, ethnographers talk about
ethnography without distinguishing between the method and the writing
genre. Ethnographers are better trained in the research method; we are
rarely trained how to write, and yet we do write. Leaning a little more
on the ‘writing genre’ half of ethnography, poetic methods help to bring
fieldwork into alignment with our writing practices. Many ethnographers
use poetic methods in their work, including poetic transcription (Glesne
1997; Richardson 2003), found poetry (Butler-Kisber 2002), poetic inquiry
(Prendergrast 2009), ethnopoetics (Brady 2000), anthropoetry (Kusserow
2017), and anthropoesis (Rosaldo 2013). Fieldpoetry is a craft of attention,
notetaking, and sensory aliveness that brings to the fore a process of making
meaning and language out of life. To be caught on a line of poetry is to be
hooked on the incompleteness of words – while also suddenly aware of
an experience so rich as to be nearly unthinkable and beyond language.
Many ethnographers are already hooked. Poetic research methods hook our
attention and our writing practices together. They help us to cross the gap
between ethnography as research and ethnography as writing.
I came to fieldpoetry intuitively. Like the technicians that I studied, I found
myself struggling to perceive layers of secret violence that seemed to press
up from beneath the everyday, like a submerged reality. This was a problem
of empiricism not representation, and I responded by changing the way that
I paid attention. At first, I found it difficult to fully pay attention to sounds –
or to the sounds that were being described to me. I lacked language; I didn’t
know how to write in my fieldnotes or make audio recordings. At one point
in my research, I made a sound cloud of all the sounds words I could think
of. I filled an entire whiteboard with words like hush, fade, boom, belch,
slap, rustle, murmur, squeal, pitch, and rip. I also made a list of sound words
used by my interlocutors that included signal, sharp, white, beep, ping, pop
pop pop, boom, blast, and thunder. Spoken by an ex-army officer, the phrase
‘pop pop pop’ combined a boyish G.I. Joe familiarity with a militaristic
syntax reminiscent of a command or countdown.
86 Leah Zani
Figure 7.1 Two explosive technicians survey a rice field with metal detectors. The
technicians are listening for the pinging sounds of the detector sensing
metal underground. Savannakhet Province, Laos, 2013. Photo by author.
Listening for explosions challenged me to listen well, even when there

was nothing to hear. One of my early fieldpoems recounts an explosion
that I heard in a nightmare. I shook myself out of bed and looked out-
side: nothing, no sirens or smoke. I felt jumpy and unsure of my own
perceptions. After taking a shower to calm myself, I gazed long at my
clouded reflection in the bathroom mirror. I scrawled this sound poem
while the house was still dark:
Fieldpoem 21: Unsound

There is another sound
that I don’t hear
nothing makes it go off
– breath on a mirror; the word faintly reappears
Poetry resists itself, and this sound poem resists listening. The poem is
unsound – difficult to hear and write. And yet, writing this poem helped
me to identify an important empirical challenge in my fieldwork (that was
literally giving me nightmares!). This poem appears in Chapter 3 of Bomb
Children (2019, 113). The poem led me to a key theoretical insight into
how explosives contamination provokes ‘apprehension’ (2019, 107), or the
fearful sensibility of hidden risk.
I was invited to observe a controlled demolition of a large cache of
explosives, mostly cluster munitions, in a remote highland village. The demo-
lition team was using a new type of explosive trigger that was unfamiliar
to the managing technician and his first few trigger attempts were unsuc-
cessful due to operator error. For safety, the demolition was split into sev-
eral smaller explosions, some failed and re-attempted multiple times. This
afforded me a leisurely opportunity to listen to an event that usually only
lasted a fraction of a second. Here is an excerpt of my fieldnotes describing
two of the explosions:
When the first explosion happens, even from behind a large tree at 400
meters, I can feel the cool blast of the shock-wave [sic] pushing me back.
It is a short, focused blast. Very little echo. It is hard to describe sounds,
but: if thunder snaps, like a whip, long and narrow, then this explo-
sion blooms, or ripples, and is spherical. The blast radius is a thing: it
has a sound, edges and a texture, but you can’t see it. […] This second
blast is even bigger, the explosion for the larger rockets. I feel the push
of the shockwave, a bit like opening a door between two pressurized
rooms: the cool air pushes past me into the hot day. This is a bigger, less
focused, boom. It is the same shape as the first blast, but due to its larger
size it lasts longer and there is more sound interference. The boom is
massive, round, punctuated by its own echoes in the valley. The echoes
crinkle the edges of the noise as it reverberates off the mountains.
This fieldnote is loose and lived-in. It is successful already as a raw record

of my attention in a specific moment. I wrote standing up with my half-page
spiral-bound notebook balanced on the flat of my upturned left forearm, my
elbow braced against my ribs. Sensory attention is often used in grounding
meditations to root us in the present moment. I know of a grounding medi-
tation that counts down sense perceptions: five sights, four touches, three
smells, two sounds, one taste. Poetic attention has a similar effect on me
in fieldwork. I root myself in the moment, calm and grounded even when
things don’t go to plan.
The following is a thick description of that first, smaller triggered explo-
sion described in this initial fieldnote. This descriptive passage elaborates on
the details recorded in my field research materials.
‘One, two, three, go!’

The bomb technician triggered the controlled demolition. There was
a moment of listening silence as the signal was transmitted from the
technician’s trigger mechanism to the rigged C4 explosives. Then I felt
88 Leah Zani
the front of a shockwave and heard a deep, low boom. At the safe point
four hundred meters from the demolition pit, behind tree cover, we
did not have a direct line of sight to the explosion but could readily
hear and feel the blast. This particular boom was anechoic; there were
no nearby mountains or large buildings to multiply and amplify the
sound of the explosion. Massively, the sound rustled its way through
fields of brittle grasses that continued to shake in all direction for some
time after the demolition. The sound disturbed bamboo houses, local
residents watching from afar, the fences of pig pens, meandering cows,
vegetable gardens, dry rice paddies, small copses of trees, and a dusty
dirt road. Even in the sonic shadow of a large pepper tree four hundred
meters way, I felt the cool blast of the shockwave pushing me backward,
passing through me. I stood stile while the sound filled me, and for a
fraction of a second, replaced the thumping of my heart and my breath
in my chest. My hair and shirt fluttered against and behind my body.
Trees clamored and a ruckus of soil, leaves, and other detritus briefly
saturated the air with the smell of turned earth. The blast occupied
the plain and was shaped by its features. It is hard to describe sounds,
but if thunder snaps, like a whip long and narrow, then this explosion
bloomed or rippled outward, and was spherical and densely textured.
The sound sort of crackled a bit around the edges and seemed to break
in the air and dissolve at some distance far behind and above me.
(2019: 98–99)
My whiteboard sound cloud came in handy in this revision. In my fieldnotes,

I had repeated the word ‘sound’ over and over again to record complex
perceptions quickly. In revision, I swapped out ‘sound’ for more unusual
words like ‘rustle’, ‘shake’, and ‘clamored’. The metaphor of the explosion
being ‘like a whip, long and narrow’ was already present in my fieldnotes
and needed to be slightly expanded. Likewise, from my fieldnotes of the
second blast, I borrowed the phrase ‘the echoes crinkle the edges of the
noise’ and expanded it into ‘the sound sort of crackled a bit around
the edges and seemed to break in the air and dissolve’. I moved the passage
to the past tense as is typical for contemporary ethnographies.
During this controlled demolition, I also listened to the unsound, the
unheard blasts of the failed triggers. Here is a polished sound poem about the
managing technician’s first failed attempt to trigger an explosion (2019, 97).
Fieldpoem 23: Blast Radius

This space and
all precious beings
Searchers use bullhorns to shock the cows

from the yellow sapless field
I imagine the birds going dumb inside it
falling from the sky
At the safe point on the far side of a pepper tree

‘He holds the wire from his box of nerves
Praising mortal error’1
Premonition flattens my view

Startled by birds
I listen to the hushing wind –

This space and nothing
This fieldpoem cuts my notes up into neat stanzas that visually mimicked
the ‘1…2…3…’ countdown to an explosion (that never came). I drew out
phrases from my raw notes, rearranged and revised for greater poetic effect.
I added ‘shock’ and ‘sapless’ to the word ‘searchers’ in my fieldnotes. This
alliteration of first-letter shhh sounds throughout the poem evoke the rust-
ling of the cows and people walking through the dry grass. At the time of
revision, I was reading the work of other poets on war. The included quote is
from a poem by Dylan Thomas reflecting on men handling other explosives
in another era.
The technicians started at the centre of the projected blast zone and walked
outward in equally spaced radii to the edge. In my fieldnotes, I recorded that
they held loudspeakers and shouted: ‘We are doing an explosive demolition!
Everyone must leave this area!’ Their message was in Lao, but the loud-
speaker was mostly for the cows. When a cow broke the border and began
grazing in the blast radius, I recorded a technician’s comment: ‘It is really
hard to keep the cows out of the clearance site. That is the most difficult
thing. Everyone, all living things, must be at twenty-five meters away when
clearance is happening.’ I loved the impossible inclusiveness of ‘all living
things’ and its sister-phrase in Theravada Buddhism ‘all precious beings’.
I used this compassionate phrase as the kernel of the finished poem.
There is no one way to write a poem, a fieldnote, or a fieldpoem. These
four examples are clearly different types of writing, but they share a poetic
attention that grounds the researcher and the reader in the senses. Explosions
consume attention or destroy it; perhaps that is why I am drawn to poetic
methods that help me to regain control over how I sense the world. Poetry
empowers me to stay present and make choices amidst complex or con-
fusing experiences – this complexity is present everywhere, not just in blast
zones. As a field device, poetry lends itself to sensory richness, noticing small
details, identifying juxtapositions and unusual connections, scale-hopping
and time-hopping, playfulness with perspective and etic/emic points of view,
a deep tenderness for human feeling, and a creative writing practice. This
poetic disposition brings an intention to write and an awareness of words
90 Leah Zani
into the way that we collect and analyze our research materials, before we
start writing our first drafts. In Laos, I would spend time in the evenings
compiling my fieldnotes, revising fieldpoems, and writing new poems out
of older fieldnotes. Not all of my fieldpoems were written or finished in the
field, but they all have a direct relationship to field notation. A continuum of
attention connects fieldwork, fieldnotes, and fieldpoetry.
How to
Sound poems may be easily incorporated into fieldwork. This exercise might
more correctly be called a ‘hearing poem’. You need only yourself, a pencil,
and a piece of paper. I discourage using audio recordings as the recording
may easily distract you from discovering how you pay attention to sounds.
I encourage you to listen for five minutes to start and then experiment with
durations that feel comfortable for you. The goal is to build up your sensory
muscles so that you can choose to pay attention when needed. You can prac-
tice this exercise anywhere. Begin where you are right now.
1. Gather your writing materials. Start a timer for five minutes.

2. Close your eyes if it helps you focus on your hearing (but don’t forget to
keep writing!).
3. Begin by just noticing what you hear first. What comes into your
awareness first? How would you describe those sounds? What words
or onomatopes (words that imitate sounds) come to you? Write down
what you hear, as you hear it, in the order in which you perceive the
sounds. You goal is to make a sound log of what you hear. Don’t censor
your words: just write down what comes to you without judgement or
commentary as it arises in your awareness.
4. As you become more familiar with your hearing, try moving your
awareness around the space. Listen for sounds that are very far away.
Identify the farthest possible sound and write that down. Then, the next
closest, and the next, moving slowly towards yourself until you are
listening to the sounds in your immediate area. Does your pencil or pen
make a sound? I invite you to listen closer still, to what you hear inside
yourself, inside your own body. Your breath, your heartbeat?
5. When your timer goes off, take one last grounding breath. Put down
your pencil. Open your eyes if you closed them.
6. Read your sound poem out loud. Your poem might be a list of words
and onomatopes, a string of phrases or metaphors, even a paragraph
block. Read your poem out loud a few times to get a mouthfeel of your
writing, a sense of how the words feel in your mouth. In academia, we
rarely listen to how our writing sounds. How does it feel to hear and
speak your writing out loud?
7. Circle words or phrases that you find especially delicious or beautiful. If
you choose, this can be how you select key phrases to revise, investigate,
or begin to open code for themes.
Note
1 A reference to other war poems (Thomas [1953] 2013).
Sources
Brady, Ivan. 2000. ‘Anthropological Poetics.’ In Handbook of Qualitative Research
(2nd ed.), edited by N.K. Denzin and Y.S. Lincoln, 949–979. Thousand
Oaks: SAGE.
Butler-Kisber, Lynn. 2002. ‘Artful Portrayals in Qualitative Inquiry: The Road to
Found Poetry and Beyond.’ Alberta Journal of Educational Research 48 (3),
229–239.
Faulkner, Sandra L. 2009. Poetry as Method: Reporting Research Through Verse.
Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press.
Glesne, Corrine. 1997. ‘That Rare Feeling: Re-presenting Research Through Poetic
Transcription.’ Qualitative Inquiry 3 (2): 202–220.
Hirsch, Edward. 2017. ‘Sound Poetry.’ In The Essential Poet’s Glossary, 299–301.
New York: Mariner Books.
Kusserow, Adrie. 2017. ‘Anthropoetry.’ In Crumpled Paper Boat: Experiments in
Ethnographic Writing, edited by Anand Pandian and Stuart McLean, 71–90.
Durham: Duke University Press.
Prendergast, Monica. 2009. ‘Introduction: The Phenomena of Poetry in Research.’ In
Poetic Inquiry: Vibrant Voices in the Social Sciences, edited by Monica Pendergrast,
Carl Leggo, and Pauline Sameshina, xix–xlii. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.
Richardson, Laurel. 2003. ‘Poetic Representation of Interviews.’ In Postmodern
Interviewing, edited by J. F. Gubrium and J. A. Holstein, 187–202. Thousand
Oaks: SAGE Publications.
Rosaldo, Renato. 2013. The Day of Shelly’s Death: The Poetry and Ethnography of
Grief. Durham: Duke University Press.
Thomas, Dylan. [1953] 2013. ‘My Hero Bears His Nerves.’ In The Collected Poems
of Dylan Thomas, 87. New York: New Directions.
Zani, Leah. 2019. Bomb Children: Life in the Former Battlefields of Laos.
Zani, Leah. 2021. ‘Ethnographic Poetry Workshop with Dr. Leah Zani: Sound Poem.’
ETHOS Lab, IT University of Copenhagen. https://vimeo.com/475654442
Zani, Leah. 2021. ‘Humanistic Anthropology: Ethnographic Poetry.’ In The SAGE
Handbook of Cultural Anthropology, edited by Lene Pedersen and Lisa Cligget
(chapter edited by David Syring), 212. New York: SAGE Publications.
8 How to flow with materials
Rachel Harkness
Flowing with materials is a mode of creative ethnographic inquiry seeking

to afford perspectives on ecological relationships, being and knowing,
via material, political and temporal movements. These ethnographic
approaches are borne out of research on building, understood as a peopled
environmental practice. They are about how taking a long view of objects
and artefacts, such as buildings, via attention to their materiality, usefully
destabilizes them. They are about trying to sketch out the whole lifecycle or
story of materials. Practically, this approach involves: tracing the peopled
histories, production stories and memories of materials; following, working
with, directing, and interpreting them, alongside others; and speculating
about them and imagining their possible futures, again, alongside others
doing similarly. Offering-up a number of possible devices inspired by
various arts practices that simultaneously engage the imagination, the sen-
sory, the political and the performative, this formulation of ethnography
acknowledges and responds creatively and critically to the acute ecological
crises of our age.
File card
Field devices: Various arts-inspired practices of attention to political
ecology: Identify, Trace, Follow, Work, Watch, and Speculate.
Mode of Inquiry: Flowing with materials: attending, creatively, to lifecycles.
Geographical location(s): examples are US and UK sites that extend out
to the global.
Duration / time: strongly durational.
Ethnographic counterparts: those that also engage with materials along
their ‘lives’ – i.e., growers/extractors, makers, consumers, wasters,
suppliers, re-users, processors, and even non-human others involved
(e.g. sheep, woodworm).
Resources: cameras, sample materials, tools, studio/workspace, one’s
own labour and others’, printing budgets, exhibition and performance
spaces.
Substantive outputs: photographic works, performances, creative-
literary writings, a series of ‘readymade’ artworks, a book of
material studies called ‘An Unfinished Compendium of Materials’
https://knowingfromtheinside.org/files/unfinished.pdf
Degree of difficulty: Varying, depending how much of the material’s ‘life’
is engaged with.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003253709-10
How to flow with materials 93
When we try to pick out anything by itself,
we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.
(John Muir)1
We might imagine the material things shaped by human processes as

concrescences of the extractions, labours, relationships, and reactions that
connect them in their present times and locations, to people and places that
have historically contributed to their formation in some way (Harkness
2009). Similarly, pivoting and looking into the future, things of artifice and
their constituent materials will go on to affect people, organisms, and places
anew, through their re-use or their deterioration and decay, their adaptation
or contamination, recalcitrance and permanence. Underlying both views is a
premise that is environmental in nature. It is that the world we humans are
part of can be understood usefully through a prism of materials-in-flux over
different durations and distances (Ingold 2012); and the cyclical aspect to
this flux, flow, and movement, is apparent if we attend to the durational flow
of materials and the cycles of life (and death) that matter travels through.
Taking inspiration from the natural material world around us and its
governance by cyclical processes, this approach also acknowledges that
systems of global neo-liberal capitalism are problematic and damagingly
linear in their logics and form: popularly dubbed as ‘take-make-waste’.
There is increasing consensus that we must embrace the circular in design
to both challenge these linear systems and revolutionize how we make
things (McDonough and Braungart 2009). Attending to the lifecycle of
things is increasingly being understood, therefore, as a way to help avoid
mindless consumption, waste production and pollution (Raworth 2018).
Here, I extend the notion beyond consumer goods to think about cycles and
the ‘lives’ of things almost as various reincarnations and re-combinations
of ongoing materials, also very much on a planet with limits (ibid). How
to flow with materials, draws, then, upon ideas of cycles from ecology,
environmental design and what we might call the environmental making
movements; it is responding to our contemporary moment and its acute
ecological crisis (IPCC 2021).
‘Flowing with’ is about acknowledging the flows, as well as partici-
pating in and directing them as an active agent. Moreover, the term flow is
used to denote movement, dynamism, something that can be traced, rather
than something necessarily smooth in its quality: there are frictions along
the way. With strong links to existing practices following things and their
routes/roots, both within and outside academia, this way of working is
indebted to anthropological movements that trace the social aspects of phe-
nomenon (e.g. Appadurai 2015; Drazin and Küchler 2015), and those that
seek to comprehend the multi-sited, the global (e.g. Tsing 2015). It is also
influenced by Just Consumerism movements that campaign for transpar-
ency and accountability of how things come to be, in order to improve their
social and environmental impact (Klein 2000).
94 Rachel Harkness
This mode of enquiry emerged from researching the field of (mostly self-
build) eco-building. Eco-building is a field characterized by practices of
weather- and climate-watching (as builders often rely on the weather of
rainfall, wind or sunshine, for alternative energy provision), careful material
sourcing (as they are invariably making detailed assessments of what
materials to use and how to make those ethical-environmental choices), and
knowledge-sharing and regular communications of ‘how-to’ make, fix or
do things (as they often teach volunteers and others in the eco-build arena,
self-teach and learn-as-they-build). At various eco-building sites in the US
and the UK, I have encountered materials that are well-known as such (e.g.
concrete, sand, polystyrene insulation, earthen mixes of sub-soil), as well as
things-turned-materials and things lesser-considered as materials (e.g. day-
light, shipping containers, living plants such as sedums, grasses or reeds and
old tyres). Given the propensity of conversation and work on a building site
to be organized around materials – work here is dominated by their choice
and procurement, preparation and movement, application and tidying up
after use, inspection, routing, storage and removal – it is perhaps not sur-
prising that they have become a focus! However, for me, this focus is cer-
tainly also an active choice, and it is one influenced by my desire to think
less of architecture as a fixed object and more of building (and dwelling) as
a peopled environmental practice, process, and relation with/in the world.
The methods described in this entry have grown amongst these builders
and their processes, as well as those of academia’s environmental arts and
humanities (especially anthropology and design). In eco-building, different
materials are knitted together to form shelters, different people bring their
skills. Here, bodies and contributions are orchestrated in construction,
de(con)struction and transformational practices and processes. I have found
a variety of artistic or creative modes of practice, that engage the imagina-
tive, sensory, political and performative, to be very useful ways of getting
to know materials ‘in the round’, within these orchestrations. Not least
because the material engagements of the field are almost always with mul-
tiple materials or materials in conjunction with one another, my ways of
approaching have also been multiple and dependent on the material(s). If
I were a specialist in one material only (or my informants were), I imagine
that I would write this entry quite differently. As it is, the pluralistic and
holistic character is an important aspect of the mode of inquiry, and in the
entry below, it is not a coincidence that I present an array of six possible
approaches or devices: Identify, Trace, Follow, Work, Watch, Speculate.
Identify
Identify is flowing with materials by considering the material in question,
seriously, and in its own right. It is gaining as rounded a ‘portrait’ of the
material as is possible, by examining its physical, chemical, symbolic, histor-
ical, cultural and relational characteristics. Works such as the writer-chemist
Primo Levi’s (1996) lyrical account of the ‘life’ of a specific carbon atom
and its journey through different materials and entities over millennia, were
influential in the genesis of this approach. Levi’s literary, poetic account
(written long before the current carbon-tracking – spurred on by the impetus
of environmental crisis – emerged) beautifully depicts carbon as subject.
My colleagues Cristián Simonetti, Judith Winter and I have used Identify
in our work on concrete: we researched what concrete is chemically, how it
is used in construction, and how to use it. Alongside this research though,
we also explored concrete as subject, inspired by Levi, and imagined it as
having a life, having a voice. We thought this voice might have a multi-
vocality to it because of concrete’s syncretic aggregate nature and – because
of concrete’s celebrated position within Modernism and narratives of devel-
opment and progress – that it might be a voice prone to bombast. In our
identifying, we created a concrete chorus and imagined what it might say if
it was to address human audiences and the idea of the Anthropocene – the
epoch named, importantly if not unproblematically, to recognize humanity’s
profound reshaping of the earth. Our point, in brief, was that concrete is
literally there in much of the reshaping that has been seen to date (Harkness
et al. 2018). The anthropomorphizing of concrete that was required to give
it voice in this way is what the political theorist Jane Bennett describes in
her vital materialist work on the political agency and vibrancy of matter
(2010). She defines anthropomorphism as ‘the idea that human agency has
some echoes in non-human nature – to counter the narcissism of humans
in charge of the world’ (Bennett 2010, xvi). Anthropomorphizing materials
like this allows us to draw connections to our material kin, identified as
such; flattening hierarchies that put humans above the rest of nature, whilst
providing other perspectives on our worlds.
Trace
Considering the material as comprehensively as possible in order to Identify
can mean having to draw limits around your object of study to mark it out –
temporarily – as singular material. This is because, of course, if one dives in
far enough, it will divide into constituents or extend into new combinations
and perhaps become another material. This branching and transformation
may reveal valuable insights though. Trace embraces this. It takes an even
more processual perspective by tracing the peopled histories of the material
and its production stories to your point of contact with it. Asking: How
did it come to be? What is it related to? Who made it? Where has it been?
Trying to do this in my field can involve looking into embodied energy or
carbon footprint calculations, as well as investigating the ethical details of
a material’s extraction, production, processing, transportation, and distri-
bution. This information isn’t always forthcoming, and this, in itself, can be
revealing. Devices like this are investigative then; their practice is unearthing
and revelatory. This might be unearthing as in coming to understand the
96 Rachel Harkness
make-up of materials and the companies and interests invested in them,
or tracing the ways in which materials have come to be in the locations of
their use.
Just one example of this sort of approach is my tracing of the shipping
containers that were being converted on one site I worked on: these
standardized things so crucial to global distribution systems told many
tales, from those of the high seas to those of the skilled metal-workers that
transformed them. Particular materials revealed particular tales, then, but
often in eco-building, I found the stories to be ones of materials having been
substituted-out with more sustainable ones, and of material choices made to
reduce distances travelled, fuel consumed, packaging and lengths of supply
chains.
Tracing materials such as cotton, gold and sugar, will offer different sorts
of insights again, and scholarship and activism (including much anthro-
pology) has been drawing attention to some of these histories for a long time
(e.g. Mintz 1985). Whether we look at Fairtrade’s system of certification,
consider campaigns such as Anti-Slavery International, or hashtags such as
‘#Who made my clothes?’ from groups like Fashion Revolution working on
issues of global supply chain transparency, there is a reason why Karl Marx
(1981), as one of the first ethnographers of capitalism, is one of the sources
mentioned in the list below. One of the key aspects of this whole approach
or mode of inquiry is to understand, demystify and critique the processes of
capitalism, using materials as a key. This way of working should allow for
a keen attention to labour, alienation, human rights and justice, as well as
being a force for change in the world as an ethnographer.
Follow
Follow builds on Trace, focusing on the particular (field)site. It is an
attending – through close participant observation – to where and how a
material is understood, valued, engaged with, transformed and where
it helps constitute the site itself. On the last site that I worked on, I took
materials portraits as I was following the build. With these images, I created
large composite mosaic-like pieces as artistic outputs: they pulled together
these many individual portraits – often of close-ups of materials, taken to
evoke a sense of their texture and materiality – to try to paint a picture of the
materials of the building and material quality of the place as a whole. I also
took a time-lapse of the site and its construction process to map the orches-
tration and concert of the work and materials into one combined form (of
the resultant building).
Some of the specific materials I have followed have included ones as
diverse as larch, gravel, (sun)light and water. To exemplify with the latter,
I followed it in off-grid sites using rainwater capture, collection, storage
and processing for the home’s water needs. My following of water revealed
much about the interdependency of people with the natural systems bringing
rainfall, as well as with those systems at the scale of the dwelling, constituted
by plants in specially designed planter beds, that could use-up and ‘clean
up’ dirty water from the household. It also highlighted the builder-dwellers’
balancing acts of welcoming, using, channelling and storing water in some
places within the home, whilst also making great efforts to keep it out in
other areas. Through making place portraits and timelapses, and more gen-
erally, just by following materials on site as they were used, transformed and
mixed, a sense was formed of how they interacted and became entangled
into a dynamic, interdependent and aesthetic thing we tend to call a building
or a dwelling place.
Work
Labouring alongside my research participants has been a way that I have
gained access to sites and prioritized both the politics of labour and learning
with and through materials. Key to this co-labouring approach is an
embodied and multi-sensory experiential understanding and appreciation of
the material. Even after more than a decade since first working with earthen
adobe plaster, for instance, I can still remember the feel and smell of the
material in my bare hands, on my trowel and applied with pressure to the
wall in front of me in the early days of my fieldwork. I remember how my
muscles ached at the close of the day, how I watched others who had mastered
the art move their bodies to distribute the material where they wanted it,
how I co-laboured on the mixing of piles of the ‘mud’ plaster. In my more
recent work with Simonetti and Winter (2014–2019), we elaborated upon
this approach, and explored more experimental, artistic practices, looking
into concrete’s use in the global construction industry, and considering it as
a source for a potential readymade.
In Fine Art, the readymade describes the use of pre-manufactured objects
in artworks. Due to the mass production and use of concrete globally, stand-
ardization of mix and quality is crucial. It was here that we found a fitting
readymade for our purpose – the standardized test cube. Made of steel or
plastic, this small reusable form provides a cast of concrete from which
structural strength can be gauged. While mixing and pouring our casts in
performance, we recited a spoken word piece. The repetition of this prac-
tice and this test cube form, in our creative works, is echoing that which is
found in the world of construction and engineering but at a scale more akin
to that of contemporary art and craft, the scale of the handmade. We echoed
aspects of the construction setting but abstracted this particular element and
dislocated it to the art spaces of studio, museum, exhibition hall etc., as has
been done with readymades in the art world before us. We also consciously
reduced the process of working with the test cube and concrete into a script
for performance and the playing out of that act(ion) of the concrete pour on
various stages. Thus, our work borrowed and adapted creative forms from
a number of fields around us, using them to create a way of attending to the
98 Rachel Harkness
actual material substance of the subject of our study (which could be present
with us on stage, as it were), to its political ecology and aspects such as its
standardization and globalization, as well as to the performativity and skill
of people labouring with the material.
Watch
It is rather common in eco-building to use things commonly considered to be
“waste” as materials. Thus, I have often been witness and party to conscious
re-use and reclamation. Watch pivots around these points: it is a charting of
the material, durationally and spatially, with a focus on waste and re-use.
One example to think with here is the automobile tyre as material, as many
of the builders I’ve worked with have used these as forms for rammed-earth
wall construction. Charting the tyre-becoming-material includes: extrac-
tion of rubber and components for steel etc.; making of tyres from steel
and textile components embedded in rubber compounds; use of tyres in
cars and by extension the powerful social symbolism of the car; wear and
tear and abrasion of tyres on road surfaces; the mechanic’s garage; tyres as
a huge waste issue with tyre mountains and their toxic fire risk growing;
new markets emerging for tyres re-sale where their use in construction
has boomed; using tyres as forms for rammed-earth (to construct walls),
filling them with compacted earth; testing of how they behave over time
when filled-with and sealed-into earthen construction projects. The charting
includes not only how the material changes or does not change, but how
people’s understandings and value of them change or remain too.
Attending to what is thrown away, and why, is important in any fieldsite
because it is probing an area of social life that is actively obscured (Alexander
and Reno 2012). The focus here, through watching wastes, brings out
different aspects of a material study and highlights contaminations. It also
highlights the effort that is required to go about re-using discarded things
and so-called wastes. As our man-made creations have become ever more
synthetically complex, our pollutions have followed-suit, with entangle-
ments (such as plastics and endrocrine distruptors) making their ways into
all sorts of bodies and becoming ever-more monstrous and strange (Carson
2000). It is essential to track these ever-multiplying material entanglements.
Watching ‘waste’ in this way, is therefore not a passive thing – there is agency
here, to act to help prevent, redirect and repurpose it.
Speculate
Building on this idea of extending the life of something, what of futures?
Working between design and anthropology, design’s relationship with the
future and the speculative has been interesting for me (a lifelong fan of
sci-fi writers such as Ursula Le Guin) to observe. There is much theorizing
of this within design, but at its core is something not at all restricted to
the discipline: i.e. the art of asking ‘what if?’ Considering material futures
and environmental design, Speculate allowed me to ask what the futures
envisioned by my eco-building participants might be like and to make this
the heart of a creative and propositional ethnographic output.
Drawing inspiration from what my research participants have taught me
over the years, from material studies, and my imagination, I speculated by
writing an account of building materials’ social history from the perspective
of a future historian looking back on the 2010s and the forthcoming decades.
The time scale offered by this semi-sci-fi approach, allowed me to envision
and describe a near future where concrete is phased-out and various healthy
ecological materials and socio-environmentally-friendly ways of building –
many that exist already in the here and now – have become commonplace in
its stead. I was able to sketch out the shifts in societal values and norms that
either allowed for, or were created by, these material practices and changes,
and to imaginatively project from the basis I had built up in ethnographic
work. My writing also took a form that somehow mirrored my eco-building
interlocuter-teachers and their practices of making manifest the futures they
want to see in the world. In my example of Speculate, a fictional future his-
torian of architectural materials, speaking in the year 2070, sheds light upon
various ways that concretes had been greened, as a first move, and then
had been superseded by hemp-based and earthen materials and techniques.
I playfully projected the latter’s increased importance over coming decades,
suggesting to today’s contemporary audiences, routes into particular material
futures that could be beneficial for people, societies, ecologies and our wider
environment. The placing of the historian’s voice into the future, their telling –
with the certainty of their hindsight – of how things still to come for us, ‘were’
and ‘had been’, lent the future scenario weight and strength. Speculate was
therefore a way that I might forecast and create. It is very important as citi-
zens and inhabitants of our common world – a world currently facing more
than a 1.5-degree temperature rise – that we really believe the alternative
social movements’ call that ‘another world is possible’. As Rob Hopkins,
Transition Towns activist, puts it, ‘we need to be able to imagine possible, feas-
ible, delightful versions of the future…where things turned out OK’ (Hopkins
2019, 8), and as ethnographers, we need to be able to help forecast those
futures too. Speculate can play a part in this important imaginative action.
How to
1. Identify a material or group of materials (hitherto described as ‘the
material’) in order to look more closely at its nature, classification,
limits, standardizing, origin, etc. What is its chemical make up? What
are its characteristics?
2. Trace the peopled histories of the material and its production stories
to your point of contact with it (i.e. how did it come to be, what is it
related to, who made it, and where has it been?).
100 Rachel Harkness
3. Follow the material around the (field)site, quite literally. See where
and how it is understood, interpreted, valued, engaged with, how it
is connected to, morphed, abstracted, transformed, where it leaks out
beyond your field site, etc. …
4. Work with the material, alongside others in your field (learning their
ways of working with and understanding of) and also experimenting
with it on your own. … Attend to the bodily labour and sensory per-
ception of working with it…Note where your muscles ache, what the
material’s surface feels like to touch, where co-labouring/collaborating
is required to work it, etc. …
5. Watch the waste/wasting practices associated with the material as it
becomes discarded, forgotten, ruined, polluting, leaking, etc. Watch
where it goes, intervene, perhaps, and see how its meanings, form, etc.
change over this process…
6. Speculate about the material and imagine its possible futures, again
alongside other people doing similarly. Project into the life of the
material yet to come…
Note
1 In John Muir’s My First Summer in the Sierra (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911),
on page 110 of the Sierra Club Books 1988 edition.
Sources
Alexander, C., and Reno, J. 2012. Economies of Recycling: The Global Transfor-
mations of Materials, Values and Social Relations. Zed.
Appadurai, A., ed. 2015. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural
Perspective. Cambridge University Press.
Bennett, J. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press.
Carson, R. 2000. Silent Spring (Reprinted). Penguin.
Drazin, A., and Küchler, S., eds. 2015. The Social Life of Materials: Studies in
Materials and Society. Bloomsbury Academic.
Harkness, R. 2009. Thinking, Building, Dwelling: Examining Earthships in Taos and
Fife. Thesis, University of Aberdeen.
Harkness, R. Simonetti, C. and Winter, J. 2018. ‘Concrete Speaks.’ In Future
Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene, edited by Mitman, G.,
Armiero, M., and Emmett, R. S. The University of Chicago Press.
Hopkins, R. 2019. From What is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination
to Create the Future we Want. Chelsea Green Publishing.
Ingold, T. 2012. ‘Toward an Ecology of Materials.’ Annual Review of Anthropology
41 (1): 427–442.
IPCC report. 2021. IPCC, 2021: Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science
Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Masson-Delmotte, V., et al., eds.)].
Cambridge University Press.
Klein, N. 2000. No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs, Taking Aim at the Brand
Bullies. Flamingo.
Levi, P., and Rosenthal, R. 1996. The Periodic Table. Alfred A. Knopf.
Marx, K., Fowkes, B., and Fernbach, D. 1981. Capital: A Critique of Political
Economy. Penguin Books in association with New Left Review.
McDonough, William., and Braungart, M. 2009. Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the
Way We Make Things. Vintage.
Mintz, S. 1985. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History.
Penguin.
Muir, J. 1911. My First Summer in the Sierra. Houghton Mifflin.
Raworth, K. 2018. Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century
Economist (Paperback edition). Random House Business Books.
Tsing, A. L. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life
in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton University Press.
9 How to game ethnography
Ignacio Farías and Tomás Sánchez Criado
Games have recently become relevant spaces for anthropological experi-

mentation, enabling alternative approaches to critical analysis, concep-
tual work, and ethical discussion. But how can games become relevant
as field devices? Using games in the field entails more than doing eth-
nography by playful means or playing games with ones’ counterparts.
Indeed, the practices of ‘game design’ and ‘game testing’ afford pecu-
liarly recursive modes of ethnographic inquiry. On the one hand, (i)
the practice of designing a game enables modes of ethnographically
inventing and projecting field relationships. Rather than inscribing or
prescribing intricate social dynamics, the game design process entails a
form of ethnographic exploration of field sites. On the other hand, (ii)
the practice of game testing, more than simply allowing to reflect crit-
ically about a given gameplay, nourishes para-ethnographic relations
with the fields’ practitioners. Indeed, in testing it’s also the game’s
ethnographic indexicality that is put to a test: triggering discussions
or reflections and comparisons of the experiences enacted in the game
with previous ones the participants might have had, enabling its recur-
sive prototyping.
File card
Field device: Game design and testing.
Mode of inquiry: Projecting field sites and staging para-ethnographic
encounters.
Geographical location(s): Berlin.
Duration / time: 2019–2021.
Ethnographic counterparts: university graduates, game designers and
testers, urban activists.
Resources: Space for 3-day workshop; reused materials for prototyping;
small funding to develop a first version of the games for an exhibition.
Substantive outputs: Workshop video-summary: www2.hu-berlin.de/
stadtlabor/event/togts-hackathon/; exhibition documentation: https://
open-form-neu-denken.tumblr.com/; downloadable version of House
of Gossip: www2.hu-berlin.de/stadtlabor/publication/house-of-gossip/
Degree of difficulty: High.
Whilst play and game have been objects of study and conceptual repertoires
for different anthropological schools, only recently have games turned into
devices enabling playful approaches to anthropological practice (Harper
DOI: 10.4324/9781003253709-11
How to game ethnography 103
et al. forthcoming). Still unique in its kind, Gaming Anthropology: A
Sourcebook from #Anthropologycon (Collins et al. 2017) strongly advocates
for the use of games as a pedagogical tool for anthropology. Games would
not only convey anthropological analysis and conceptual work of highly
technical problematics, but also create safe spaces for the discussion of eth-
ical predicaments of ethnographic practice. But how could games become
relevant in ‘producing ethnographic knowledge collaboratively with research
participants and as a genre for communicating anthropological knowledge
with varied publics’ (Harper et al. forthcoming)? Our piece recounts sev-
eral attempts at putting games to use as part of a collective ethnographic
exploration of housing and real estate markets. In our view, this entails
more than doing ethnography by playful means or playing games with ones’
counterparts. As we will show, the practices of ‘game design’ and ‘game
testing’ afford peculiarly recursive modes of engaging in ethnographic inquiry.
Designing games, projecting fields

House of Gossip is a board/performative game, developed by the authors
together with a group of anthropology students. Centre-staging neighbour
resistance to real-estate pressure, the game focuses on critical situations –
e.g. when a whole building is about to be bought – and explores how know-
ledge, information and gossip begin to wildly proliferate among affected
residents. The gameplay is shaped by encounters among the players in a
staircase. In each turn players can go up and down the staircase and meet
other neighbours. When they do, they have to move away from the table
and enter an imaginary role-playing staircase: engaging in a face-to-face
improvised conversation with other players. In these encounters, players try
to understand whom they are talking to, performing a character in front
of others and creating conditions of trust and friendship to undertake col-
lective action.
Its first prototype was the result of a one-year project in the MA
Ethnography at the Humboldt-University of Berlin that we co-taught in the
year 2018–2019. The project, called The only game in town? Anthropology
of housing and real estate markets in Berlin, invited students to explore
ethnographically the entanglements of socio-technical, calculative and pol-
itical practices shaping housing and real estate markets and market agents
in Berlin. The question mark in the title suggested an attempt to go beyond
the economicist idea that there is just ‘one’ market or ‘one’ capitalist logic
underlying housing real estate markets and to explore ethnographically the
multiple ‘games’ market actors are engaged in.
Students pursued research on a variety of issues: (1) the rationales of
market actors and intermediaries (real-estate agents, city-owned housing
building companies, cooperatives); (2) the social life of policy and legal
instruments (Airbnb’s conditions of use and lobby organizations’ public
statements); and (3) the politics of dwelling in, against or even outside
104 Ignacio Farías and Tomás Sánchez Criado
commoditized housing (the tiny house movement, living in public spaces).
After some months of fieldwork, we organized a three-day workshop with
the students to prototype games on these topics.
We were inspired by colleagues who have been exploring the pedagogic
and scholarly potential of game design (Collins et al. 2017). Joe Dumit
offers an extremely inspiring example of how ‘the serious play of designing
a game’ (2017: 609) would liberate students from getting stuck in critical
stances, fully embracing the project of learning to think and see the world
from the point of view of a singular actor, such as a fracking company. This
is crucial to teach a research practice that is attentive to the intricacies of
specific socio-technical practices, rather than pursuing a principled critique
of fracking. Similarly, Matthew Durington underlines the playful capacities
of games, such as Cards against Anthropology, to prop students to critic-
ally engage with key disciplinary issues in anthropology classes, ‘confronting
ethical dilemmas in the field’ (Durington 2017).
Both are games aimed to facilitate a reflexive anthropological engagement
with real-world issues. Notably, they differ in the role games take: whereas
for Dumit the task was ‘to step into the point of view (POV) of a company, to
map the world that they live in, to figure out what corporations care about’
(2017, 617), for Durington the field situations described are hypothetical
and schematic, but aimed at triggering more nuanced discussions. Our
engagement led us in a different direction. Game design became an ethno-
graphically grounded exercise in projecting field sites: not yet encountered or
studied but sensed and imagined during fieldwork. Game design developed
into an abductive exercise of jumping sideways from well-known to par-
tially known field sites – thus giving form to that indeterminate process,
right in the middle or after undertaking fieldwork, leading ethnographers to
figure out promising future projects or sites. Game design, in our case, was
neither a mode of description (Dumit) nor a provocation (Durington), but
an ethnographically grounded mode of projecting field sites.
This was in part a consequence of practical considerations. Our work-
shop happened after our students had begun to engage ethnographically
with the housing and real estate markets. The risk, we realized, was that
our games would represent ethnographic results in a simplified way, thus
killing the generative effects of game design. To prevent this, we set a series
of design constraints, inspired by Anastasia Salter’s (2017) how-to guide for
game development in the classroom:
1. Game design groups were to be composed of students researching

different issues, hence avoiding the creation of one-to-one representations
of actors or field sites, integrating knowledges, experiences and insights
from their different fields into the game.
2. Games should be understandable and engaging, so that they could be
played by non-academics. To that effect, we invited artist-cum-game
designer Sebastian Quack from the Invisible Playground network to
advise on the playability of the teams’ games.
3. Each group had a set of constraints concerning the ultimate goal, the
mechanics and the materiality of the game, in order to ensure greater
variability and, most importantly, to avoid idealized versions of real
estate markets or housing activism.
Each of these constraints had important effects on how the groups engaged in
the practice of projecting field sites through their games. The most important
one was the need to invent a promising site in relation to the sites students
had been doing research on, hence articulating ethnographic insights from
various ethnographic projects. A staircase where people living in the same
building meet, perhaps greet, talk or forge alliances was not a field site in any
research of the research projects of those who designed House of Gossip,
but a regular site of personal experiences as inhabitants of Berlin. The
inspiration came from the unrealized potential of one of the ethnographic
projects, focusing on people living in public spaces. When discussing game
topics, the team began talking about how interesting would have been to
explore the interfaces between homelessness and regular flat living – a par-
ticularly picky issue in winter, when homeless people sleep in the staircases
of buildings, leading to many everyday negotiations. Even if this element was
later discarded to avoid unnecessary stigmatizations, how neighbours deal
with situations affecting their flats, and the role of the staircase as a space of
exchange between neighbours became the main image grounding the idea for
House of Gossip of a site that triggered powerful conversations.
The design process, understood as projecting an ethnographic field site,
also required developing specific figurations, that is, relational assemblages
of figures and material configurations (Suchman 2012). Whilst the impera-
tive of playability worked against a nuanced practice of figuration, many
game ideas involved bringing together different types of actors (residents
of different socioeconomic profiles, real-estate agents, landlords, politicians,
journalists, etc.) with clearly defined interests and agendas into more or
less conflictive spaces and dynamics. Sue them all, another of the games we
developed at the time with students Lilian Krischer, Rojîn Bindal, Sophia
van Vügt, Tjaša Celan and Vanessa Zallot, offers a good example of how
tensions between ethnographic and gamely figurations were handled. In the
game, players take the role of an activist group helping tenants sue their
landlords by facilitating contacts to support persons: lawyers, witnesses,
experts, journalists or friends. Accordingly, it was necessary to figure out
who the tenants were, where they lived and how they were being cheated by
the landlords.
In the first prototype, the game included rather stereotypical figurations
of both tenants and landlords. This led to a major debate about how game
design might thwart ethnographic nuance, triggering stereotypical and even
discriminatory cultural figures. The tendency in commercial games to create
exaggerated, ironic, comic or univocal types of social practice and dynamics
became an issue throughout the process of projecting new fields through
game design. We were deeply concerned with designing ambiguous or more
open player identities, like the ones encountered in the field. The design pro-
cess thus triggered major conversations about ethnographic craft, not as a
hypothetical task (as in Cards against Anthropology), but one grounded in
their actual ethnographic encounters. The aim, somewhat closer to Dumit’s
experience, was to portray accurately. And, yet, the design process involved
portraying a potential site.
The tension between ethnographic and gamely figurations involved not
only the actor identities, but also the type of social relationships that a game
would project. Hence, the Sue Them All group quickly began to problem-
atize early game ideas based on cooperative gameplays and altruistic actions
by considering that a main challenge for activists is how to articulate unsal-
aried activism with salaried work. Then, the gameplay changed to include
two simultaneous logics: one of group cooperation, another of individual
earning. New rules were added: Players would get an economic retribution
for bringing cases to court and they would need to make ends meet by the
end of every round earning enough money. Accordingly, they would not just
collaborate in bringing landlords to court (freely negotiating how to split the
reward) but would also be forced to compete in bringing cases to court, to
secure the full reward. The addition of rules seemed necessary to allow for
a sufficiently complex gameplay simulating activists’ predicaments. In other
cases, figuring out the complexity of projected field sites required elimin-
ating frames or rules. This happened in House of Gossip, where the playful
projection of a staircase as a field site left player identities, turn-taking or
timing (e.g. to exchange gossip) to situated decision-making by players.
In this process, we discovered that designing games enabled both an ethno-
graphically grounded exploration of not-yet-researched field sites, as well as
a critical engagement in the ethnographic projection of their social figures
and the dynamics shaping them. In a movement similar to conceiving a new
research project based on lateral or peripheral insights from fieldwork, game
design involved performing a movement from sites explored and encountered
first-hand to the projection of ‘second sites’ in which new problem spaces
are anticipated. The relevance of the ‘second field’ in anthropology was
singularly highlighted by Marilyn Strathern (1999) when describing the
space that emerges in ethnographic writing, partially connected to the ‘first
field’ of ethnographic research. The ‘second site’ is for her a site of ethno-
graphic effects, resulting of the mobilization of materials and inscriptions
gathered whilst doing fieldwork with the aim of creating an ethnographic
re-description. However, when designing our games, we were confronted
with a different configuration altogether. Rather than as spaces for the re-
description of social worlds, our game design involved a type of lateral
ethnographic displacement: from already known and researched first sites
to intriguing and inspiring potential second sites. Rather than textual spaces
where to re-describe fieldwork, fieldnotes and materials anew, game design
figured out how new problem spaces could be delineated in a material form.
Testing games, or how to stage para-ethnographic effects?

On the last day of the workshop we held an open doors session. A father
and his teenage son quickly learnt Sue Them All, developing complex strat-
egies in order to bring many cases to court. After playing, we asked for their
feedback. Both were experienced players and gave us valuable comments
to improve the gameplay. Then the father began to tell a more complicated
story about how some friends and a lawyer had actually convinced him to
sue his landlord, later losing the case and having to pay a high amount in
lawyer and court costs. This encounter was fascinating. On a very practical
level, it prompted the need to add a further dynamic: players would not
just need to bring cases to court, but a dice roll would randomize whether
players won or resources were wasted. Most importantly it made us realize
that this was not just a game, but a device to make visible and discuss-
able an actually existing and important field of action in the housing
market world.
We began to understand game testing as a peculiar ethnographic
research practice: one involving a scenographic mode of encountering
and corresponding with social and epistemic partners. Scenography, Luke
Cantarella, Christine Hegel and George E. Marcus (2019, 21) argue, is
a mode of creating fieldwork encounters by means of staging something
new: not just a description of another world, but another world in its own
right. We started to realize that games, and particularly game testing, have
the capacity to similarly function as ethnographic scenographies, thus cre-
ating conditions for what Cantarella, Hegel and Marcus describe as a ‘revela-
tory alienation’ (2019: 14) supporting the mutual reflexivity and criticality
of generative ethnographic encounters. As we quickly discovered, inviting
people to play games about heated public debates deeply connected with
their lives was an extremely generative form of enabling conversations and
encounters.
A wider exploration of the scenographic capacities of game testing
began in the context of a cooperation in 2019 with Miodrag Kuč from ZK/
U – Centre for Art and Urbanistics, a major artist and community space in
Berlin. Miodrag was then leading a practice-based research project called
‘Rethinking Open-Form’, addressing post-socialist legacies of housing
estates built in Eastern Europe between 1960 and 1980, in collaboration
with the Museum X of Lublin, Poland.1 They were working on the Karl-
Marx-Allee housing estate in Berlin, built during the GDR, and a major
object of public concern in the context of the housing crisis, with its proper-
ties rapidly entering the market. In this context, our games were to take two
roles: to trigger conversations among local residents about current trans-
formations of this housing estate; and to partake in the final exhibition of
the project, where urban transformations were to be reflected as ‘open forms’
and thematized through artworks and interactive devices, such as games.
In this context, we brought our games to a one-day neighbourhood fes-
tival in the main street of the housing estate. May 11, 2019 was a rainy day.
Our stand was just one amongst 30 others, where both local organizations
and citywide civic initiatives were present. It had an improvised billboard
with the title ‘Spiele für eine kritische Nachbarschaft’ (Games for a crit-
ical neighbourhood) and the setup invited visitors to play one of three
games: the already described House of Gossip and Sue Them All, as well
as Kiez Mind Archive, an urban exploration game developed by students
Diana Mammana, Nora Kronemyer and Kiane Wenneman. Our fieldnotes
account for many different interactions: some superficial, some intense. In
most encounters players would provide feedback on the gameplay: how
easy, fun or complicated it was to play. But interestingly, game testing
would also operate as an elicitation device, enabling to share personal
experiences with the game topic, such as this reaction of a couple to House
of Gossip:
As we explain the possibilities of how to win the game as renters

(cooperative, right of first refusal, etc.), the two begin to tell that they
have experienced exactly such a process in their old apartment building.
Unfortunately, in their case all attempts to save the house were unsuc-
cessful and they had to move.
(Fieldnotes by Lilian Krischer and Tan Weigand)
Beyond elicitation, game testing also led to reflexive forms of assessing the
political and ethnographic value of games, surprisingly similar to our very
anthropological exploration of real estate ‘games’. Several people discussed
with us, the political effects of the games, in part as a reaction to our ‘games
for a critical neighbourhood’ statement. Most of these conversations were
not about the games themselves or personal experiences with the issue, but
about the conditions under which these games could unfold their potential.
This was reflected in the fieldnotes some of us took (Marie Klinger, Lilian
Krischer, Tan Weigand): A journalist who approached us pointed out that
games like ours are extremely ‘context-dependent, because in each neigh-
bourhood there is a different predicament concerning the housing market’.
In the same line, a woman who really liked the games was also interested
in discussing the conditions under which they could work in other areas
of the city and whether they ‘would make sense where there is already
citizen dialogue’. We also encountered critical voices. One woman radically
questioned the development of these games in a university context: ‘Why
don’t the tenants do it themselves?’ and ‘Are you also doing something for
the citizens?’. Finally, various people refused to engage, either because they
felt games are too infantile and/or undermine the earnestness of the issue.
In that regard, one seasoned neighbour, who shared the desire to politicize
Berlin’s real estate problem, would argue that ‘such a serious topic cannot
be treated with just games’.
Game testing, we would argue, not only creates occasions where ethno-
graphic encounters are facilitated. It also creates conditions for para-
ethnographic reasoning. Para-ethnography is a concept proposed by Douglas
Holmes and George Marcus for describing how fieldwork needs to be re-
learnt in contexts where ‘our subjects are themselves engaged in intellectual
practices that resemble … our own methodological practices’ (2008: 595).
Para-ethnography is, for them, a condition of certain sites, resulting from the
reflexivity of particular fields of practice. Yet, thinking about games and game
testing as stages of para-ethnographic relations might allow us to develop
this notion in two senses. Firstly, this para-ethnographic condition, rather
than being a condition of certain contexts, can also be provoked by devices
such as games. Secondly, paying attention to what happens during game
testing practices begs specifying in what sense the intellectual practices of
testers might resemble those of ethnographers. Holmes and Marcus (2008)
suggest a condition of reflexive engagement of experts homologically resem-
bling the ethnographer’s. This is certainly correct but misses one key char-
acteristic of ethnographic practice: the simultaneous presence and absence
of the ethnographer in the field of inquiry. Ethnographic practice entails a
‘doubling’: ‘being there’, participating of a field of inquiry, while at the same
time ‘being somewhere else’, looking at the situation from an outer perspec-
tive concerned with particular questions and problems.
This ‘schizophrenic doubling’ is not necessarily characteristic of experts
(whose locus of expertise tends to be where they also think and act), but
defines well how testers related to the games playing the game and, at the
same time, be somewhere else: assessing the gameplay from different epi-
stemic positions, such as their own or their activist endeavours – hence
assessing the game as a multimodal artefact aimed to generate specific social
and political effects – or contrasting it with their own distressful experiences
of the real estate market.
Game on!
In this process, what has become ethnographically interesting for us is not
so much the effects that a game generates once it begins to circulate, but the
multiple forms of cross-reflexivity and friction that emerge when we design
and test games. Whilst game design enabled us to argue their importance
as devices to project field sites, we discovered that testing what only felt as
perpetually ‘imperfect’ games also meant that the games acted as stages of
para-ethnographic relations, where the ethnographic indexicality of their
figurations was being put to a test: triggering discussions or reflections and
comparisons of the experiences enacted in the game with previous ones the
participants might have had, hence enabling its recursive prototyping. That
is, until one might need to call it quits. However, we are well aware fur-
ther affordances of games for anthropological research might be recursively
opened up as we game on. …
How to
1. Do not aim to establish a sequential relationship between ethnographic
insight and game design:
a. Do not do fieldwork and then design a game based on it.
b. Do not design a game and then do fieldwork with it.
c. Rather do games as fieldwork: instead of fieldwork, on top of field-
work, besides fieldwork.
d. Do as you please, juxtapose, depart, contradict, divert, speculate,
hyperbolize, but avoid establishing a realist relationship between
the game and the field. Experiment with allegory.
2. Do not subordinate your work with games to a specific need or challenge
coming from the field.
3. Do not subordinate your exploration of the game form to the existence
of an ethnographic relationship of collaboration, this relationship might
not appear or be elicited, or it might but in ways you don’t expect.
4. Games do not need to be a ‘response’ to a particular circumstance or
development. They can also be modes of addressing something, starting
a conversation, or even a conflict, an invitation to discuss.
5. Do not think that you will manage to do any of this by just being a
‘good’ ethnographer or anthropologist:
Figure 9.1 Testing games at the Spiele für eine kritische Nachbarschaft (May 11,
2019). Photo taken with permission by one of the authors.
a. In order to learn about what your game does ethnographically, you
will not get far by just being an ethnographer of your own game.
b. You might need to work with game designers and game theorists, or
become one!
6. Do not work towards finishing a game, but towards generating a loop
of prototyping versions of imperfect games, caught in between designing
and testing. If the game doesn’t work so well that might be even better,
since things that might count as a ‘problem’ in terms of conventional
game design might lead to the most interesting ethnographic openings,
insights, encounters and para-ethnographic effects.
7. Games are difficult to design. So, beyond hopefully inspiring stories,
what needs to be discussed are lessons about mistakes, backfires, things
that should rather be avoided or further provoked. Please document
and share!
Note
1 See https://open-form-neu-denken.tumblr.com/ (Accessed November 15, 2021).
Sources
Cantarella, Luke, Christine Hegel, and George E. Marcus. 2019. Ethnography by
Design: Scenographic Experiments in Fieldwork. London: Bloomsbury.
Collins, Samuel Gerald, Joseph Dumit, Matthew Durington, Edward González-
Tennant, Krista Harper, Mizer Nick, and Anastasia Salter. 2017. Gaming
Anthropology: A Sourcebook from #anthropologycon. Retrieved from https://
anthropologycon.org/ (Accessed November 15, 2021).
Dumit, Joseph. 2017. ‘Game Design as STS Research.’ Engaging Science, Technology,
and Society 3: 603–12.
Durington, Matthew. 2017. ‘Teaching Somewhat Serious Games.’ In Gaming
Anthropology: A Sourcebook from #anthropologycon, 22–25. Retrieved from
https://anthropologycon.org/ (Accessed November 15, 2021).
Harper, Krista, Samuel G. Collins, Matthew Durington, Joseph Dumit, Edward
González Tennant, Marc Lorenc, Nick Mizer, and Anastasia Salter. Forthcoming.
‘Games and Public Anthropology.’ In The International Encyclopaedia of
Anthropology. Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell.
Holmes, Douglas R., and George E. Marcus. 2008. ‘Para-Ethnography.’ In The SAGE
Encyclopaedia of Qualitative Research Methods, edited by Lisa Given, 595–97.
Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Salter, Anastasia. 2017. ‘Making Board Games in the Classroom.’ In Gaming
Anthropology: A Sourcebook from #anthropologycon, 5–6. Retrieved from
https://anthropologycon.org/ (Accessed November 15, 2021).
Strathern, Marilyn. 1999. Property, Substance and Effect: Anthropological Essays on
Persons and Things. London: Athlone Press.
Suchman, Lucy. 2012. ‘Configuration.’ In Inventive Methods: The Happening of the
Social, edited by Celia Lury and Nina Wakeford, 48–60. London: Routledge.
10 How to get caught in the
ethnographic material
Greg Pierotti and Cristiana Giordano
‘Affect Theater’ is a practice that blends theatrical techniques, anthropo-

logical fieldwork methods, and affect theory. For both ethnographers and
theatre makers working with the ‘real’, this writing and research method-
ology allows an engagement with empirical material collected in the field
(interviews, archival documents, medical and legal reports, etc.), and the
elements of the stage (light, sound, props, architecture, costumes, spatial
relationship, as well as text) to both construct and deconstruct narrative for
the stage or page. How does an ethnographer leave the field of research and
remain affected by the worlds they have encountered when they write them?
How does a theatrical deviser build performances from empirical research
that convey affective experience rather than strictly a documentary-style
narrative? In a laboratory format, Affect Theater troubles the truth claims
and privileged theoretical positions that often challenge social scientists and
other writers working with the empirical. It allows for the rendering of felt
experience from the field that is often obscured by the rush to represent
compelling narratives.
File card
Field devices: ‘Getting caught’ (Favret-Saada), collection of empirical
material for Affect Theater.
Mode of inquiry: ‘Getting caught anew’, or Affect Theater as compos-
ition, dramaturgy, performance.
Geographical location(s): Siracusa (Italy). Baltimore, MD (USA).
Duration /time: 2015 – ongoing.
Ethnographic counterparts: theatrical devisers, migrants, police officers,
doctors, activists, graduate and undergraduate students, archives, elem-
ents of the stage.
Resources: Funding for research and for performance making (from UC
Davis, San Francisco Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and University
of Arizona).
Substantive outputs: Performances (Unstories, b more), book, chapters,
articles.
Website: http://affecttheater.com/.
Video: Disrupting the Narrative Urge (video by Lisa Stevenson and Alex
Krause).
Degree of difficulty: Difficult.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003253709-12
How to get caught in the ethnographic material 113
Several actors playing archivists push shelves of archive boxes onto the stage.
Others set up a variety of research tools: A VCR, a reel-to-reel tape recorder,
a record player. They open boxes and sort through materials: clothing,
objects, documents, photographs. The unpacking of boxes creates the
opportunity for the play to unpack stories about Jim Jones’ movement The
Peoples Temple, which the performers spent four years researching. Greg
was a lead writer and performer.
In spring 2005, Cristiana saw the play The People’s Temple [sic] at
Berkeley Rep while working on her dissertation at UC Berkeley. She was
struck by the complex account of the social movement and inspired by how
the script refused to resolve the contradictions of the violence and hope
inscribed in story, producing richer analyses of the moment in history. This
devised play accomplished something she wanted to achieve in her disserta-
tion; it enabled a more performative writing she had been looking for. On
Greg’s part, this play was the beginning of an effort to rely less on narrative
as an organizing principle and more on ideas and formal structures. Ten
years later, we met at UC Davis and began to develop together more analyt-
ical and performative modes of sharing research.
Affect Theater, the process we have developed since, creates a dialogue
between research and narrative practices in theatre and anthropology in a
laboratory/workshop format. It is primarily a mode of inquiry but as such it
also shapes the ways in which we do empirical research, therefore it acts as a
field devise as well. In our practice anthropologists take from theatre a more
visceral posture towards research, and a more performative understanding
of narrative that can translate into new texts (essays, plays, short stories,
installations, etc.), or into a revitalized practice of academic writing. Theatre
makers learn from anthropology how to approach the different discourse
formations around events and social issues.
Victor Turner (1982) and Richard Schechner (1985) made intriguing
collaborations between anthropology and performance; Erving Goffman
(1959) used performance as an analytical frame; Eugenio Barba (2010)
investigated how different theatrical traditions inform and impact perform-
ance and presence. Ours is not an experiment in performing ethnographies,
nor an exploration of the anthropology of theatre, but rather a lab where we
use theatrical techniques and performance creation to engage and trouble
empirical questions and material. We put the elements of the stage (lights,
sets, objects, sound, bodies etc.) and our research material into conversation
with each other. This generates affective analyses, research modalities, and
productions.
We are inspired by French anthropologist and psychoanalyst Jeanne
Favret-Saada who outlined a research method and a practice of writing that
challenged the common idea of ‘participant observation’. She questioned its
paradoxical nature: ‘To observe while participating, or to participate while
observing, is about as obvious as savoring a burning hot ice cream’ (1990,
190). She proposed a different field device that she called ‘getting caught’,
114 Greg Pierotti and Cristiana Giordano
a way of letting oneself be affected and positioned by the language and
network of relations that make up worlds. She elaborated: ‘To accept to
“participate” and be affected has nothing to do with understanding.’ Like
in a dream, a lot of what happens during our research processes can only be
grasped through the affects that are produced in us and the kind of oblique
associations we make while immersed in our field sites.
When writing, Favret-Saada warns against moving from being ‘caught’ to
‘catching’ things in an analytical or representational frame, creating accounts
from an unaffected and comprehending posture. For her, writing is not a
distancing process that allows for objectification, but a way to tap back into
the intensities we experienced while doing research. It is a way to create
new relations with the empirical so that our sense of separateness from our
objects of inquiry continues to be blurred. Favret-Saada sees in writing the
need for ‘a second “catching” and not a “getting uncaught” ’ (1980, 14).
Affect Theater is what we use in our research sites to ‘get caught’, and
in our workshop to ‘get caught again’, or perhaps more accurately caught
‘anew’. It takes up her challenge to experience the affective dimension of
research, rather than understanding it. Affect Theater creates relationships
between empirical material, theatrical vocabularies, performance makers,
and spectators, where the tactile, sonic, textual, and visual are woven
together with modes of thinking.
We are also inspired by two post-modern theatrical devising processes,
Moment Work and Viewpoints. The practice of theatrical devising departs
from traditional theatre in that a finished script is not the starting point for
the staging and direction of a play. It is a collaborative process involving
the members of a company developing and writing together. Moment Work
was originated by Greg’s former company, Tectonic Theater Project. It is a
practice for working with non-theatrical source material (interviews, arch-
ival documents, medical and legal reports, media sources, etc.) to construct
narratives for the stage (Kaufman, Pitts et al. 2018). The Viewpoints were
developed by Mary Overlie to deconstruct conventional dance and theatre
practices. In our workshop, participants engage with empirical sources,
become ‘absorbed in a dialogue with the material’, and listen to all the avail-
able elements to become a different sort of participant observers and avoid
working from ‘the prejudice of the creator’ (Overlie 2016, 189).
The process of Affect Theater has three parts: research, composition, and
dramaturgy. We discuss them in a linear fashion, but they are in fact fluid
and interwoven in practice.
Research
During the research period, the group investigates an initial area of inquiry.
For example, the illegal arrest and death of Freddie Gray and anti-blackness
(b more), or the Italian refugee ‘crisis’, and theories of ‘anti-crisis’ (Unstories).
Having chosen a topic, we conduct empirical research.
Along with interviews, fieldnotes, and archival material, we also tune in
to the specific visual, aural, tactile and textual source material of different
sites. For example, during the creation of Unstories, Cristiana introduced art
that was shared with her during her fieldwork by Homiex, a young Nigerian
artist she met in Siracusa, Italy. In the workshop, we used this material,
along with projections of WhatsApp chats between them, to create a char-
acter who emerged through images rather than embodied acting.
We also attend to seemingly unrelated design elements pulled directly
from transcribed interviews because they strike us. For instance, during one
interview for b more, Greg was struck when community activist Mama Ama
described a cabaret show she was doing with her band following Freddie
Gray’s funeral. Later the song ‘I Like it’ by the DeBarge, which she referenced
in the interview, served to create atmosphere and point to differences in cul-
tural contexts between black and white characters as well as in audiences.
We always mine our sites and empirical material for any design element that
might add to the theatrical world we create.
However, as Favret-Saada observed, research is also about being affected
by an atmosphere and the subject positions assigned to us while in the field.
In her work on witchcraft, she describes how she was positioned by her
interlocutors as a potential un-witcher who could undo a spell. She was
‘caught’ within the force field of witchcraft by simply being placed within
a set of relations organized through the discourse of magic. This stepping
into different sites and their discursive practices impacts our fieldwork and
creative productions in unexpected ways. Affect Theater is a new field device
and mode of inquiry that affords us more visceral engagements.
Episode composition
We begin our devising by leaving text and storytelling aside. We generate
a list of the elements of the stage besides text that are available to us, and
we explore each element by creating individual episodes, initially from a
phenomenological rather than a semiotic point of view. We look for the
theatrical rather than only the narrative potential of the elements, in other
words, what they can do rather than what they can mean. We avoid making
the elements function in the way we have decided they must, or in ways that
we are used to.
An episode is framed by the words, ‘We Begin’ and ‘We End’, signalling
that the episode to consider is only what exists within this deceptively simple
framing device. This allows us to think in a structural way about the discrete
units of theatrical time that may eventually make up an entire performance
progression.
This practice extends our experience of ‘being caught’ in the field into the
phase of analytical engagement with our empirical material so that writing
or devising can be a way of ‘getting caught anew’. Based on our associations
and intuitive hunches, rather than our understanding, we create episodes. We
then engage with them through different types of analysis described below.
This allows the episodes to speak back to our initial impulses. This dialectic
creates something unexpected and unintentional, giving the material a liveli-
ness that must then be grappled with in the present moment.
It is challenging to let go of the urge towards signification and allow
the encounter between the elements of the stage and our material to not
only make meaning but also create generative disagreements around the
understanding of a particular representation. These early explorations create
an affective space where we play with phenomena and spectacles for their
own sakes. As we add more elements to our episodes, they become more
complex and create more associations in the minds of the spectators, and
therefore more narrative, interpretation, and metaphor. This also generates
more dissonance between spectators’ understandings.
After an episode is presented within the frame ‘We begin’ and ‘We end’,
spectators – not the episode presenters – engage in a structured critique
that unfolds in three parts: 1) What did you love? 2) structural analysis,
describing what was literally seen and heard on the stage; 3) interpretative
analysis, sharing any meaning or story spectators made up.
While we decentre text and storytelling, in step one of analysis we don’t
privilege the phenomenological either. If we love an episode because it
creates a surprising interpretation or even narrative, that is noted. If we
love an episode because it teaches us something fascinating about an object,
light, costume, that is also noted. We title episodes and put them in a shared
document. This becomes a catalogue of material for a possible larger piece.
In step two, under each title, we write down the structural elements of each
episode. In step three, we link the structural to our interpretations – the
meaning each spectator makes.
Adding text increases the capacity of each episode to signify further. We
layer language into episodes that have already been made and listed, or by
creating new ones. We often privilege texts that seem to capture everyone’s
attention. For example, working on Unstories, we engaged a transcript from
Cristiana’s conversations with Dubarak, a man from Senegal she met in a
shanty town in the South of Italy where he worked as a seasonal worker.
Despite its hardship, the shanty town was in open fields outside the city,
where foreigners were often stopped by the police and asked for documents.
In talking to her, he said: ‘Deep down [here] I am free.’ Without consulting
each other, many of us made episodes using this line.
When portions of texts are selected repeatedly in the workshop, this repe-
tition becomes other than the words uttered, and it also may start mobil-
izing certain narratives or associations. Through this utterance, Dubarak
seemed to mobilize a critique of power and surveillance, which the group
picked up and further developed through our devising practice. In the pro-
cess of episode making, who is mobilizing what narrative is blurred, and the
author of the statement blends with other bodies, voices, objects, lights, and
space, creating a different world.
Eugenio Barba calls this kind of process working with the text rather
than for the text. To work with the text implies that the text is one of the
many materials of a performance rather than a blueprint that dictates how
other materials will be used to construct a representation (Barba 2010, 123).
Similarly, in our practice the body may also be de-centred: it is not just a tool
for the representation of a character, it is also and foremost another element
of the stage.
Dramaturgy
How are episodes organized in relation to each other? This brings us
to the third phase of our process. At its heart, dramaturgy is always an
organizational process. Traditionally, it has been understood as a practice
of analyzing and shaping a performance text: its narrative structure, char-
acter development, language, etc. It is literary. We define dramaturgy more
broadly to encompass all aspects of a performance: sonic, aural, spatial, as
well as textual.
We look for commonalities among the episodes. These shared properties
can be of any sort. We may notice that a particular object or coloured light is
employed repeatedly, while other elements remain unused; a certain subject
or theme may arise more frequently in different text-based episodes, as with
Dubarak’s ‘Deep down I am free’.
We interweave these common threads into possible sequences for the
piece. This is a form of writing, but the process is more intuitive. Having
narrowed the episodes down in this way, we develop larger structures
within which we can place them. For example, in Unstories one of the
collaborators, Ante Ursic, made an episode where he took a piece of paper
from an interview transcript and read about a young Tunisian man who
drowned while crossing the Mediterranean. Next, he folded the page into
a paper boat and placed it in a fishbowl full of water. During the analysis,
collaborators noticed many representational and affective ramifications.
The moment referenced the boats used to cross the Mediterranean. For
some, it also pointed to the impossibility of representing through the written
language of our research the lived experience of those who cross borders.
From then on, paper boats recurred frequently in other episodes. The boat
was a material form carrying what text alone could not and allowing the
group to be ‘caught anew’.
Arriving at the dramaturgical phase, we agreed that the paper boat
episodes could serve as a non-narrative through-line. We lined ten fish
bowls along the edge of the stage. Each time we presented an episode that
contained empirical material on paper, we ended it in the same way: a paper
boat placed within one of these fishbowls. After the second or third of these
episodes, spectators understood that the fishbowls would be filled with boats
over the course of the piece. This became a reliable through-line that had
nothing to do with narrative – except in an associative way. This physical
dramaturgical structure relieved us of the pressure to narrate and allowed
us to move episodes around without disrupting the flow of the performance.
As we experimented with the order, we created a number of indexes of
episode titles, making sure we dispersed episodes that contained paper boats
evenly throughout the piece. These episodes, rather than story, were our
main organizing principle. During this experimental phase, as we tried out
different orders, it occurred to us that these indexes could also function
as chapter titles in a table of content, or as subtitles in a chapter, books or
dissertations. Of course, the writing process for these other types of work
would be distinct from developing episodes, but episode composition could
shape our writing by pointing to the more visceral qualities of our empirical
material. The dramaturgical work of Affect Theater can then free us from
the linear narrative urge.
Conclusion
The non-linear process we have outlined resembles what Freud calls ‘dream
work’ (Freud 1899), what the unconscious does to produce dreams, and the
associations one makes in dream interpretation. In our workshop, things are
brought together in a logic that is intuitive/non-literal, through an affective
movement from one object to a text to a shade of light. Chains of free asso-
ciations and overlays are formed creating more evocative responses to our
research. For example, relations between interpretations of what the paper
boat episodes ‘means’ give rise to new relations to the empirical and allow
the development of a dramaturgical structure. This process need not cul-
minate in a performance but can be used to shape other forms of writing.
We also discover theatrical forms that can disrupt narratives and produce
affect. For instance, in b more, Greg’s play on police violence in Baltimore
(2015), in many episodes, painter’s tape is laid down to mark a map of the
city on the stage. This performs the ways city planning inscribes/prescribes
the spaces in which a black body may or may not move. By having a white
actor create these boundaries, the mapping in the play enacts what the planners
produce in the city: on the one hand, forms of discontinuity, division, and inter-
ruption; and on the other, forms of communication, community, and flow.
During the performance, each time that narrative threatens to take over as the
principal structure a painter’s tape episode disrupts that drive. In the workshop,
it was the phenomenological exploration of a roll of painters’ tape we had in
the room that was the inspiration for these larger dramaturgical possibilities.
To review, we consider both ‘getting caught’ and ‘getting caught anew’ as
intertwined field devices and modes of inquiry that can be used to collect
and develop material and to create non-linear structures. According to
Favret-Saada, ‘getting caught’ is something that happens unavoidably to the
researcher in the field, a way of being in a relationship with other worlds and
being affected by them. She next warns against the urge to ‘get uncaught’
once we return from the field and begin to grapple with the writing process.
For us, Affect Theater influences the type of empirical material we collect,
and then, during the workshop phase, it allows us to ‘get caught anew’ by
that material. The analytical work that arises from both the compositional
and dramaturgical processes supports all sorts of writing that can exceed the
workshop space. The creation of episodes is a compositional practice that
impacts the writing of our smaller sections, and the structuring of episodes
into orders is a dramaturgical process that impacts our tables of contents
and larger structures in chapters, articles, dissertations, and monographs.
Regardless of the end product, the process of Affect Theater engenders new
relations to our empirical research. We invite the reader to try it out for
themselves.
How to
Preparation for the workshop

1. After fieldwork, gather a group of interested collaborators (eight to ten
is good).
2. Put all your empirical research material (interview transcripts, fieldnotes,
images, etc.) into shareable files.
3. Bring text from your material. Highlight striking images or phrases.
4. Bring in elements of the stage related to your research: costumes, objects,
sound cues, light sources, etc.
5. Dress comfortably for movement.
6. Start each day with a short physical warm-up.
Episode composition
1. Make episodes exploring each element of the stage that you have
brought (don’t begin with text).
2. Break into small groups. Let each group choose one element to explore.
3. Give groups three minutes to explore the theatrical potential of their
element.
4. Give groups another three minutes to compose a short episode sharing
their discoveries (be firm about time limits).
5. Present episodes to each other, framing them with ‘We begin’ – ‘We end’
(these explorations don’t have to be good or ‘successful’).
6. Engage in feedback for each episode (see below).
7. Make a list of the possible uses of text in episodes: i.e. dialogue, mono-
logue, voice-over, direct address, written on posters or costumes, etc.
8. Layer text into existing episodes.
9. Make new episodes starting with text.
10. Make as many episodes as possible, using all the elements of the stage
simultaneously.
11. Title episodes of particular interest and write them on a list.
Feedback
1. Only spectators – not presenters – give feedback.
2. Start by sharing what you loved about the episode for any reason.
3. Structural analysis: describe exactly what you saw and heard between
‘We begin’ and ‘We end.’
4. Interpretative analysis: describe stories/logics that you created based on
what you saw and heard.
5. Articulate the connection between what you made up and what you saw
and heard.
6. Moment makers may (or may not) revise episodes based on spectators’
feedback.
Dramaturgy
1. Make a list of the stories, characters, elements of the stage, text, and
themes shared among episodes.
2. Make a sequence with three or four episodes using these shared aspects.
3. Develop transitional episodes in your sequences between the existing
episodes in your sequence.
Figure 10.1 Left to right: Cristiana Giordano, Ugo Edu, John Zibell, Maria Massolo,
and Sarah Hart in, Unstories, written by Cristiana Giordano and Greg
Pierotti, directed by Greg Pierotti. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San
Francisco, 23 September 2017. (Photo by Tommy Lau).
4. Make longer sequences creating new episodes when necessary. Remove
episodes that no longer feel relevant from your list.
5. Connect sequences to each other. Try different orders and combinations
to see what contexts they create.
Return to the field

1. Based on what you have learned, collect new empirical materials (hope-
fully, what you now need from the field is not what you had anticipated).
2. Repeat: returning from the field, put all your empirical research material
into shareable files.
3. Continue this iterative process between fieldwork and workshop for as
long as it is useful.
Sources
Barba, Eugenio. 2010. On Directing and Dramaturgy: Burning the House.
London: Routledge.
Favret-Saada, Jeanne. (1977) 1980. Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage. Trans.
Catherine Cullen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Favret-Saada, Jeanne. 1990. ‘About Participation.’ Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry
14 (2) :189–99.
Freud, Sigmund. (1899) 1965. The Interpretation of Dreams. Trans. and ed. James
Strachey. New York: Avon Books.
Goffman, Erving. (1956) 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.
New York: Anchor Books.
Kaufman, Moises, and Barbara Pitts McAdams, et al. 2018. Moment Work: Tectonic
Theater Project’s Process of Devising Theater. New York: Vintage Books.
Overlie, Mary. 2016. Standing in Space: The Six Viewpoints Theory and Practice.
Billings, MT: Fallon Press.
Schechner, Richard. 1985. Between Theater and Anthropology. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press.
Turner, Victor. 1982. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play.
New York: PAJ Publications.
11 How to devise collaborative
hermeneutics
Kim Fortun and Mike Fortun
Collaborative hermeneutics rotates around particular data points (often

artefacts such as images, video, audio or text, but also shared sets of
questions), bringing diversely positioned people together to read what,
putatively, is ‘the same thing’. Collaborative hermeneutics can be focused
at different scales and levels of abstraction, rotating around an empir-
ical focus: an artefact, like an image; a place; a person, group or organ-
ization; a problem space and its double binds and discursive risks; the
paradigms or interpretative frames that we use to make sense of all these.
All of these things can be evidenced empirically, then collaboratively
questioned, analyzed, interpreted, and transposed into still more questions.
First, second, third and even high-order questions are all important.
Collaborative hermeneutics isn’t presentist; it is in constant pursuit of
more interpretation. Collaborative hermeneutics doesn’t require technical
infrastructure but is enabled and animated by it. The design logics of that
technical infrastructure matter.
File card
Field device: Technically infrastructure ethnographic workflows.
Mode of inquiry: Collaborative hermeneutics.
Geographic location(s): Southern California (USA), Transnational.
Ethnographic counterparts: Community-based environmental justice
activists and researchers; elected officials; bureaucrats; EcoGovLab
researchers; PECE Design Group.
Resources: Funding for community partners; funding and technical
support for digital research infrastructure.
Substantive outputs: https://theasthmafiles.org/
https://disaster-sts-network.org/content/eij-case-study-santa-ana-
california-usa
https://disaster-sts-network.org/content/enviro-injustice-building-global-
record/essay
Where in ethnographic workflows does interpretation happen? Where is

collaboration possible and an advantage? How can digital infrastructure
enable collaboration at multiple junctures, scaffolding ‘collaborative her-
meneutics’? We’ll share how we’ve worked through these questions, centring
an ethnographic project focused on environmental injustice and governance
DOI: 10.4324/9781003253709-13
How to devise collaborative hermeneutics 123
in the southern California city of Santa Ana. We’ll also describe how the
Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography infrastructures the
work (PECE).1 First developed to support our own projects, PECE software
is now freely available for building diverse collaborative research spaces and
projects. We’ll highlight use of PECE’s ‘analytic structures’, describing how
they can be used in project design; data collection, analysis, and interpret-
ation; and to build creative modes of scholarly communication, scaffolding
collaborative hermeneutics at every turn.2
Thinking in terms of ‘workflows’ has helped organize and pace coordinated
work at least since the early 20th century, especially in manufacturing and
transportation engineering. With the development of digital infrastructure
and concern about effective human-computer interfaces (HCI), establishing
standardized, easy-to-follow workflows became important in many fields
(from clinics to insurance claims processing). A ‘workflow management
system’ (WfMS) is a software system that supports coordinated work. We’ve
learned to think and talk in terms of workflows and WfMS from colleagues
in other scientific fields, where digitally supported workflows are used to
coordinate access to instruments (telescopes, for example); data sharing,
analytics, and preservation; author attribution, etc. – often promising repro-
ducibility. A key challenge for the PECE Design Group has been figuring
out when we can build on and borrow from the workflows used in other
scientific fields – and when we need to build our own, based on our par-
ticular epistemic and discursive commitments (Fortun et al. 2017). Another
challenge has been the assumption among many ethnographers that ethno-
graphic workflows are always emergent (so can’t be predicted in advance)
or at least so idiosyncratic that they can’t be described, much less in ways
that can be visualized, planned and infrastructured. While we concur that
ethnography is full of switchbacks (Khandekar et al. 2021), we’ve learned
that ethnographic workflows can be visualized, planned and infrastructured
without impeding spontaneity or diversion. This kind of ‘light structure’
(Poirier 2017) can scaffold and animate collaborative hermeneutics.
Collaborative hermeneutics sounds more complicated than it is, though
it isn’t straightforward – and this is its experimental and explanatory
virtue: it reliably takes one where one didn’t know one could or needed
to go, running in many directions, drawing in a wide array of characters,
objects and narratives, some seemingly obscure – much like Borges’s famous
labyrinths (1962). Collaborative hermeneutics is a theory and method of
interpretation in concert. Like musical concerts, collaborative hermeneutics
can be staged in many different settings, with different numbers and types
of both performers and audience members. Like musical concerts, collab-
orative hermeneutics has to be planned and set up, and often benefits from
technical support, but then there is lots of room to play, in different ways.
Our investment in collaborative hermeneutics itself has many sources. In
keeping with the theory and practice of feminist epistemology, we recognize
both the realities of explanatory pluralism and how explanatory pluralism
124 Kim Fortun and Mike Fortun
‘is not simply a reflection of differences in epistemological cultures but a
positive virtue in itself, representing our best chance of coming to terms with
the world around us’ (Keller 2002, 300). In keeping with poststructural and
postcolonial recognition of the ‘transmuting ambivalences of meaning’ –
and the violence involved in controlling this – we also see collaborative her-
meneutics as profoundly political (Fischer 2003; Bhaba 1994). Tenets such
as these are PECE’s ‘design logics’.
Deconstructive investments don’t mean that collaborative hermeneutics
(in our enactments) aren’t tethered to the actual or real; indeed, we think
of our work as de-positive – tightly tethered to and disciplined by the real,
while also leveraging interpretive multiplicity (Fortun, M. 2022; Fortun and
Fortun 2020).3
Collaborative hermeneutics rotates around particular data points (often
artefacts such as images, video, audio or text) using shared sets of questions
to bring diversely positioned people together to look at what, putatively, is
‘the same thing’ – a specific image, a setting or an event, for example. Shared
questions allow a collaborative group to lace their interpretations together,
as in a complex musical composition. In our enactments, collaborative her-
meneutics always allows for improvisation and new directions.
Ethnographic data is not born but made (achieved rather than ascribed,
in the language of anthropology); the selection process through which data
is identified or created is itself hermeneutic. This creates powerful inter-
pretive loops. Data that is the reference of collaborative hermeneutics is
itself produced through (sometimes collaborative) hermeneutics. Questions
generate data, which in turn becomes subject to questions. At its best, col-
laborative hermeneutics note, reflect on and work with all these moments of
interpretation – junctures in an ethnographic workflow where new pathways
can open up.
Collaborative hermeneutics thus has an archival imperative; data has to
be stored to be shared. It thus also needs infrastructure – a place where the
data can be hosted and preserved, attributed and contextualized, located,
accessed, and commented on, usually across space, time zones and different
schedules. Technical infrastructure that enables work across space and time
can intensify the differences in play in collaborative hermeneutics so is an
experimental good. Such infrastructure gets technical very quickly, requiring
software, servers, back-up routines, continual monitoring and upgrades,
diverse technical expertise, and the funds required to support all of these.
Building capacity for collaborative hermeneutics thus has many
dimensions – conceptual and empirical, organizational and technical, sub-
jective and intersubjective. People don’t just come together, organically,
especially in our fissured, late industrial times – times marked by struc-
tural adjustments that undercut many forms of collectivity (labour organ-
izing, for example) while also powering forms of collectivity that are rigid,
internalist, violently exclusionary, and virally reproductive (Fortun 2012).
‘Coming together’ thus cannot be naturalized; it happens by design, with
ethico-political valence. Collaborative hermeneutics thus requires creative
design – the making of space for coming together, spaces designed against
epistemic settlement and foreclosure.
How, then, does one devise collaborative hermeneutics? How are col-
laborative hermeneutics enacted? We’ve run many experiments to figure
this out, building supporting infrastructure (the Platform for Experimental
Collaborative Ethnography, PECE) in process (Fortun et al. 2021a and
2021b; Fortun et al. 2019; Fortun et al. 2013). Below we’ll turn to one
example, trying to convey what collaborative hermeneutics looks like in
practice and through technical design.
Collaborative hermeneutics on the ground

Santa Ana, California is an economically and environmentally stressed
city in Southern California. Notably, its environmental hazards aren’t dra-
matic features of the landscape; there are no refineries or massive plastic
production complexes; flares don’t mark the sky. Pollution sources are
more subtle: freeways that ring the city; high volumes of through traffic;
high levels of lead in the soil attributed to vehicle pollution before lead
additives were banned; industrial facilities that are too small for many to
notice: metal plating facilities, for example, a facility that manufactures
skylights, a cement plant, and scattered distribution centres. Madison
Park Neighborhood Association (MPNA), in southeastern Santa Ana, has
actively advocated for inclusive community prosperity for almost thirty
years. It was only five years ago, however, that MPNA came to recognize
itself as an environmental justice organization – after residents were put
on notice (in English, even though many adults in the community are
Spanish speaking) that a new polluting facility was being permitted, just
adjacent to homes and two elementary schools. The resulting learning
process has continued to spin out, bringing a complex mix of environ-
mental hazards into view. Lead community organizer Leonel Flores puts
it well, explaining that ‘everyday, environmental injustice in Santa Ana
keeps getting bigger’.
The EcoGovLab, which we set up to host an array of research projects,
began collaborating with (newly re-named) GREEN-MPNA in 2021,
building builds on prior work by anthropologist Katie Cox that focused on
MPNA’s launch of a community air monitoring network and a resident-led
environmental justice steering committee (Comunidad Unida, Aire Limpio).
We work with GREEN-MPNA through this committee, and through a
jointly run youth research intern program. We also work with GREEN-
MPNA in a collaboration, led by air chemists, focused on “beyond-the-
tailpipe” pollution (particles and gases from tires and brakes) that will
persist after vehicles are electrified. A key challenge in this collaboration is
to learn how new scientific findings move, or fail to move, into governance.
As in other EcoGovLab projects, a key aim is to cultivate and leverage many
forms of knowledge supporting next-generation environmental governance.
This is what some of the work looks like:
Working with image artefacts: Three maps are particularly important

touchpoints for GREEN-MPNA. One map is of the entire city of Santa
Ana, with twenty-three neighbourhoods marked in bright pink because
they have been designated ‘disadvantaged’ by California’s Department of
Environmental Protection (CalEPA). Another map is of an industrial cor-
ridor in southeast Santa Ana, with small dots marking industrial facilities
permitted to operate by CalEPA. A key with company names is in the lower
right corner. For over three years, GREEN-MPNA has been trying to get
information about what these facilities produce, including pollution. A third
map marks an area around the industrial corridor (and the homes and
schools nearby) where GREEN-MPNA has established its community air
monitoring network. All of these image artefacts tell part of the story of
environmental governance in Santa Ana, a story that we are both part of
and analysts of. These images are critical data for us, creating rich opportun-
ities for explication and interpretation – explication and interaction that is
richer if produced collaboratively, drawing in people who tell different back-
stories about them and see different futures in what they point to. There are
many questions to ask: Who produced the images, why and when? When
did people encounter them and how did they read their significance? What
additional maps and data visualizations do we need to study and address
environmental injustice going forward?
EcoGovLab researchers – anthropologists, students, GREEN-MPNA
community members – ask these questions in informal exchanges and
more structured meetings. We archive our responses as ‘annotations’ in an
‘analytic structure’ in an instance of PECE called Disaster-STS-Network,
established to support geographically distributed researchers. PECE ana-
lytic structures are question sets that scaffold collaborative hermeneutics;
they are technically supported in PECE through customization that we
added to a (open source) Drupal content-management system. Each of the
PECE platforms that the PECE Design Group supports (partly as test beds
for our continuing development of PECE) has many (some think too many)
question sets, some developed for particular projects, others relevant across
projects. These question sets generate data and interpretation, structure the
ways we archive data, and are themselves data. It is, as the saying goes,
turtles all the way down.
Participation observation of public events: Meetings of the Santa Ana City

Council have also been important in environmental governance, espe-
cially over the last two years as the city updated its General Plan. Cities in
California are required to have General Plans; since 2016, all cities with
CAL-EPA-designated disadvantaged communities must include plans to
address environmental injustice in their General Plan Updates – thus making
such updates important venues for environmental advocacy. EcoGovLab
researchers (including those who are GREEN-MPNA community members)
attended these and related meetings, collecting documents along the way,
writing advocacy letters, and participating in formal public comment periods
during recorded City Council meetings, later posted on the city’s website.
Here, collaborative hermeneutics first involved the creation of artefact
bundles for each meeting – with relevant clips excerpted, notes from lead-
up meetings, advocacy documents, and so on. Researchers then annotated
these bundles, using an often-used analytic structure titled ‘Reading an
Event’. Some questions in this set are fairly straightforward, some less
so: Who hosted the event and what was the stated purpose? What social
groups are involved or implicated? What vocabulary was in play and how
was it charged? Responses to these questions by different researchers some-
times confirm each other, strengthening a particular interpretation; other
responses are markedly different or go in different directions. Sometimes the
differences are worthy of argument and need to be worked out; often, the
differences add hermeneutic dimensionality.
Organizational profiles: We need to understand the structures, aims, ideolo-

gies, and operations of working in a complex tangle of organizations –
including many government agencies – involved in environmental governance
in Santa Ana. To support this, EcoGovLab researchers collaboratively develop
organizational profiles in an open-ended process: organizational profiles
are continually elaborated as we learn more and the list of organizations
continually expands. The questions here are again expansive, and usually
require many methods to answer (analysis of mission statements and other
documents produced by the organizations, media analysis, and interviews
with people both within and outside the organization, for example). Among
our shared questions, these have been particularly good prompts: What was
the political and discursive context in which the organization was founded,
and how did this context motivate and shape the organization? What dis-
course formations compete for authority within the organization, and which
formations appear to be dominant? What kind of data does the organization
produce and share, and what kinds of technologies, softwares, and infra-
structure support this? How does the organization evaluate and monitor
the credibility of the information it uses and circulates? What political and
discursive currents most forcefully affect the organization today? How do
actors within the organization perceive these currents?
Integrative analytic frameworks: Our last example moves to a higher level

of abstraction and considers how all the questions and data types above
can be hung together, in a frame that can be visualized both among col-
laborating researchers within our Santa Ana project, and among the much
wider group of collaborating researchers working on our Environmental
Injustice Global Record project, an array of projects focused on envir-
onmental injustice in different settings. The questions here allow for the
integration of many lines of interpretation in any one project while also
allowing us to set projects side-by-side (in a manner that is more juxta-
positional than comparative). The question set and analytic structure
supporting this scale of analysis foreground the lingering effects of histor-
ical disadvantage, compounding harms, and intersectionalities that make
reparations difficult. Even seemingly basic questions – about setting and
implicated social groups, for example – often involve many rounds of inter-
pretation; often different researchers pull figure from ground in different
ways. Other questions ask for interpretive weaving, asking, for example,
what intersecting factors – social, cultural, political, technological, eco-
logical – contribute to environmental health vulnerability or undercut
environmental governance? A final question is recursive, asking researchers
to read back through responses to earlier questions in the set (their own or
others) to articulate the intersecting injustices – data, economic, epistemic,
gender, health, infrastructure, intergenerational, media, procedural, racial,
reproductive – that combine to produce environmental injustice. The inte-
grative question set that structures our work in Santa Ana also (lightly)
structures research in many other settings, brought together in EcoGovLab’s
Environmental Injustice Global Record project. The integrative question set
(PECE analytic structure) thus scaffolds collaborative hermeneutics both
within and across projects, drawing out variation and pattern. Through
this, we reach both for new social theoretical understanding and new pol-
itical possibilities.
Infrastructuring collaborative hermeneutics

Sometimes, the shared sets of questions that populate PECE analytic
structures are established in advance of the work, though it is always possible
to revise and elaborate them. Almost always, more question sets are drawn
in or developed as a project progresses. Different researchers often want to
pursue different angles. PECE was designed for this, recognizing how eth-
nography, at its best, drifts and detours as it develops. New understanding
always generates new questions; collaboration can multiply these questions,
leveraging difference and différance to extend hermeneutic possibilities. The
extensibility of PECE analytic structures is one way that PECE is lightly
structured; it is designed to scaffold analysis to proliferate interpretations,
not direct them toward consensus.
Unlike coding in the grounded theory tradition (infrastructured by soft-
ware like ATLAS-ti, NVivo and MAXQDA, all proprietary and thus dif-
ficult to use in extensive collaborations), PECE analytics don’t encourage
researchers to uncover themes that can then be tracked across data
resources, enabling interpretive confirmation (Fortun, 2019). PECE analytics
work inversely, encouraging constant drift and new lines of work, helping
researchers read material in a deeply Derridian sense.4 Collaborative her-
meneutics – as we enact it – is thus wayward by design. Rather than wrap
things up, it opens portals that constantly draw in new data, questions and
people, taking projects to places they weren’t designed to go.
How to
Collaborative hermeneutics is a theory and method of interpretation in
concert. Collaborators both respond to and generate questions, focused at
different scales and levels of abstraction, rotating around an empirical focus.
Devising collaborative hermeneutics takes structural imagination and
organizational skill, and a sense of how theory can be translated into both
method and technical design.
Figure 11.1 An image composition showing a map of Santa Anna and the process of
collaborative hermeneutics.5
Collaborative hermeneutics can rotate around an artefact, like an image;
a place; a person, group or organization; a problem space and its double
binds, enunciatory politics and discursive risks; the paradigms or inter-
pretative frames that we use to make sense of all these. All of these things
can be evidenced empirically, then collaboratively questioned, analyzed,
interpreted, and transposed into still more questions. First, second, third
and even high-order questions are all important.
Collaborative hermeneutics isn’t presentist; it is in constant pursuit of
more interpretation.
It is not straightforward because of the difference and differance it
unlooses; it often goes in many different directions, skating across many
systems, scales and levels of abstractions. It is hard to capture in established
genre forms. This is another virtue, while also a challenge.
Collaborative hermeneutics is labyrinth-like, opening up intricate
passageways and what seem like blind alleys (but rarely if ever are).
Collaborative hermeneutics is wayward, by design.
Notes
1 PECE is an intensively customized, open-source content management system
designed to support new forms of collaboration among researchers across time
and space, and new ways of drawing users into ethnographic research. PECE can
be freely downloaded at GitHub, an open software development platform. The
PECE logo – and the logos for many PECE supported platforms – plays off the
image of a kaleidoscope – which, like PECE, allows users to bring things together
in different ways, easily shifting relationships and the overall configuration.
Kaleidoscopes work with bits of glass. PECE works with bits of ethnographic
data and interpretation – assembled and layered in different ways, experimenting
with ethnographic analysis, interpretation and expression.
2 In step with eminent learning theorist Lev Vygotsky, we think of scaffolding as a
way to develop new interpretive capacities through social interaction (1978).
3 In ‘What’s so funny about PECE, TAF and Data Sharing’ (2020), Mike and Kim
Fortun and collaborators explain that: ‘Our depositivist style of collaboration is
marked by the trace of a positivist style of science, but one with its ground mined
under by the play and work of deconstruction. To name only one sign of this aspect
of the depositivist style: our comfort with and even embrace of the term “data,”
which raises more than a few hackles among more than a few anthropologists… .
As is true of so many contemporary sciences, our depositivist style of collabor-
ation is also one that privileges the deposition or archiving of data as much as, and
in many cases more than, its use. Depositivism is a style of deferral, then, another
trace of its broader deconstructivist legacy. It is a sedimentary style of collabora-
tive anthropology, similar to scientific styles of work and thought in many other
domains such as genomics and neuroscience: data accretes constantly, collected as
much for future analytic capacities as it is for present purposes.’
4 Following many others (Strathern 2018, Sánchez Criado and Estalella. 2018), we
recognize that ethnography is always infrastructured, though often in ways that
aren’t marked. Adolfo Estalella, for example, reminds that Bronislaw Malinowski’s
tent was critical infrastructure for his work. Marilyn Strathern calls out the con-
ceptual infrastructures that underpins ethnographic projects. We also recognize
that infrastrures are always ideologically encoded (Larkin 2010).
5 On the left is the City of Santa Ana Zoning Map, showing gray areas with per-
mitted industrial facilities. The Madison Park Neighborhood – the base for our
research – is just adjacent to the industrial corridor in the southeastern corner of
the City. The map can be read as a representation of good city planning and gov-
ernance, or as representation of environmental injustice. Differently positioned
experts will read the map in different ways. The image on the right suggests
the doubled nature of collaborative hermeneutics. Viewed with the head tilted
slightly to the left, one sees a figure of the wise expert. Viewed with the head tilted
right reveals a script “liar,” signalling the blindness that accompanies insight, the
marginality produced by focus. Expertise is a double bind, and collaborative her-
meneutics works within this space.
Sources
Bhabha, Homi. 1994. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge.
Borges, Jorge Luis. 1962. Labyrinths. New York: New Directions Publishing.
City of Santa Ana, California, USA. Zoning Map. www.santa-ana.org/documents/
zoning-map
Derrida, Jacques. 1978. ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human
Sciences.’ In Writing and Difference, 278–94. London: Routledge.
Fischer, Michael M. J. 2003. Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Fortun, Kim. 2012. ‘Ethnography in Late Industrialism. Cultural Anthropology 27
(3): 446–64.
Fortun, Kim. 2021. ‘Cultural Analysis in/of the Anthropocene’ Hamburg Journal
of Cultural Anthropology 13, 15–35. https://journals.sub.uni-hamburg.de/hjk/
article/view/1696
Fortun, Kim and Tim Schütz. 2021. Environmental Injustice Global Record Project.
Disaster STS Platform. https://disaster-sts-network.org/content/enviro-injustice-
building-global-record/essay
Fortun, Kim, James Adams and George Marcus. 2019. ‘Visualizing Toxic Subjects at
the UCI Center for Ethnography.’ University of Toronto Press Teaching Culture
blog, series on Innovations in Anthropology. April 1. www.utpteachingculture.
com/visualizing-toxic-subjects-at-the-uci-center-for-ethnography
Fortun, Kim, James Adams, Tim Schütz, and Scott Gabriel Knowles. 2021a.
‘Knowledge Infrastructure and Research Agendas for Quotidian Anthropocenes:
Critical Localism with Planetary Scope.’ The Anthropocene Review, 8(2),
169–182. https://doi.org/10.1177/20530196211031972
Fortun, Kim, Mike Fortun, Angela Hitomi Skye Crandall Okune, Tim Schütz,
and Shan-Ya Su). 2021b. ‘Civic Community Archiving with the Platform for
Experimental Collaborative Ethnography: Double Binds and Design Challenges.’
In Culture and Computing. Design Thinking and Cultural Computing edited
by Rauterberg M. HCII 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 12795.
Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77431-8_3
Fortun, Kim, Mike Fortun, Erik Bigras, Brandon Costelloe-Kuehn, Allison Kenner,
Tahereh Saheb, Jerome Crowder and Dan Price. 2013. Mike Fortun. ‘Asthma,
Culture, and Cultural Analysis.’ Heterogeneity in Asthma: Translational Profiling
& Phenotyping. Series: Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology.
Springer.
Fortun, Mike. 2022. ‘Interpretivist Positivist Perversion’, Platform for Experimental
Collaborative Ethnography, last modified 8 March 2022, accessed 10 May 2022.
https://worldpece.org/content/interpretivist-positivist-perversion
Fortun, Mike. 7 August 2019, ‘Ab-Using Coding Structures’, Platform for
Experimental Collaborative Ethnography, last modified 23 April 2022, accessed
10 May 2022. https://worldpece.org/content/ab-using-coding-structures
Fortun, Mike and Kim Fortun. 2020. ‘What’s So Funny About PECE, TAF and Data
Sharing,’ in Collaborative Anthropology Today: A Collection of Exceptions edited
by Dominic Boyer and George Marcus, 115–140. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Fortun, Mike, Kim Fortun and George Marcus. 2017. ‘Computers in/and
Anthropology: The Poetics and Politics of Digitization,’ in Routledge Companion
to Digital Ethnography, 11–20. London: Routledge.
Keller, Evelyn Fox. 2002. Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development
With Models, Metaphors, and Machines. Harvard University Press.
Khandekar, Aalok, Brandon Costelloe-Kuehn, Lindsay Poirier, Alli Morgan, Alison
Kenner, Kim Fortun, Mike Fortun and the PECE Design Team. 2021. ‘Moving
Ethnography: Infrastructuring Doubletakes and Switchbacks in Experimental
Collaborative Methods.’ Science & Technology Studies 34 (3): 78–102.
Poirier, Lindsay. 2017. ‘Devious Design: Digital Infrastructure Challenges for
Experimental Ethnography.’ Design Issues 33 (2): 70–83.
Sánchez Criado, Tomás and Adolfo Estalella. 2018. ‘Introduction.’ In Experimental
Collaborations: Ethnography Through Fieldwork Devices edited by Adolfo
Estalella and Tomás Sanchez Criado, 1–30. New York, Oxford: Berghahn.
Strathern, M. S. 2018. ‘Infrastructures in and of ethnography.’ Anuac 7 (2): 49–69.
Vygotsky L.S. 1978. Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological
Processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
12 How to set ethnography in motion
Monika Streule
Recorridos explorativos and entrevistas en movimiento are two comple-

mentary strategies that set ethnography in motion. Together they form
the basis of a specific methodological design of mobile ethnography
that draws on well-established qualitative strategies and adapts them
to studying large and heterogeneous urban territories. Framed as such,
mobile ethnography is a systematic and situated strategy for empiric-
ally studying urbanization – and one that is inventive, comparative
and possibly useful for analyzing other current multi-sited and multi-
scalar socio-spatial transformations more generally. Such a mode of
inquiry invites anthropologists to further decentralize methodological
perspectives, particularly by encouraging more collaborative ways of
knowledge production.
File card
Field device: Recorridos explorativos and entrevistas en movimiento.
Mode of inquiry: Situated experimental collaborations.
Geographical location(s): Mexico City (metropolitan scale).
Duration / time: 2005–2018 (14 years).
Ethnographic counterparts: Inhabitants of a city foregrounding their
knowledge alongside the expertise of local urban researchers, such as
anthropologists, geographers, sociologists, planners, architects, artists
and activists.
Substantive outputs: Streule, M. 2018. Ethnografie urbaner Territorien.
Metropolitane Urbanisierungsprozesse von Mexiko-Stadt. Münster:
Westfälisches Dampfboot.; Schmid, C., Streule, M., eds. 2023.
Vocabularies for an urbanising planet. Theory building through com-
parison. Basel: Birkhäuser.
Degree of difficulty: Medium/Advanced (depends on the researcher’s dis-
position and the place/socio-spatial context in which it is applied).
To set ethnography in motion I draw on dynamic practices, such as driving

or walking, as embodied and sensual experiences that profoundly modify
representations and thus also imaginations of the urban: On the street level –
where spatial social practices are being performed, materiality is embodied
and specific socio-spatial relations are lived – we can observe, reflect on and
interpret the social production of urban territories.1 I developed mobile eth-
nography as part of an experimental set of methods2 to study urbanization
on a metropolitan scale during my long-standing fieldwork experience and
DOI: 10.4324/9781003253709-14
134 Monika Streule
engagement with urbanization in Mexico City since 2005 (Streule 2018,
2020). In this contribution I do not further elaborate on the whole set of
methods but focus instead on the two complementary strategies that render
mobile ethnography viable: First, the recorridos explorativos is a technique
based on participant ‘floating’ observation, which is done by walking and
perceiving urban space on a metropolitan scale. Second, the entrevistas en
movimiento is a technique of semi-structured, in-depth narrative interviews
conducted on the move during commented walks in multi-sited fields.
Moving through urban space on foot is a decisive strategy of these field
devices – but, due to the scale of Mexico City, the techniques also include
driving and the use of public transport.
Similar mobilized, qualitative-empirical methods are frequently used in
academic as well as artistic urban research. However, in its ambiguity, it
is more programmatic than an established procedure – this is crucial pre-
cisely because it opens up possibilities to develop more experimental and
inventive techniques. ‘Fieldwork on foot’ can thus mean very different strat-
egies and include such diverse empirical practices as strolling, shadowing
or perceptual walks (Garcia Canclini 1996; Gallo 2005; Delgado 2007;
Ingold and Vergunst 2008). Strollology is a clear and obvious example of
this: Framed as the very science of strolling (Burckhardt 2015), methodo-
logically it is very broadly based on perception of the environment as well
as experimental practices like reflective walks and artistic interventions.
Additionally, walking as method is always subject to its own rhythm that
is shaped by the specific urban context it is practiced in and limited by the
researcher’s situated disposition (Streule 2017). Fieldwork is in itself already
a sensual experience, yet putting it into motion on the street with mobile
ethnography leads to spatially related data and thus to particular spatially
sensitive insights into everyday urban life.
My mobile approach emerged as a result of the questions I was interested
in within the framework of my research project Ethnography of Urban
Territories (Streule 2018). The project focused on the main actors involved
in the production of the urban, whom I asked how they engage in the for-
mation of territorialities across Mexico City. Furthermore, I strived to
understand how these emerging territories are transformed by such social
everyday practices. In other words, central questions were: How are such
urbanization processes inscribed in the terrain, and how does geography
shape this process? The study showed that the formation of urban terri-
tory is a relational and dialectical process that is equally based on collective
urban imaginaries and everyday agency of the actors, who range from
professionals and practitioners to ordinary urban inhabitants, as well as
on the materiality of the built environment. Yet, what makes this socio-
territorial approach different to conventional understandings of social space
is its explicit focus on the unequal power relations that are deeply inscribed
within these processes (Porto-Gonçalves 2001; Haesbaert 2011). It is this
specific understanding of urban territory as a multi-layered and power-driven
social process that persuaded me to develop multidimensional methods and
How to set ethnography in motion 135
thus to adopt and adapt conventional methods in urban studies and anthro-
pology such as participative observation, walking, go-alongs, interviews and
mapping. Based on the assumption that no scientific method serves as an
end in itself, I tailored selected qualitative methods to my research question,
developed them further as needed or combined them with each other.
While trying to make ethnography work for my study of the metropolitan
urbanization processes of Mexico City, it became evident that conventional
and more orthodox applied ethnography entails serious limitations and
shortcomings. Exemplary for such limited approaches is an exclusive focus
on single administrative units such as neighbourhoods, or the tendency to
reject wide-reaching theoretical assumptions on urbanization, including a
meta-perspective beyond the central areas of Mexico City called CDMX
(formerly known as Distrito Federal). Yet when approaching urbanization as
an ever-changing dynamic process, and urban territory as socially produced,
we need to keep in mind what Jennifer Robinson (2016) points out, namely
how it is indispensable – if urban theory is to be reworked – to develop
experimental and creative methodologies and rationales for urban studies
that are coping with this task. Hence, the analysis of current urbanization
processes in one of the largest cities in the world (with more than 21 million
inhabitants) urgently calls for such a reconceptualization of ethnographic
methods – and led me to improvise and to continually adapt the mobile
devices, i.e. recorridos explorativos and entrevistas en movimiento, that
I used in my fieldwork.
Recorridos explorativos
Public transport was a good option for a recorrido explorativo in the exten-
sive area of Mexico City. I derived the choice of where to go from my ongoing
mapping exercise,3 which eventually resulted in a map of current urbanization
in Mexico City. The map helped me to see issues such as which areas of the
city I did not know yet and where I still had many open questions. In prepar-
ation for a specific recorrido explorativo, I had to consider the best way to get
to an unfamiliar area using public transport. With the help of the well-known
Guia Rojí edition of the city map, I wrote down a few fixed points that I used
to orient myself on the way. However, once on the recorridos explorativos
themselves, I mainly let myself drift. I initiated this exemplary recorrido
explorativo at the old centrally located Buenavista railway station, at which
I boarded the then recently inaugurated suburban train service in the direc-
tion of the municipality of Cuautitlán. The train followed the former cargo
train line, running between apartment blocks, factories and industrial halls.
The further north the train went, the fewer residential buildings there seemed
to be. The first workshops and industrial buildings were soon replaced by
large-scale industry. On the road running parallel to the tracks, many lorries
were driving alongside coaches, which had just started their long-distance
journeys from the nearby bus station, Terminal Central del Norte. Still in
CDMX, the suburban train passed between the seemingly endless rail yard of
136 Monika Streule
the Pantaco freight station and the Vallejo industrial zone. Despite the clear
industrial past of these districts, urban transformation through de- and re-
industrialization seemed to be losing strength at the time. Although Vallejo is
still an important production site, I saw numerous empty warehouses where
parking spaces were rented out.
On impulse, I decided to get off the train at the Cuautitlán stop because
the area seemed interesting and safe enough. I walked around and, impro-
vising along the way, I decided to take a Volkswagen bus converted into a
shared taxi, a so-called combi, which went to the centre of Tlalnepantla, one
of the fix points I had previously noted down. In fact, this mix of walking and
using public transport for recorridos explorativos in more peripheral areas
turned out to be particularly useful for going to places usually not access-
ible to me on foot. The more I learned about how to move in Mexico City,
I improvised, adapted and changed my initial practice of walking the city.
Back then, I took the last seat on a narrow bench in the rear of the combi,
and we drove off. My head hit the top of the car roof; the windows were at
stomach level, and I could not look outside. A fellow passenger pressed two
ten-peso coins into my hand and, as I passed the money forward, she called
to the driver, ‘Me cobra uno en la Ford, por favor’. Following the same path
through many hands, the change came back to the woman, who got out as
the bus stopped at the corner of the Ford factory. Companies and factories
are often important landmarks for everyday orientation in the northwest
of Mexico City and point to the deep imprint of the urban configuration
by the socio-territorial process that produces what I call ‘Ejes Industriales’.
Thus, the stops of the shared taxis and microbuses are called Ford, Olivetti,
Bacardi or Coca-Cola. They often keep those names even after factories
move away and there would be other references in the meantime, such as
street names or shopping centres.
The recorrido explorativo is a form of a ‘floating observation’, inspired
by Colette Pétonnet’s (1982) ethnographic study of a Parisian cemetery
and her call for a basic attitude of a ‘disponibilité attentive’ during per-
ceptual walks, based on ‘the greatest possible openness and constant avail-
ability of the researcher’ (1982, 39). Through this almost seismographic
attention, different socio-territorial relations can be recognized. Pétonnet’s
method underlies the conceptualization of the recorridos explorativos, but
I adapted it to my research while explicitly acknowledging my positionality
and influence on the research process, whereas Pétonnet describes the
method as a tool for giving equal attention to all situations and phenomena
and encountering them without bias (1982, 39). Rather, I understand the
recorridos explorativos as a device for moving between the public space
of the city and the sphere of my own experience and subjective know-
ledge – thus it is far from an unbiased field approach. This immersion in the
studied field, my observation from the participant’s perspective and also my
influence on what is observed through my participation are three essential
characteristics of this method. After each of the 68 recorridos explorativos
I performed during my fieldwork, I progressively mapped emerging spatial
configurations and delineated increasingly defined contours of urbanization
processes. However, while the recorridos explorativos certainly provided an
initial overview of the current urbanization processes of Mexico City, it was
the entrevistas en movimiento that deepened and consolidated the ethno-
graphic data.
Entrevistas en movimiento
I met David Reyes in the central plaza of Tlalnepantla for an entrevista en
movimiento in his neighbourhood.4 He was in his late thirties and worked
in an ironware shop close by. Throughout the walk, I conducted a guided
narrative interview on an improvised route in this city area. We talked about
his everyday spaces, stories about the neighbourhood, his views of where he
lived, the other residents and passers-by, but also his life-story and personal
positioning in Mexico City. To address broader issues during the interview on
the move, I drew on an archive of newspaper articles on urban areas that I had
assembled since 2011. Asking him where to go first, David decided to start
our walk by taking me to (in his view) a characteristic area of the neighbour-
hood. As we left the central square in a northerly direction, we were already
Figure 12.1 A moment during an entrevista en movimiento in Mexico City. Image

by Monika Streule, 2013.
138 Monika Streule
in a first industrial zone. The Harinera flour factory, opened in 1957, stands
next to the Aceros Nacionales steel factory built a year earlier. A bazaar with
cheap goods was set up in a huge hall between the factories. Rows of trucks
were parked on the street. On one side of the area, a highway led north
along the train tracks. We reached a shopping centre called Plaza Millenium,
whose car park was enclosed by a two-and-a-half-metre-high white mesh
fence. On the large street crossing in front of it, numerous minibus lines ran
all the way to the region. Pedestrians hurried across the multi-lane streets.
Intersections like this, completely designed for traffic, are typical for the area.
David brought up an unexpected topic as we walked there, telling me that the
few overhead crossings are also popular places for migrants passing through
on their way north. I learned that migrants are more present in the public
space in this area than anywhere else in Mexico City. The reason for this is
the cargo trains that pass through the industrial zones and are the migrants’
most important means of transport for their journey north.
Talking about his growing up in the area and how it changed in recent
years, David spontaneously invited me to go to his place. We turned around,
got a combi and then walked towards his home. He lived with his parents in a
public housing estate in a municipality north of Tlalnepantla, the Municipio
Cuautitlán Izcalli. This municipality was only founded in the course of the
decentralization policy in 1973 and is paradigmatic for the urbanization
process of ‘Ejes Industriales’ as a showcase project for the intended indus-
trialization of the region of Mexico City. While central neighbourhoods of
Cuautitlán Izcalli tend to be inhabited by the middle class, the north of
the municipality is home to numerous public housing estates, the Unidades
Habitacionales from the 1970s. Further north, the newer large-scale mass
housing developments of the Mega Conjuntos Habitacionales begin.
Even though the Unidades Habitacionales are an older model than these
new mega settlements, they are already of considerable scale. The Unidad
Habitacional INFONAVIT alone, where David lived, consists of different
sectors with about twenty apartment blocks each. Every housing unit has
its own access road with gates. Finally arriving after a one-hour bus drive,
I saw some open gates, while others only allowed residents to pass through.
The gate to the housing estate where David lived was open. We entered
and came to the first courtyard, which was used as a car park. There was
a small kiosk selling eggs, beans, beer and soft drinks. In the lowest flat of
David’s block, there was also a small shop that mainly sold beer. The next
bigger shop was far away. The petrol station at the road junction is open 24/
7, but it did not have a larger range of products either. All lower flats had
windows, but most, also the upper ones, were barred. Many front doors of
the apartment blocks were blocked off and decorated with flowers, statues
of the Virgin of Guadalupe or crucifixes. Even some cars in the car park were
locked in cages to protect them from theft of individual parts but also entire
vehicles. The space felt unsafe for me, and I asked David if it is a dangerous
neighbourhood.
No, it is not dangerous here. There are a few street gangs in the area
and there is some dealing in the back passages of the housing estate.
But it’s not really a problem to move around here. Nothing serious ever
happens. Except once, when Lobo, a buddy from the settlement, robbed
the petrol station at the junction in front. He managed to escape and has
since gone into hiding – he is probably in the USA.
(David Reyes, interview 26/10/2013)
Entrevistas en movimiento as exemplified here with the story of David Reyes,

are conceived as a mobilization of the usually (mostly) site-bound and static
interview situation. Complementary to the above-introduced recorridos
explorativos, this strategy allows for building a relationship between the
interview narrative and everyday territorialities present, resulting in a con-
siderable increase in the spatial quality of the ethnographic data during the
research process. The spatiality of the data results primarily from the com-
bination of speaking and walking but also includes non-verbal statements
while walking, providing thus data that would not be collected in a classical
interview situation. The symbolic and material interaction through walking
together with interlocutors is a field strategy to learn about their everyday
practices in a specific urban territory. Importantly, I do not determine the
routes of an entrevistas en movimiento in advance; they rather emerge – or
are improvised – during the interviews. Thematically framed by the guided
narrative interview, the route articulates itself through improvisation by the
interviewees and my presence. Even if I generally try not to influence the
pathfinding too much or directly, I neither completely hand over nor can
I relinquish responsibility for it. Rather, as a researcher, I always influence
and thus co-create the interview situation together with the interlocutors.
In this respect, the interview technique of entrevistas en movimiento clearly
differs from the go-along method developed by Margarethe Kusenbach
(2003, 463), who explicitly applies a ‘natural go-along’ by following the
accompanied persons as they go about their daily business. In her study,
she is interested in everyday routines in urban space and, in line with her
research question, focuses on two selected neighbourhoods and the social
networks within them. My research question on urban transformation
processes was different and aimed at the social production of urban terri-
tory making questions about the co-production of the route more relevant.
Conclusions
In summary, with mobile ethnography I presented a possible recalibration
of existing ethnographic methodologies, moving away from place-based
or footloose investigations and towards those of dynamic and mobilized
research techniques, which enables me to follow urbanization processes on
the ground. I have shown that an appropriate methodology and set of research
strategies and techniques help generate empirical data on lived experiences of
140 Monika Streule
urbanization – acknowledging everyday experience as a site of knowing and
knowledge production – and make it possible to observe, describe, analyze
and interpret urbanization processes in novel ways, thus producing situated
and relational knowledge. Self-reflexivity and positionality are central to this
research strategy, which differs fundamentally from one that displays a par-
ticular city as an urban laboratory or from one that exposes different case
studies in a city as local variants of a more general phenomenon. Instead of
comparing cities or neighbourhoods, the focus is on how urban territories are
constituted in relation to one another through power-laden practices in the
multiple interconnected grounds of everyday life.
The added benefit of the entrevistas en movimiento compared with typ-
ical interview techniques – or also compared with the floating observations
of the recorridos explorativos – is that they allow the researcher to fore-
ground lived experience in spatially and temporally specific situations as
well as a wide range of spatial practices, perceptions, interpretations and
evaluations of the urban. Entrevistas en movimiento thus evoke spatial
knowledge by addressing the biographical context, specific urban socializa-
tion, and learning processes of and with the interlocutors. This is exempli-
fied most clearly by the improvisational co-production of the route along
which the interview on the move takes place. The aim is to rethink the urban
by interrogating the perspectives of very different inhabitants and experts
of the everyday in Mexico City, and by suggesting collaborative ways of
knowledge production. Put more generally, the focus of mobile ethnography
is not the description of a specific ‘place’ or ‘city’, but rather the question
of how and why certain urban processes are dominant in certain urban
configurations, how they can be explained and how they shape urban ter-
ritories. Neither the metropolitan scale of analysis nor the local scale of
the field-site is thus a univocally fixed entity defined, for instance, by local
administrative authorities. Instead, scales and field sites were key concerns of
my study and were defined eventually collaboratively with the interlocutors
and through the ethnographic research itself.
As I developed mobile ethnography during my extended field research
in Mexico City, the implications for the methodological design presented
here are deeply situated in that context. Since I was employing this field
device in a multi-sited field and interviewing a wide spectrum of people, as
outlined above, mobile ethnography engenders a reconstruction of everyday
knowledge concerning urban processes based on theoretical assumptions
and empirically grounded data. Understanding urban territories as a social
product, I am aware that my perceptions during the recorridos explorativos
and my interpretations of the entrevistas en movimiento are to a certain
degree structured by previous assumptions shaped by my own academic
and personal disposition. It is this theoretical and individual background
together with the specific context of Mexico City at a certain time that pro-
foundly influenced the analysis by writing and mapping. In other words,
mobile ethnography is shaped by and deeply invested in a specific urban
context and adapted to a particular research question. As such, this method-
ology is always in relation to particular situations and problems and there-
fore generates situated knowledge. At the same time, it is a strategy or tool
that is, in part, alienable from specific problems or situations and can be used
in multiple contexts. Research strategies such as the recorridos explorativos
and the entrevistas en movimiento are thus not simply reproducible in mul-
tiple sites but are, rather, modifiable and modified in use. Depicted as such,
mobile ethnography becomes an ‘inventive method’ (Lury and Wakeford
2012) both influenced by and formative of urban theory. Particularly the col-
laborative mode of inquiry showcased with the entrevistas en movimiento
might be useful for anthropologists interested in spatial practices and
decentred knowledge production.
How to
• For the recorrido explorativo, choose a neighbourhood you are not
familiar with, where you hardly know what is going on.
• Using any available city map, write down some fixed points that you
can use to orient yourself along the way.
• Think about the best way to get to this particular part of the city by
public transport.
• Get off the bus if you think an area is interesting and safe.
• Let yourself drift in the sense of a self-reflexive floating observation,
using all your senses of awareness and seismographic attention as
discussed above.
• Meet with a resident of a neighbourhood for an entrevista en movimiento.
• For the entrevistas en movimiento, use an interview guideline throughout
the walk to cover topics such as the person’s everyday spaces, stories
about the neighbourhood and their own views on where they live. Also
address their personal self-location in the city.
Notes
1 A more extensive version of this paper can be found here: Monika Streule (2020).
2 This set of methods combines multi-sited ethnographic field research with his-
torical analysis and cartographic synthesis, thereby moving beyond the usual
predisposed set of data. Rather than serving only an illustrative function, ethno-
graphic, cartographic and historical strategies are of equal heuristic importance
for the analysis and are complementary of each other. I developed this specific
methodology as part of my research project Ethnography of Urban Territories
(Streule 2018) and in close connection with the comparative study Patterns and
Pathways of Planetary Urbanisation (Schmid et al. 2018).
3 For the analysis and interpretation of the obtained data – along with the ethno-
graphically well-established thick description write-up – I applied a specific quali-
tative mapping method. This mapping method was collaboratively developed
and designed as a part of the aforementioned comparative project. My study
142 Monika Streule
of Mexico City particularly foregrounds qualitative mapping as a technique to
translate the social production of urban territories from the bodily ethnographic
experience into the geographical representation of a map. (For a more detailed
discussion of the mapping method, see Streule 2018; 2020.)
4 During my fieldwork, I conducted 56 such interviews on the move, each lasting
between one-and-a-half and three hours. Including the trip to and from the
respective neighbourhood, I was on the road for between nine and twelve hours
on an interview day. The duration varied depending on the distance between
where I lived and the meeting point.
Sources
Burckhardt, L. 2015. Why is landscape beautiful? The science of Strollology.
Basel: De Gruyter.
Delgado, M. 2007. Sociedades movedizas. Pasos hacia una antropología de las calles.
Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama.
Gallo, R. 2005. México D.F.: Lecturas para paseantes. Madrid: Turner.
García Canclini, N. 1996. ‘Los viajes metropolitanos.’ In La Ciudad de los Viajeros.
Travesías e Imaginarios Urbanos, México, 1940–2000, edited by García Canclini
N, et al., 11–41. México DF: UAM-I: Editorial Grijalbo.
Haesbaert, R. 2011. El mito de la desterritorialización. Del ‘fin de los territorios’ a la
multiterritorialidad. México DF: Siglo XXI.
Ingold, T. and Vergunst, J. L. 2008. Ways of walking. Ethnography and practice on
foot. Aldershot; Burlington: Ashgate Publishing.
Kusenbach, M. 2003. ‘Street Phenomenology. The Go-along as Ethnographic
Research Tool.’ Ethnography 4 (3): 455–485.
Lury, C. and Wakeford, N., eds. 2012. Inventive methods. The happening of the
social. London; New York: Routledge.
Pétonnet, C. 1982. ‘L’observation flottante. L’exemple d’un cimetière parisien.’
L’Homme 22 (4): 37–47.
Porto Gonçalves, C. W. 2001. Geo-grafías. Movimientos sociales, nuevas
territorialidades y sustentabilidad. México DF: Siglo XXI.
Robinson, J. 2016. ‘Thinking Cities Through Elsewhere. Comparative Tactics for a
More Global Urban Studies.’ Progress in Human Geography 40 (1): 3–29.
Schmid, C., Karaman, O., Hanakata, N., Kallenberger, P., Kockelkorn, A., Sawyer, L.,
Streule, M., and Wong, K. P. 2018. ‘Towards a New Vocabulary of Urbanization
Processes: A Comparative Approach.’ Urban Studies 55 (1): 19–52.
Streule, M. 2017. ‘Post- und dekoloniale Perspektiven der Stadtforschung. Eine
andere Lesart der Urbanización Popular von Mexiko-Stadt.’ In Subalternativen.
Postkoloniale Kritik und dekolonialer Widerstand in Lateinamerika edited by
Steger, R, et al., 79–104. Münster: edition assemblage.
Streule, M. 2018. Ethnografie urbaner Territorien. Metropolitane
Urbanisierungsprozesse von Mexiko-Stadt. Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot.
Streule, M. 2020. ‘Doing Mobile Ethnography: Grounded, Situated, and
Comparative.’ Urban Studies 57 (2): 421–438.
13 How to use Pathosformeln
in anthropological inquiry
Anthony Stavrianakis
How can ethnographers work over and work through things that they
see that pertain to gestural repertoires? More specifically, how to grasp
and work through gestures whose affect and effect should be properly
characterized as uncanny, perturbing, discordant and indeterminate? The
concept of the Pathosformel, formula for the expression of pathos, drawn
from the work of historian of images Aby Warburg, is a conceptual tool
for working through the aesthetic, ethical and narrative stakes of the con-
frontation with uncanny, haunting, disconcerting gestures.
File card
Field device: Die Pathosformel (German, formula for the expression of
pathos).
Mode of inquiry: Collaborative concept work; image-work;
narrative work.
Geographical location(s): France, Switzerland, United States.
Duration: Four years.
Degree of difficulty: Worth the sweat.
Over the course of four years (2014–2017) I conducted fieldwork on the

practice of assisted suicide in Switzerland. The ultimate aim was to follow
requests for assistance with a voluntary death from the beginning of a
demand, through to the final outcome, whatever that might be. The challenge
was to occupy a position, to be given a position that I could in turn take
up, so as to listen to people, and to see what happens, as their demands
and desires unfolded in time, demands and desires that necessarily included
my own, to the degree that I would come to have a position in relation to
them. In this ‘how to’ I make a case for using Aby Warburg’s art historical
concept Pathosformel–– ‘formula for the expression of pathos’. It was a tool
that I used for working over preoccupying images within the unfolding of
this ethnography. It was crucial not only for helping me to grasp what was
troubling about these images, the things I had seen, in relation to what I had
heard, but also for developing a way of narrating them.
Importantly for this ‘how to’, it was a conceptual tool that I honed together
with Paul Rabinow in a setting outside of the field, an ongoing collaborative
DOI: 10.4324/9781003253709-15
144 Anthony Stavrianakis
setting for concept work, work that catalyzed my orientation to what I was
participating in within fieldwork. Reflection via the concept of Pathosformel
aided me in considering the positions I was occupying or would come to
occupy and the position from which I could hear what I was being told, as
well as how I could write about why I was doing what I was doing, and what
I could draw out, in terms of knowledge, from anthropological inquiry.
Pathosformel
The concept of Pathosformel is drawn from the path-opening work of the
utterly singular Hamburg-born historian of images Aby Warburg (1866–
1929). It has a particular status within Warburg’s intellectual trajectory,
but fundamentally the concept signifies forms given to a gestural language
of pathos in images. To give a sense of how and why he honed the con-
cept, a clear example can be taken from his 1905 essay ‘Dürer and Italian
Antiquity’. His choice of subject is two representations of the Death of
Orpheus: one a drawing by Albrect Dürer, from 1494 and the other an
anonymous engraving from the circle of Andreas Mantegna, which was
Dürer’s source. Warburg’s concern in this essay, which I use here to stand in
for the project as a whole, ‘stems from the conviction that these two works
have yet to be adequately interpreted as documents of the reentry of the
ancient world into modern civilization… by the latter half of the fifteenth
century … Italian artists had seized on the rediscovered antique treasury
of forms just as much for its emotive force of gesture as for any tranquil,
classic ideal’ (Warburg 1905: 553). Warburg demonstrates that, although
never previously remarked on, the late fifteenth-century engraving draws on
‘emotive gestural language’ from Greek antiquity, using vase paintings as his
convincing source of comparison.
For Warburg, the object and objective of inquiry was to trace within
Renaissance painting and sculpture the afterlives (die Nachleben) of ancient
Greek formulas for the expression of pathos. Moreover, he pushes us to track
the ‘survivals’ (Nachleben) of earlier elements of gestural motion in later
formulas, showing longer durational configurations and reconfigurations of
these forms. Warburg’s concern was to grasp the influence of the emotive force
of antique gesture in the Renaissance. His problem was how Renaissance
artists strived with, reacted to, and worked through ‘the surviving imagery
of the eastern Mediterranean pagan cultures’ (Gombrich 1999, 270).
How might one wish to use the concept within ethnographic inquiry,
and to what end? In my case I was confronted within inquiry with gestures,
specifically gestures performed by individuals at the moment they ended
their lives, ‘emotive gestural language’ to use Warburg’s phrase, for which
I lacked a vocabulary and conceptual orientation, beyond the endeavour to
simply describe what was before me. When confronted with a given form or
‘formula’, in the course of inquiry, one that somehow seems crucial or sig-
nificant precisely because of the evocation of an emotion, or perhaps more
How to use Pathosformeln in anthropological inquiry 145
accurately an affect, the troubled indetermination could be worked on with
the help of Warburg’s concept: what does this form, linked to an affect,
signify? Or as I will come to put it, the question becomes an uncanny and
disconcerting one: Where have I seen you before? To be able to respond to
this concern would be a means of better discerning the problem and the task
of a given inquiry as it pertains to an indetermination or discordance around
gestural form, for the one undertaking the inquiry.
The major text in which Warburg tried to work through his problem
was the Mnemosyne Bilderatlas (Warburg 2020), an ambitious sequence
of efforts to create an order for the historical survivals of the forms given
to human experience, and principally to the experience of pathos. ‘Order’,
though, is probably not quite the right term; it’s a stand in signifier for the
act of trying to ward off chaos, a search for solace (c.f. Merback 2017;
Rabinow and Stavrianakis 2021) to give some form to the encounter that
occurs, as Warburg wrote, ‘between the imagination’s act of grasping and
the conceptual act of observing’ (Warburg 2009, 277). Warburg named
such form giving as a ‘process of de-demonizing the inherited mass of
impressions, created in fear, that encompasses the entire range of emo-
tional gesture, from helpless melancholy to murderous cannibalism’ (ibid.).
Warburg’s Mnemosyne Bilderatlas was an attempt to render visible this pro-
cess and its subsequent effect of rendering uncanny the dynamics of human
movement. He rephrases the process as one which could be defined as ‘the
attempt to absorb pre-coined expressive values by means of the representa-
tion of life in motion’ (ibid.). And this was one of the things that was par-
ticular to Warburg, and from which anthropologists have much to learn: his
own absorption in the de-demonizing process was as much at stake as that
of the Renaissance painters he was observing.
Image-work 2014–2016
It was early on in fieldwork that I was confronted with an image and a ges-
ture. I had not yet been present at an assisted suicide. My knowledge and
image repertoire were forged at that time through the speech of those who
had accompanied others, and, crucially, in the gestures that were described
to me, of the moment of death, and then, in my own watching of these
gestures in documentary films that had been made on the practice. The ges-
ture that set me to work on the Pathosformel is that of the person who ends
their own life sitting upright, head tilted to one side as they lose conscious-
ness and begin to die, the head of another, a companion, an accompanier,
tilted in turn towards them, resting against theirs, supporting that weight
with their own, both holding them and letting the go.
Where have I seen you before?

Giotto’s Lamentation (c. 1305).
Or; the icon of Episkepsis Glykophilousa (c. 1200–1300).
In parallel to the fieldwork I was conducting in Switzerland, which involved
regular visits from my home in Paris to different locations in Switzerland, as
well as encounters with people both in France and in the UK who either had
experience of assisted suicide or were in the process of making a request,
I was involved perpetually in collaborative work with Paul Rabinow on
the question of how to develop conceptual repertoires adequate to the eth-
ical and intellectual stakes of any given anthropological inquiry. This work
involved not only regular conversation between us, but also workshops with
colleagues, notably Trine Korsby and Roy Fisher, in which we sought to
develop concepts that would mutually enrich what we thought we could
learn from what we were doing in inquiry. During this particular period
2014–2016 our discussions turned on what we had named in our 2014
book Designs on the Contemporary as ‘the practice of formgiving under the
sign of pathos (as object and mood)’ one that ‘contrasts with those of irony,
comedy, and tragedy’ (Rabinow and Stavrianakis 2014, 144).
It was in relation to this concern that I brought an image of the ges-
ture of dying into a common workspace, a workshop held with Rabinow,
Korsby and others in 2016 (Stavrianakis, Rabinow and Korsby 2018). Our
discussions assisted me in clarifying, at that time, how the object of ‘ges-
ture’ in dying, and specifically in assisted suicide, taken up as a formula
for the expression of pathos, is connected to a problem, or troubling of
signification: on the one hand, there is a ubiquitous discourse of ‘control’
that concerning demands for and evaluations of the legitimacy or illegit-
imacy of assisted suicide. Such discourse tries to fix the signification of
dying in advance, usually around signifiers such as ‘dignity’, ‘good death’
and ‘choice’. On the other hand, there is incompleteness in the significa-
tion of the signifier. It resists complete determination. Signification requires
‘a listener to the story of the death, or a family member’s experience and
recollection of their grief to give it a form (not to say to complete it, once
and for all). The form of the practice, at the level of gesture, and the sig-
nification for self and others, it could be said, is not a correlate of a tech-
nique (technē), but rather becomes a site of narrative testing (épreuve)’
(ibid., 185). This testing was itself undertaken through the search for a
Pathosformel.
From field to workshop and back to the field

By chance, but also of note, I was obliged to fly directly from a workshop
in Berkeley, where we had been discussing narrative moods and formulas
for pathos, just before the summer of 2016, to Basel, to be present at the
death of a person I had been engaged with over the course of months. What
follows is a textual rendering of the work produced in the motion from an
initial field encounter, which primed a concern with an image and gesture of
dying, a collaborative set of exchanges on the concept of the Pathosformel,
and then the return to the field in which I would endeavour to reorient
Figure 13.1 Sketch from a memory of a moment before Clément ended his life.
myself to the stakes of what I observed and heard, and then would want
to write.
Clément’s death
Supported by three large pillows, Clément leans back on the bed. His son
Pascal and Albertine, Pascal’s partner, are standing by his feet. Erika, the
doctor who runs the association that will help Clément with his voluntary
assisted death, is at the head of the bed, alongside her brother, a photog-
rapher, who helps her with her work. He makes a short film, as Clément
gets settled, recording him explaining what he is here to do, at this rented
apartment in an out-of-the-way business zone in the Canton of Baselland: to
end his life.
Erika begins to prepare the intravenous drip that will be filled with
the lethal medication. Clément extends his left arm so she can insert the
needle. His right arm is bent at the elbow, behind his head. His left leg is
straight, and his right leg is bent at the knee. I am standing by a movable
shelf that creates a division in the room, between the area with the bed
where Clément will die, and a living room, with magazines, tables and
chairs. The affect in the room is serene. Clément often talked about having
‘completed life’; this is how he wanted it to end. He smiled as the perfusion
was set up.
From my position behind Albertine and Pascal, a word came to
mind: otium; I thought twice about it; it seemed appropriate. After a
sequence of exchanges, Clément was ready. He turned the tap on the drip.
We waited, looking. He told us he was leaving (je pars), lost consciousness
and a few minutes later he was dead.
Two gestures
I won’t tell you much about Clément, about his son Pascal, Albertine, the
association in Switzerland, his experience of illness, and so on. I won’t give
you, the reader, the means for you to make a judgment, your own judgment,
about whether or not he needed to die in this way, rather than another way –
a question that was at a given time, unresolved for Pascal.
What I want to grasp is the specificity of the gesture: the way in which
Clément died.
It seemed to me from the beginning of my inquiry into assisted suicide,
an inquiry that began by talking with people who worked within associ-
ations, and with people whose family members had left their experience of
illness through voluntary assisted dying (la mort volontaire assistée, or else
more commonly named as suicide assisté, assisted suicide), as well as by
watching the handful of documentaries that had been made on the subject,
that there was something specific about the gesture; that the gesture was
somehow important in the preparation for any eventual grasping of the
event of death.
When I brought this theme up with Clément, three months earlier, he
fobbed me off, saying I was fetishizing the act, saying the focus on the
act was like the ‘obsession’ with last words; that what counts is what
happens before and after. Standing there, observing Clément, I knew that
he disagreed, but for me at least, it seemed important; arm behind the
head, his son caressing his feet, master of the moment of his death, an
inversion of the murder of his parents in Nazi death camps. A form given
to pathos.
It was not only the affect of serenity that confirmed the importance of
the gesture, for me; there was a contrast. After Clément died, we waited in
silence for some time, I don’t know how long, before Erika left the room.
She informed us that she had called the police, which is usual. We waited
with Clément until the police came. When they arrived, we went to the living
area for them to interview us briefly. The police then called the forensic med-
ical examiners. When they arrived, they asked us to leave.
About half an hour later, we were allowed back in the room to say
goodbye to Clément before the undertakers took away the body; all of a
sudden, I felt faint; blood drained from my face. I looked at Clément: his
attitude had been changed by the forensic team. He was now lying back; his
arms were down by his side. His legs were now straight: Clément was now
a corpse.
A claim for inquiry: to grasp the significance of the change in Clément’s
attitude and posture, for me as an observer, is to try and grasp them in their
character as what Brecht called Gesten – embodied attitudes that condense
multiple ranges of signification that are not necessarily coherent, and hence,
to be given form, to grasp them as Pathosformeln whose prehistory can take
on signification only through the one who reconstructs that history.
Or else, to put it more precisely, I would like to grasp a movement from
Clément’s Haltung, his bearing as he died, to its Gestus, as made visible in
the two contrasting positions of his corpse, distinct formulas.
A gesture might thus express one ‘meaning’ and the Gestus of the ges-
ture, the configuration of gesture, attitude, discourses, instantiates another
meaning. It is arguably the public and repeatable, ‘the readable’ character of
Gesten (Fore 2012) which articulates the interrelation of both their obvious
and the obtuse meanings. Gestus will be a way of trying to grasp and work
over what I think I have seen in Clément’s Haltung, rendered readable as a
formula for pathos.
To approach gesture by way of the Pathosformel is precisely not to
redeem its social character, as with Brecht, but rather to establish the proto-
significations of the Gestus by looking at the historical survivals that can be
animated in relation to gesture observed in the present.
To render visible
How to make visible the Gestus at play in the gesture and attitude of
Clément and to grasp without reducing it to a representation, a synecdoche,
of something pre-established (a cultural repertoire, or the social)?
Beginning in the present, through my experience with Clément,
I endeavour to draw from an available repertoire of gesture in the history of
art, ways in which dying has been given form, in order to configure a series
of images so as to share what seemed to me to be the significance of the ges-
ture (its status as a Gestus).
The first step is to suggest that Clément’s gesture, and the gestures of
those accompanying him, are part of a repertoire: neither infinitely open,
nor pre-defined. I quickly find in one of the first documentaries made about
assisted suicide, two gestic elements that reappear: (1) the arm behind the
head and (2) touching heads.
Where have I seen you before?
The figure of the ‘dying slave’ whose serenity in Michelangelo’s sculp-
tural rendering is counter-effectuated by its twin ‘the rebellious slave’ both
produced for Pope Julius II’s tomb (1513–1516); The figure of Girodet’s
Endymion (The Sleep of Endymion 1793), whom the Goddess Selene found
so beautiful when asleep that she asked Zeus to make him sleep forever.
Gestures observed in the present, in particular the gesture of Clément’s
entourage holding his feet and caressing his head, resonate with the post-
Byzantine figuration of compassion in lamentation, or Pietà (Giotto’s
Lamentation, ca. 1303–05). Moreover, the very form of the act of voluntary
ending life in the company of others renders possible a situation in which
such gestures are primed. From Clément’s attitude, and the entourage around
him, we can draw on gestural survivals that may enrich an understanding of
what is going on in this manner of dying. Minimally, these gestural survivals
(Nachleben) are available, for me, as an observer, as elements for trying to
grasp and transmit to a reader, how I have been affected by my encounter
with this form for dying, and why, years later, I am still moved by it.
How to
Anthropological inquiry is the ongoing practice for the production of the
logical forms to which further inquiry submits.
Whilst modernist and realist genres of anthropological inquiry have
short-circuited the motion between fieldwork and text, the production of
such logical forms that can be made to count within the veridictional remit
of anthropology qua discipline is facilitated (additionally) by an intellectual
setting outside the field.
A collaborative approach to such production in such a setting is salutary.
Modernist and realist genres of anthropology tend towards the moods of
irony and tragedy: an anthropological inquiry after modernism and realism
primes the mood of pathos, and even comedy.
Priming pathos, and the return of familiar forms in unfamiliar, or alien-
ating form, leads away from the descriptive ethnographic reality of experi-
ence (Erlebnis) and towards the worked-over form of that experience, tested
conceptually (Erfahrung).
Sources
Fore, Devin. 2012. Realism after Modernism: The Rehumanization of Art and
Literature. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Gombrich, E. H. 1999. ‘Aby Warburg: His Aims and Methods: An Anniversary
Lecture.’ Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 62: 268–282.
Merback, Mitchell. 2017. Perfection’s Therapy: An Essay on Albrecht Dürer’s
Melencolia I. NY: Zone Books.
Rabinow, Paul and Anthony Stavrianakis. 2014. Designs on the
Contemporary: Anthropological Tests. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Rabinow, Paul and Anthony Stavrianakis. 2021. From Chaos to Solace: Topological
Meditations. Berkeley: Haven.
Stavrianakis, Anthony, Paul Rabinow and Trine Korsby. 2018. ‘In the Workshop:
Anthropology in a collaborative zone of inquiry.’ The Composition of
Anthropology: How Anthropological Texts Are Written edited by Morten Nielsen
and Nigel Rapport, 169–192. NY: Routledge.
Warburg, Aby. 1999a [1905]. ‘Dürer and Italian Antiquity.’ In The Renewal of Pagan
Antiquity. Trans. David Britt, 553–558. Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute.
Warburg, Aby. 1999b [1893]. ‘ “Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Spring”. An
Examination of Concepts of Antiquity in the Italian Early Renaissance.’ In The
Renewal of Pagan Antiquity. Trans. David Britt, 89–156. Los Angeles: The Getty
Research Institute.
Warburg, Aby. 2009. ‘The Absorption of the Expressive Values of the Past.’ Trans.
Matthew Rampley. Art in Translation 1 (2): 273–283.
Warburg, Aby. 2020. Bilderatlas Mnemosyne –The Original edited by Roberto Ohrt
and Axel Heil. Berlin: Hatje Cantz.
14 How to perform field encounters
Andrew Irving
The anthropologist does not enter a pre-existing social reality but

through their performative interactions in the field creates the conditions
for certain kinds of expression, including speech, knowledge and action.
As such, the anthropological presence establishes a new social relation-
ship and performative context in which people describe and reflect on
a broad range of experiences, subjects and events, including those they
might not articulate in their habitual social interactions. A key challenge
across the social sciences is how to understand the unarticulated realms
of experience, memory and imagination that constitute people’s social
lives. As conventional social–scientific methods may be too static to
understand the fluidity of perception, this ‘how to’ piece explores how
performance can be used to craft ethnographic contexts – specifically
in relation the emergent realms of experience, emotion and memory
among people living with illness – but with general applications for
ethnographic research. A primary intention is to use performance to
establish a field of inquiry that is relevant and of interest to the people
we work with, rather than being directed by disciplinary theories and
presuppositions.
File card
Field device: Performative Encounters
Mode of inquiry: Collaborative and Performative Ethnography
Geographical location(s): Uganda, USA, UK
Duration / time: 20+ Years
Ethnographic counterparts: Anyone who is interested in participating
Resources: Voice-recorder and camera (or phone)
Substantive outputs: See Sources
Degree of difficulty: Easy
Anthropology is in large parts a performative discipline in that fieldwork

is based on performing and interacting within a broad range of social and
cultural settings with the aim of generating new knowledge about human
beings. Victor Turner famously lamented how the dynamic and performa-
tive character of social and cultural life encountered in the field is too often
rendered static through the rigidity of the discipline’s theoretical and lit-
erary texts. For Turner anthropology frequently fails to provide an open,
living quality in its ethnographic representations because ‘our analysis
presupposes a corpse’ (1982, 89). Although different writing strategies have
DOI: 10.4324/9781003253709-16
How to perform field encounters 153
been used, with varying degrees of success, to bring to life the vitality and
depth of people’s lived experiences and expressive activities, Turner him-
self advocated the use of performance and drama. Turner was particularly
interested in how the ever-changing, embodied and interactive dimensions
of social life, emotion and memory might be understood and communicated
through the application and aesthetics of performance. When writing about
Turner’s commitment to the use of performance, George Marcus (2006)
described his deep disappointment that the practical and methodological
implications of the Writing Culture debate and reflexive turn were largely
overlooked insofar as attention has been mostly restricted to questions of
textual and ethnographic authority.
Responding to this lacuna, this how-to piece analyzes the foundational
role of performance in the production of anthropological knowledge and
provides some applied examples of how performative and co-creative
approaches might be used to research and represent social life and experi-
ence. In a series of publications (Irving 2007; 2011a; 2011b; 2013; 2017;
2018) I have attempted to use the performative basis of fieldwork to develop
new co-creative and collaborative approaches to research and represent a
diverse range of subjects – from everyday practices, such as walking, sitting
in cafes or commuting – to the lifeworlds of terminal illness, including
the experience and immediacy of living with cancer, MND or HIV/AIDS.
Combining ideas of free association with techniques used by filmmakers,
performers and creative artists, my aim has been the development of new
approaches to fieldwork to understand the ever-changing and complex
assemblages of perception, memory and sociality that constitute people’s
lived experiences. Particularly relevant here is Dorinne Kondo’s conceptual
framework for understanding the performative crafting of different selves
amidst shifting relations of power, race and gender (1990; 1997; 2018), and
Kim Nicolini’s (1998) more practical attempt to map her life history onto
the streets of her native San Francisco by identifying and locating certain
fractures and moments of disruption or transformation in her personal his-
tory only to find that ‘mapping my life with its never-ending string of melo-
drama is, at best, an impossible task’ (1998, 79).
Building from these approaches, I will now turn to a performative
field device that was originally written up as ‘Strange Distance: Towards
an Anthropology of Interior Dialogue’ (Irving 2011a). The aim was to
understand how experiences of terminal illness are mediated by ongoing
streams of interior dialogue, imagery and expression that exist beneath
the surface of people’s public activities. The capacity for a complex inner
life – encompassing inner speech, imaginative reverie, and unarticulated
moods – is an essential feature of living with illness and a principal means
through which people interpret, understand, and manage their condition.
Nevertheless, anthropology lacks a generally accepted theory or methodo-
logical framework for understanding how people’s internalized speech and
streams of perception relate to their public actions and expressions.
154 Andrew Irving
As conventional social–scientific methods are often too static to under-
stand the fluidity of perception – especially when living with illness or
bodily instability – my aim was to place the problem of inner dialogue and
expression directly into the field, turning it into an ethnographic, practice-
based question to be addressed through performance. Of course, there is no
objective independent access to other people’s consciousness or lifeworlds.
We do not observe or encounter other people’s perceptions, thoughts or
experiences in themselves but their embodied, performative expression
in different contexts, which are necessarily subject to social, cultural and
moral conventions, self-censorship, and the limits of observation and lan-
guage. As such, a key challenge was to create a field device and ethnographic
context for the generation of internalized speech, memory and imagery by
establishing a different kind of relationship between persons, their bodies,
and their surroundings.
The result was ‘Strange Distance: Towards an Anthropology of Interior
Dialogue’: a collaborative ethnography between myself and two HIV+
Ugandan activists, Margaret Ssewankambo and Nalongo Kaweesa. The
process involved establishing a set of mutually defined research aims and
objectives in which the two participants identified areas that were of crit-
ical interest and relevance to themselves, with the aim of understanding the
often unvoiced but sometimes radical changes in being, belief, and perception
that can occur while negotiating illness. By taking seriously people’s role in
shaping anthropological theory, data, and discussion, the aim was to develop
a field device that recasts the power relationship between researcher and
researched through forms of co-creation and self-representation. In doing so,
the two participants decided which aspects of their experience they wanted
to research and represent by responding to the question: how would you like
to represent your experience to someone living in my country, England?
The performative interaction that materializes in response to this question,
emerges out of Margaret and Nalongo’s own embodied experience of HIV/
AIDS and establishes a field of inquiry that is relevant to them, rather than
being directed by anthropological presuppositions and theory. The field
device involves one participant walking around a map of significant places
while narrating their thoughts into a voice recorder as they emerge in the pre-
sent tense. At the same time, the second participant interjects, asks questions,
and takes photographs, thereby creating a moving performative dialogue in
which transient thoughts and memories are brought into the public domain
and reflected on. It is a device that plays on the capacities of movement and
significant places to elicit interior dialogues and verbal testimonies, and
which attempts to offer a practical fieldwork approach to think ethnograph-
ically about the emergent and associative properties of thought and interior
dialogue in relation to one’s familiar surroundings. At a point agreed on by
the two participants, the roles are reversed with the narrator taking on the
interlocuter/photographer role and vice versa, at which point a new ‘field-
work performance’ begins. I accompany them but take on a tertiary role.1
While carrying out their performative dialogue, both women could ask
questions about each other’s experience that I could not even conceive
of, let alone ask, as a white European male without children or HIV. For
example, it would never have occurred to me to ask Margaret if she had tried
to buy a motorbike when she found out she had HIV/AIDS. But for both
women the logic of the question was obvious: a motorbike could provide
a daily income over a number of years in the event of prolonged illness by
being hired out as a boda-boda taxi.2 Moreover, in the event of Margaret’s
death it would continue to provide money for her children’s meals, educa-
tion and school-fees long after she had departed.
It is a performative approach that enables people to act as subjects of
their own inquiry rather than objects of study by enabling both participants
to identify and discuss a set of issues relevant to their own lived experi-
ence. As Margaret’s account below demonstrates, it consists of participants
actively selecting certain events, dilemmas, and life experiences that they
judge will communicate to imagined, unknown others who they have never
met and who may be living in radically different social, cultural and eco-
nomic contexts. Margaret’s words thereby build a bridge between her own
embodied experience and an unknown but interested audience of imagined
persons, reinforcing how acts of storytelling generate spaces ‘of shared inter-
est’, that are ‘never simply a matter of creating either personal or social
meanings, but an aspect of the “subjective in-between” ’ (Jackson 2002,11).
By recounting events in her life history with a spontaneous commentary
on her thoughts, perceptions and emotions as they emerge in the moment
of performance, we witness the way that both inner expression and story-
telling mix well-rehearsed narratives and existential concerns with spontan-
eous trajectories of thought, digression and improvisation.
In the following excerpt, taken from the original article Margaret is the
narrator speaking into the voice recorder and Nalongo the interlocuter who
asks questions and takes photographs.
Strange distance: Excerpt
Photo 1: Top left corner: The bench

After the death of my husband, I was encouraged by a friend to come to
Baumann House and have an HIV test. The actual test was not a big thing,
and I took the test without any problem. They just took blood and then
I left. But finding out was different. I was supposed to get the results after
two weeks. Those two weeks – oh my – they were black days. I would hardly
sleep because of the worry, very much worrying and thinking about all the
things that could happen and remembering the way my husband looked and
the way his body looked. Then when 5 a.m. came I would get up and still
not know if I was moving towards life or death. So when it came that the
two weeks were up, I waited there on this bench and I would see people go
156 Andrew Irving
Figure 14.1 Composition by the author. Photo 1: Top left corner: The bench.
Photo 2: Top right corner: The walk after diagnosis. Photo 3: Bottom
left corner: Waiting at the side of the road. Photo 4: Bottom left
corner: Outside the old house.
into the rooms and then would be seeing the same people come out with red
eyes, crying. I kept watching people go inside and kept seeing them come out
miserable. My mind became mixed about whether I wanted to go in and was
worried and nervous that if I entered I imagined being asked to sit down,
being prepared for the result, and then hearing the news.
Photo 2: Top right corner: The walk after diagnosis

As I came out of the Baumann House, I walked along this road that takes us
down towards the main road. As I walk down here now, I cannot believe!
I really cannot believe how short this road really is. At the time the road
seemed so long and far as if it were miles before I reached the end but
now to walk it takes just a few small minutes. It was really not easy. I was
remembering seeing my husband die the previous year. It happened very
quickly. My husband was very healthy at the time, and then one week he just
fell sick. That one week became two, then three, then four, then five; then he
died. It was that quick. He seemed so healthy and then five weeks later he
was dead. It was really not easy when I came out of Baumann House. I was
thinking all the time that I too would end up like my husband, remembering
what he looked like and how he suffered. I remember moving along this
road thinking that I did not know what to do and had no real place in this
world. It was really not easy but now I can walk down this street and it
seems easy.
Photo 3: Bottom left corner: Waiting at the side of the road

I reached the end of the road and did not know what to do. I really had a
lot of thoughts. I began to think that I was no longer any good as a mother.
I just waited there standing on the side of the road hoping that a car would
knock me down. I stood there for a very long time. I wanted any of those
cars to come and hit me so I would die. I moved even closer to the road so
that if a car or bus came along and hit me it would end my problems. I just
stood here waiting for some vehicle to take my life away. I stood for over
one hour. I started thinking what if a car knocked me down and I didn’t die.
A car may knock me down, but I still might not die. I might end up without
being able to walk or move and instead I would have months and months
of suffering. What good would I be then? I would be even more of a burden
on my children. After that, I moved away from the roadside and waited for
a bus to take me back home.
Photo 4: Bottom left corner: Outside the old house

This is the place where I used to live. It is a big house because my husband
was an accountant and was earning good money working abroad in the
UK. But it was a rented house and I had to leave after my husband had
died. I then had to find a place to stay. The place I found was a room of
10 feet by 10 feet. During the day it used to be a classroom and at night it
used to be my room for sleeping. When I got my results and reached back
to this place, I entered, sat down and then spent three days in bed without
really talking to anybody because I was really too confused with the results
I had got. And the fourth day my friend came and asked why I was not
being seen in town. And I told her that I had gone for an HIV test and
I was found HIV+.
Towards an anthropology of interior dialogue

The performative device used above involves walking, narration and pho-
tography to research and represent people’s ongoing inner dialogues and
lifeworlds through a performative ‘dramatization of being’ that is carried
out in the actual locations in which the original events and experiences
occurred. It does so by allowing participants to actively shape the ethno-
graphic content and character of the research, thereby setting the ground for
the anthropological theory and analysis to follow. As Margaret walks the
158 Andrew Irving
shape and contours of her life history, she explicitly compares two modes
of leaving the clinic and walking down the same street, one bathed in the
intense emotions of having just been diagnosed with AIDS, the other while
retrospectively walking and narrating the exact same route as a piece of per-
formative ethnography. Here, the objective, rational measurement of space
and distance is differentiated by two radically different phenomenological
experiences, namely the long and terrifyingly lonely street on the day of
diagnosis, wherein many different possibilities were internally debated by
Margaret as she walked, and whose intended resolution was suicide, and
her subsequent astonishment while walking along the same stretch of road
as she verbalizes her disbelief at how short it now seems. Crucially, neither
the contrast in embodied experience – nor the ethnographic evidence about
spatial and emotional perception – would have emerged if Margaret had not
physically rewalked the steps she made after her diagnosis. For example, by
conducting a seated interview or life history in her home. Consequently, we
might never have known that to measure the length of a street it is sometimes
better to recognize the many different emotions and existential dilemmas
someone experiences before they reach the end.
The radical discrepancy in Margaret’s two different experiences of
walking – each representing their own emotional, experiential and bodily
truth – illustrates the extent to which habitual, seemingly congruent practices
(walking) and shared social environments (a street) possess a superficial com-
monality but are differentiated by personal biography, inner dialogue, mood
and imagination. Accordingly, we cannot presuppose that similarities between
people’s public activities provides evidence of commonality – or assume the
presence of a shared, social experience among Margaret and her fellow citi-
zens, including those who have just been diagnosed at Baumann House –
for like all relations between persons, places, and practices, their character
is differentiated through ongoing streams of internally represented speech,
mood, and reverie that run the whole spectrum from the trivial to the tragic.
As Margaret walked down the street – both at the time of the original
diagnosis and the performative recreation – her fellow citizens had no idea
that the person walking beside them was conjuring up the graphic image of
her dead husband in her mind’s eye. Likewise, the internalized imagery of
Margaret’s husband, which seems so central to her experience and testimony
of diagnosis, was not in her account when I interviewed in her sitting room
but only emerged through the performative act of walking the same route
down the street. By contrast, the experience of standing at the edge of the
road waiting for a vehicle to kill her was present in both accounts: but it
was only on seeing the pillar on the sidewalk that she remembered retreating
back from the road and aimlessly standing by the pillar wondering what to
do with her life. Thus, we see we have the emergence of certain details (the
length of the road, her husband’s image, leaning on the pillar) that were lost
to her own conscious expressions when we talked in her house and instead
only emerged through the performative journey.
Because anthropological knowledge depends on people’s performative
and expressive activities, its concepts, theories and grounding evidence need
to be understood in terms of the specific expressive actions being performed.
For example, Margaret’s recollection of walking from the clinic after diag-
nosis was experienced, remembered, and expressed in a radically different
way when walking than when sitting inside her home. The performative
aspects of expression-in-action encompass both the street and the sitting
room, which both generate equally valid modes of recollection, thought
and expression, while simultaneously indicating how different performative
contexts and activities are responsible for empirical data generated during
fieldwork. Because experiences and expressions in the field are not fixed
or undeviating but are generated through action, then no act of recollec-
tion or description (of an event, object, situation) is anything other than
a momentary expression in relation to its performative context. The flu-
idity and contingency of expression-in-action is further reinforced because
memory is unstable right down to the level of the body’s proteins and
chemicals, meaning even long-term, ‘embodied’ memories enter a labile,
unstable state and undergo transformation during acts of recollection and
performance before being repatterned back into the brain and body in a new
emotional context.
Although the fluidity and contingency of experience and action are
extensively discussed in anthropology’s theoretical literature, they are often
neglected in practice. This necessitates a critical rethinking of the epistemo-
logical basis of anthropological evidence and knowledge that I suggest must
take place not merely at the level of theoretical analysis and writing practice
but through the development of appropriate field devices that can explicitly
engage with the complexity and mutability of people’s thinking and being
as situated in action. By employing a performative approach, the theoret-
ical and documentary imperative already found in anthropological analysis
might productively be transformed into ethnographically grounded modes
of knowing and representation to understand the flows of perception,
memory and expression that are constitutive of human experience.
How to
The collaborative process behind ‘Strange Distance’ involved four dis-
tinct stages, briefly summarized below, while being open to a number of
variations and adaptation:
1. Outlining the nature of the project to both participants and identifying

a set of ideas and themes of mutual interest and concern in response to
an organizing question. For the project described above the question
was how would you like to represent your experience to someone living
in my country, England? but any framing question could be used. For
this particular project, the question was directed towards the theme of
160 Andrew Irving
inner speech and expression, but the content was left open and decided
by the two participants.
2. Discussing each participant’s life history and identifying specific
experiences, events and subjects they are interested in exploring and
representing. This can be done separately or together. For this project, the
two participants were long-standing acquaintances. However for other
projects one might, for example, work with two people who are strangers
to each other and would therefore be required to articulate themselves
without relying on shared, often unspoken understandings that exist
between persons who are familiar with each other’s lives and history.
3. Drawing a map of significant locations associated with certain life
experiences and events. Then walking the shape of this life his-
tory. Because the externalization of the person’s thoughts and acts of
remembering are carried out in the actual locations in which the ori-
ginal events and experiences occurred, this will also generate unex-
pected or unforeseen trajectories of thought, memory and imagination.
It is important to incorporate and be open to the various routes, detours
and trajectories that emerge as the dialogue develops.
4. The last stage is to meet to listen to the narrations, review the images
and discuss the different subjects and themes that emerged. At this point
a key aim is to identify and decide on which stories, images and themes
to select for the planned publication or output.
Notes
1 Although the focus of this how-to-piece is Margaret’s story, Nalongo’s fieldwork
performance was written up in Irving, A., 2011b.
2 A common mode of transport in East Africa whereby the passenger sits on the
back seat of a motorbike behind the driver.
Sources
Irving, Andrew. 2007. ‘Ethnography, Art and Death.’ Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute 13 (1): 185–208.
Irving, Andrew. 2011a. ‘Strange Distance: Towards an Anthropology of Interior
Dialogue.’ Medical Anthropology Quarterly 25 (1).
Irving, Andrew. 2011b. ‘I Gave My Child Life but I Also Gave Her Death.’ The
Australian Journal of Anthropology, 22: 332–350.
Irving, Andrew. 2013. ‘Bridges: A New Sense of Scale.’ Senses and Society 8
(3): 290–313.
Irving, Andrew. 2017. The Art of Life and Death: Radical Aesthetics and Ethnographic
Practice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Irving, Andrew. 2018. ‘A Life Lived Otherwise: Contingency and Necessity in an
Interconnected World’. Anthropologica 60 (2): 390–402.
Jackson, Michael. 2002. The Politics of Storytelling: Violence, Transgression, and
Intersubjectivity. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum.
Kondo, Dorinne. 1990. Crafting Selves: Power, Gender and Discourses of Identity in
a Japanese Workplace. Chicago.
Kondo, Dorinne. 1997. About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theater.
London: Routledge.
Kondo, Dorinne. 2018. Worldmaking: Race, Performance and the Work of Creativity.
Marcus, George 2006. ‘Artists in the Field: On the Threshold Between Art and
Anthropology.’ In Contemporary Art and Anthropology edited by A. Schneider
and C. Wright, 95–116: Oxford: Berg.
Nicolini, Kim. 1998. ‘The streets of San Francisco: A personal geography.’ In Bad
Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life, edited by Bad Subjects Production
Team, 78–83. New York: New York University Press.
Turner, Victor. 1982. From Ritual to Theatre: The Seriousness of Human Play.
New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications.
15 How to invent childhood publics
with photo-stories
Sevasti-Melissa Nolas, Christos Varvantakis and
Vinnarasan Aruldoss
Photo-stories are a device to invent childhood publics with children:

that is, for exploring the relationship between childhood and public life
and a way of organizing children’s encounters, experiences and engage-
ment with politics broadly defined. Photo-stories comprise of collages of
photographs taken by the children and the children’s ‘little stories’ about
the photograph brought together on A3 card and variously decorated
with stickers, colours, glitter, and other crafting materials. Children’s
photo-stories can also be coupled with exhibitions and others forms
for making public (exhibition catalogues, websites, training) children’s
encounters, experiences, and engagement with public life. This device can
help any research team to bring children’s everyday lives into the public
sphere, and to bring members of the public into children’s experiences.
Photo-stories, then, can be treated as both (i) the assembly of little
actions, interactions, communications, conversations, stories, and ultim-
ately relationships built between the research team and the children; and
(ii) material objects that can attract and entangle strangers into childhood
publics.
File card
Field device: Photo-storying.
Mode of inquiry: Inventing childhood publics by use of photography
and storytelling; a way to visualize and make shareable particularly
those experiences that lie beyond what can be verbally expressed and/
or clearly articulated as an ‘argument’ or ‘opinion’.
Geographical location(s): Athens (Greece), Hyderabad (India),
London (UK).
Duration / time: 2014–2019.
Ethnographic counterparts: Children, parents, childhood objects, adult
facilitators for workshops, curious strangers to attend exhibitions.
Resources: Art materials, digital cameras, funding to pay exhibition
helpers.
Substantive outputs: https://childhoodpublics.org/projects/connectors/
Degree of difficulty: Medium/high.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003253709-17
How to invent childhood publics with photo-stories 163
To tell a story of inventing childhood publics with photo-stories is to tell the
story, in part, of the Connectors Study. The study was funded by the European
Research Council and ran between 2014–2019 with an aim of exploring the
relationship between childhood and public life. We worked with 45 chil-
dren, and their families, in three cities (Athens, Hyderabad, London) over
a three-year period during which we spent considerable time with each
child hanging out together in their homes, playing, taking photographs and
having conversations about those photographs (the focus of this entry) as
well as much more, drawing maps, taking walks, and eating together; in
short, getting to know the children, and their families, finding out the things
that move and matter to them, their cares and concerns. What moves and
matters to people makes public life churn, as anthropologists, feminists, and
sociologists have long held. The terms of moving and mattering, of caring
and worrying, have become key cyphers of an affective understanding of
political personhood.
Andrew Sayer (2011) urges us to think about concern as a key orienting
metaphor of everyday life: we relate to the world through our concern for it
and our concern for the world communicates something about our loves and
losses, our strengths and vulnerabilities, our dreams and nightmares. Catherine
Lutz (2017) asks us to think about affect as a route into our ‘shared global
predicament’, one that is at once relational and transpersonal. Nevertheless,
in many of these accounts, which strongly resonated with us, children do not
feature as key interlocutors. Sayer’s examples, where they reference family life,
refer to parental concerns for children, Lutz’s essay cites ethnographies the
interlocutors of which are all grown up. In our work, we sought to bring the
child into the vernacular of personhood (Aruldoss and Nolas 2019; Aruldoss,
Nolas and Varvantakis 2021), in its affective and political conceptualizations,
and we organized our ethnographic explorations of the ways in which chil-
dren encountered, experienced, and engaged with politics broadly defined
through the concept of a childhood publics (Nolas 2015).1
Childhood publics
The term ‘publics’ is a tricky one. As a plural noun, publics is not often
used in everyday speech. The more widely used singular form of public, or
public life, however, does not fare much better in terms of an easy defin-
ition. As one London boy in our study said: ‘I don’t know how to describe
what I know about it.’ We used an understanding of publics that took its
cue from political theory, media and cultural studies (Fraser 1990; Berlant
2018; Warner, 2005), where a publics refers to a cultural and political phe-
nomena involving the assembly of people, often strangers to one another,
around matters of common care and concern; it often also involves some
form of mediation. In the Connectors Study, childhood publics represented
something of an epistemic wager, the sort that as researchers we regularly
make: to imagine the thing you know exists because you yourself have been
164 S-M Nolas, C Varvantakis and V Aruldoss
part of it, have experienced or witnessed or dreamed it, but for which per-
haps descriptive language and examples are currently lacking. This wager
was an attempt to describe, to invent and to connect.
During the three years, we experienced, heard, and had political
conversations with children in their homes, in playgrounds, geitonies
(neighbourhoods), and in bustees (slums). We reviewed the photographs
they took and listened to parents’ contextualization of their children’s
experiences as well as learning about parents’ own familial and political
biographies. The study, however, was not designed to only be descriptive.
Children knew from the outset that one of the activities they would be
involved in together was the staging of an exhibition that was due to take
part in the final year of the fieldwork. The exhibition on the horizon, even-
tually to be called in common,2 was a frequent topic of conversation, an
event we all moved towards together at a distance, as we morphed from
ethnographers and interlocutors to workshop participants and co-curators,
private viewers and public audiences of children’s photo-stories of public
life. The children’s photo-stories, which we turn to next, were the ‘fieldwork
devices’ (Sánchez Criado and Estalella 2018) that we developed over time
and through which we invent our childhood publics.
Photo-storying
There is a long and complicated tradition of using visual methods in
research across the social sciences which we won’t rehash here (Banks 2001).
Our photo-storying, which only revealed itself as such after the fact and
when it came to sharing our practice with others, was neither an attempt
to empower nor to elicit (for a much longer discussion see Varvantakis,
Nolas and Aruldoss 2019; see also Harper 2012). We have long held that
empowerment is a violation of ethnographic sensibilities (Nolas 2011) and
elicitation is equally duplicitous: we were not in the business of drawing out
by trickery or magic with the help of children and a camera, some hidden
everyday childhood reality. Photo-stories do, however, share the core aspect
of both empowerment and elicitation approaches to visual research: they are
a collaborative (Harper 2012) device and in our study brought children and
researchers together in a search of making good on a wager.
There is a certain (in)visibility, ungraspability (‘I don’t know how to
describe what I know about it’) we might say, to publics at a phenomeno-
logical level because of their distributed nature. Mediated practices, such
as photography and storytelling, play a role in making publics visible
and tactile. In our study, the process of making visible and tangible was
collaborative and started with a digital Nikon Coolpix camera we issued
every child, an ethnographic gift, a first in many gestures that went into
brokering relationships, and which marked the start of our collaboration.
‘Take pictures of the things that matter to you’, we asked the children, in
line with the study’s affective orientation to politics and public life. ‘Take
pictures of things that are important to you’, Melissa repeatedly asks/
suggests/cajoles Khadar in London, who every time she visits seems far
more interested in his video game, another sort of publics, than responding
to her suggestions. Over time, Khadar’s curated Lego collection, his cards,
and family trips become his photographic subjects, these are the things
that mattered to him. After about a year he snaps a photo of Melissa too.
In Hyderabad, children are either accompanied by their friends/siblings
or adult members of their families when taking photos of what mattered
outside the home, as most parents were concerned about their children’s
safety in the city, as well as being concerned about their young children
handling a camera with care (though the cameras were inexpensive as
far as digital cameras go, they represented luxury for families struggling
financially).
Faithful to Marcus Banks’s (2001) advice that photographs should never
be interpreted without the ones whose gaze they hold, the meaning from
children’s images emerges over time and in conversation with them in the
public spaces of the home, the living rooms/verandas/terraces/ kitchens/
dining rooms and their overlaps (for some children in Hyderabad these
spaces were not separate). In Athens, Alexandros has taken 446 images,
many of the same cartoon. He insists, and he is nothing if not persuasive,
on recounting every single one of them to Christos, frame-by-frame; going
through all of Alexandros’s photographs takes several visits. In London,
Eleanor flicks through her photographs: boring, boring, boring, she declares
of the beautiful (to Melissa’s eyes) ‘still life’ of the fruit and veg stand at her
local supermarket. But the mushroom? That makes the cut! ‘Because it’s
nature, I like it because the colour range is quite nice, it goes from light to
dark’, and because Eleanor cares a good deal about nature and animals, as
she has told Melissa on many occasions. ‘We have quite an extensive discus-
sion about the mushroom picture and which one of the three that Eleanor
has taken should be selected. We select the sharpest one. I felt I had quite
a bit of input in selecting the better-framed and more focused image but
we arrived at this selection together. It was quite collaborative.’ (Melissa’s
fieldnotes, 19 March 2016; emphasis added).
At a later stage in the process, we facilitated workshops with all the study
children from Athens/Hyderabad/London in the more public places at the
premises of the Archaeological Society in Athens/the Centre for Economic
and Social Science Research/The Photographer’s Gallery. In preparation for
these workshops, we asked children to choose ten pictures of things that
mattered the most, to discuss their selections with us and eventually with each
other at a workshop we organized bringing children from each city together.
At the workshop, we put children into groups, where they presented their
ten pictures to the other children in their groups. During these workshops,
we ask the children to choose one picture (or a combination of pictures),
which they felt spoke to something they valued highly and to write a short
‘story’ about it which would then be turned into a photo-story: a single
image or collage of images accompanied by children’s narrations about the
photograph(s) brought together on A3 card and variously decorated with
stickers, colours, glitter, and other crafting materials. Later in the workshop
children covered their stories (leaving the pictures visible), switched tables,
and were asked to reflect on other children’s pictures (without knowing the
accompanying ‘story’) and to discuss why a particular photograph might
be important to someone else. It was during these workshops, that the
photo-story became a device and a material artefact that gave our child
interlocutors the opportunity to share what mattered to them, to take and
explore another child’s perspectives, to co-curate their images in a private
view for parents, and to consider what it might be like to make their photo-
stories even more public, beyond the group assembled there, beyond the
confines of their families and the study, to put their photographs out there,
in the city, in an exhibition catalogue, on a website, for anyone to see.
Reflections
Methods or devices, according to Lury and Wakefield’s (2012) original for-
mulation, are there to ‘be used to conduct research that is explicitly oriented
towards an investigation of the open-endedness of the social world’. In our
children’s workshops in Athens/London/Hyderabad conversations unfolded
on various aspects of public life: nature, animals, the city, friendship,
children’s cultures, and religious belief (cf Varvantakis, Nolas and Aruldoss
2019; Varvantakis and Nolas,2021). Children joked and sparred with each
other, and conversations about associative living (Dewey 1916) filled the air.
But this is not all. In all our cities, children told us that being asked to take
photographs sometimes led to discussion of ‘what matters’ with their parents
and significant others, especially those who might be supporting them to
take photographs. Sometimes their individual circumstances, as for some
of the children in Hyderabad who lived in one-room dwellings that did not
Figure 15.1 Examples of pictures chosen by children (Images © Connectors Study,

2014–2019).
afford the sort of privacy we value in western research paradigms, the pro-
ject became a way for children to reflect on their values or share with elders
‘what mattered’ to them, something they might not normally do. Khadar for
earlier in this text is a case in point; he is sitting at a table with Jenny3 who
is facilitating the small group discussions. Amongst his 10 photographs he’s
brought the one he took of Melissa. He tells Jenny and his group that ‘he
took this photo because after the “lesson” he had had a lot of fun, and so he
wanted to take the picture “because I really understand what I really love
the most” since I’ve been in this project’ (workshop fieldnotes, May 2016).
The relational processes, of mattering, of shareability, of common concern,
have been at work from the outset if not always visible; they became so
through the creation of material artefacts.
The process of making things public is also in and of itself political. It
is not open to everyone, and perhaps, especially not to those on the many
margins of society where public articulations may contribute to further stig-
matization, precariousness and/or (further) vulnerability. The slow unfolding
of the photo-story method with the many opportunities for discussion and
reflection it afforded us, as well as its mixing of media (words, images,
stickers, colours, collage, glitter), supported the emergence of narratives of
value (‘what matters’) that were both considered and nuanced. This is par-
ticularly important when it comes to children, who remain, as Barrie Thorne
described them in the late 1980s, ‘privatized’ (Thorne 1987), by which she
meant that children, like women before them were often relegated to the
confines of private, domestic spaces of the family. When children do appear
in the public sphere it is often in the guise of a problem to be solved: as a
threat or victim to adult society, as playdough to be moulded. Despite the
in-roads made by children’s participation rights, children’s affective citizen-
ship, especially in advanced industrialized economies, continues to ‘lurk’ on
the fringes of our societies and our disciplines (Thorne 1987; Nolas 2015)
surprising its audience when it comes pouring onto the streets as it did with
children’s environmental movement (Nolas 2021).
Flashback to our exhibitions. It is November 2017/December 2017/
February 2018, and we are standing in a large, high-ceiling, white-wall and
wood-floor community art space in Islington, North London/the low-rise
auditorium building saved for special guests and occasions at the Centre for
Economic and Social Science Research in the neighbourhood of Begumpet in
Hyderabad/a neoclassical building of the first premises of the National and
Kapodistrian University of Athens, now a museum, in the Plaka area. We have
known the 15/12/14 children whose arrival we are eagerly awaiting, for three
years now; these exhibitions, a near-final destination of their photo-stories
in their journey to invent publics. The exhibition, a manifestation of the care
and relationships coded into the photo-stories. Over the following week,
our exhibitions will attract 149/30/266 members of the public, wandering
in off the streets, peaking at stranger-children’s photo-stories, momentarily
recruited into their publics, those spaces and times of mattering and sharing
amongst strangers (Barnett 2014).4 We found photo-storying a useful device
for making visible and public ‘private troubles’ and ‘the personal’ on the
one hand, but also a way to visualize and make shareable particularly those
experiences that lie beyond what can be verbally expressed and/or clearly
articulated as an ‘argument’ or ‘opinion’. The photo-story, as a process and
a resulting artefact, materializes the everyday politics that are situated in
and refracted through bodies and their senses, affects, gestures, and gazes,
making shareable the idioms of childhood publics and offering, perhaps, a
counterweight to dominant economies of outrage.
How to
1. Take pictures of things that are important to you. Ask your research
participants to reflect on things that are important to them, at a personal
level. We suggest avoiding steering interlocutors too closely; you could
achieve this by using abstract language that could be interpreted in
a few ways, i.e. the word ‘things’. Tell participants that things could
be anything; objects, games, food, people, places. It is important that
the participants think for themselves about what matters to them.
Consequently, ask participants to make photographs of things that
matter to them. (Over a flexible and, we suggest, generous, period of
time.)
2. Bring ten pictures to the workshop. Ask each research participant to
choose ten pictures out of their total production. It is important to high-
light that this process of ‘choosing’ serves two functions. On the one
hand it is a reflective process (thinking about ‘what matters to me’).
Conversely, it is also an ethical process of creating boundaries: the
photographs being selected are to be shared and shown to strangers;
they will be made public. The selection process is an opportunity to
think through and discuss what participants are comfortable with
making public and the possible implications of a chosen image being
made public.
3. Discuss your photos with the other research participants. Presentation
and discussion in small groups, around what is depicted in each pic-
ture and why what we see is important for the person presenting it. We
suggest that this stage should be facilitated with care. It is important
to create a ‘safe’ space, in which participants will feel comfortable and
secure to discuss their pictures and concerns. To that end, you may want
to think of ways to create this safe space – i.e. that the researchers par-
ticipate too, playful introductions, creating ground rules, etc.
4. Choose one picture and tell a story about it. Ask each participant to
choose one picture out of their selection of ten, and to tell a story
about it. At this stage we may facilitate the discussion with questions
around: what do we see in the picture? What’s the story behind the
picture? What was happening when you took the picture? How do you
feel about that which is depicted (or for that which the depicted object
represents for you)? Why does it matter to you? Do you think that it
may matter for other people too? The photograph that the participant
finally selects does not have to be the most important photograph/thing,
but one that the participant thinks is significant and feels happy to share
(see step 2). It is good to highlight this to participants, in order to take
the pressure off choosing.
5. Create your photo-story. Participants at this stage may alter/decorate
the picture they have selected, in whatever way they wish and with the
available means. For example, one could draw on or around the pic-
ture or create collages (also with elements from the participant’s other
pictures – thus creating collages).
6. Discuss other participant’s photo-stories. At this stage, cover all the
stories (i.e. the written text), leaving the picture side of the paper visible.
Move your groups / individual participants around the tables / photo-
stories. Ask your participants to choose one of the covered photo-
stories, and to take turns telling the ‘story’ they imagine accompanying
the photo: What do we see? Why may it be important to someone? How
do you feel about it? This is an activity of curiosity, reflection, imagin-
ation and perspective taking, about ‘seeing’ the world through another’s
eyes; it is not about guessing the ‘right’ answer! Then uncover and read
the story and reflect on differences and similarities.
7. Exhibit the photo-stories. Set up an exhibition of all the participant’s
photo-stories (across all groups) by i.e. hanging them on the wall for
all participants to see. This stage may allow for a further round of
Figure 15.2 The photo-story method (Images © Connectors Study, 2014–2019

Graphic design by Giorgos Skarmoutsos).
reflection and commentary while making the photo-stories more public.
The change of perspective (on a wall, rather than on the artists’ tables)
and the inter-framing of the photo-stories, may generate interesting
discussions between the creators and their audiences. Following this
stage, you may also consider opening up the exhibition to the wider
publics.
Acknowledgements
Photo-storying childhood publics into being was devised as part of
the European Research Council-funded Connectors Study (ERC-StG-
335514): We want to acknowledge the contribution of our colleagues
Madhavi Latha (research consultant for the project in Hyderabad), Thalia
Dragonas, Nelli Askouni, and Uma Vennam (advisory board members) and
the following individuals who brought their skills, passion, warmth and
good humour to the creative workshops and supported the project team in
successfully facilitating these events. In Athens: Anastasia Dimitriou, Aimilia
Fakou, Victoria Lagopoulou, and Stephanie Vouvousira. In Hyderabad: Sai
Amulya Komarraju, Archana Rao Manukonda, and Naga Deepika Ratan.
In London: Jenny Hewitt, Perpetua Kirby, Tasleem Rana, Catherine Walker.
Notes
1 A full list of project publications can be found here: https://childhoodpublics.org/
dissemination/writing/academic-articles/
2 https://childhoodpublics.org/events/in-common-childrens-photo-stories-of-
public-life/
3 With many thanks to Jenny Hewitt for facilitating the small group discussion and
capturing the exchange in her fieldnotes of the day.
4 Clive Barnett who we cite wrote about public life as ‘a family of practices of
sharing with others’ held together by people’s ‘vocabularies of worth’ (cited in
Nolas, 2015).
Sources
Aruldoss, V. and Nolas, S-M. 2019. ‘Tracing Indian Girls’ Embodied Orientations
Towards Public Life,’ Gender, Place and Culture 26(11): 1588–1608.
Aruldoss, V., Nolas, S-M. and Varvantakis, C. 2021. ‘Thinking with Feeling: Children’s
Emotional Orientations to Public Life,’ Childhood 28 (1): 56–71.
Banks, M. 2001. Visual Methods in Social Research. London: Sage.
Barnett C. 2014. ‘Theorising Emergent Public Spheres: Negotiating Democracy,
Development, and Dissent,’ Acta Academica 46: 1–21.
Berlant, L. 2018. The Queen of America Goes to Washington: Essays on Sex and
Citizenship. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Dewey, J. 1916. Democracy and Education: an Introduction to the Philosophy of
Education. New York: Macmillan.
Fraser N. 1990. ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of
Actually Existing Democracy,’ Social Text 25/26: 56–80.
Harper, D. 2012. Visual Sociology. London, Routledge.
Lury, C. and Wakeford, N. 2012. Inventive Methods: The Happening of the Social.
London, Routledge.
Lutz, C. 2017. ‘What Matters.’ Cultural Anthropology 32 (2): 181–191.
Nolas S-M. 2011. ‘Reflections on the Enactment of Children’s Participation Rights
Through Research: Between Relational and Transactional Spaces,’ Children and
Youth Services Review 33: 1196–1202.
Nolas, S-M. 2015. ‘Children’s Participation, Childhood Publics, and Social Change: A
Review,’ Children & Society 29 (2): 157–167.
Nolas, S-M. 2021. ‘Childhood Publics in Search of an Audience: Reflections
on the Children’s Environmental Movement,’ Children’s Geographies 19
(3): 324–331.
Nolas, S-M. and Varvantakis, C. 2019a. ‘Fieldnotes for Amateurs,’ Social Analysis
63 (3): 130–148.
Nolas, S-M. and Varvantakis, C. 2019b. The Child’s Gaze (Exhibition Catalogue).
ISBN: 978–1-912685–54–7.
Sánchez Criado, T. and Estalella, A. 2018. ‘Experimental Collaborations.’ In
Experimental Collaborations: Ethnography through Fieldwork Devices
edited by Adolfo Estalella and Tomás Sánchez Criado, 1–30. New York and
Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Sayer, A. 2011. Why Things Matter to People: Social Science, Values and Ethical Life.
Cambridge University Press.
Thorne, B. 1987. ‘Re-visioning Women and Social Change: Where Are the Children?’
Gender & Society 1: 85–109.
Varvantakis, C. and Nolas, S-M. 2019. ‘Metaphors We Experiment with in Multimodal
Ethnography,’ International Journal of Social Research Methodologies 22
(4): 365–378.
Varvantakis, C. and Nolas, S-M. 2021. ‘Touching Heritage: Embodied politics in
children’s photography.’ Online first, Visual Communication.
Varvantakis, C., Nolas, S-M. and Aruldoss, V. 2019. ‘Photography, Politics and
Childhood: Exploring Children’s Multimodal Relations with the Public Sphere,’
Visual Studies 34 (3): 266–280.
Warner M. 2005. Publics and Counterpublics. Zone Books: New York.
16 How to remediate ethnography
Adolfo Estalella
The remediation of ethnography involves two interrelated things: put-

ting a remedy to a difficult ethnographic situation by changing the
media of ethnography. Moving beyond the traditional text-centric
approach of anthropology, remediation practices bespeak the prolifer-
ation of digital media in our societies and the opportunity to embrace
multimodal ethnographic inquiries. A common case of remediation
involves the construction of site-specific digital infrastructures whose
design process becomes integral to the ethnographic endeavour. These
infrastructures are not mere accessories but sociomaterial and spatial
arrangements disposing of the conditions for inquiring: they sustain
relations in the field at the same time that offer a relation of them. In this
sense, they have ethnographic-like qualities and may be conceptualized
as ethnographic infrastructures that invite us to envision ethnography
as an infrastructural project. Against the vision of the ethnographic
encounter as a face-to-face unmediated situation, thinking of ethnog-
raphy in infrastructural terms demands getting hold of the sociomaterial
textures of ethnographic relations (both in the field and beyond, in their
later representation).
File card
Field device: Ethnographic infrastructure.
Mode of inquiry: Ethnographic remediation.
Geographical location(s): Madrid (Spain).
Duration / time: 2015–2021 (6 years).
Ethnographic counterparts: Professionals, university graduates, urban
activists, mainly architects and urban gardeners.
Resources: Funding for the ethnographic companions.
Substantive outputs: www.ciudad-escuela.org, www.ciudad-huerto.org
Degree of difficulty: Medium.
Which is the proper media of ethnography? The question may sound a bit
vague for its meaning is not clear: it may refer to the media used for ethno-
graphic representation; the media and format of empirical records, or even the
different communicative media used in the field to relate to our counterparts.
In any case, if there is a paradigmatic media of ethnography How to per-
form field encounters this would be the plain written text: anthropologists
write when they are in the field and write again later in their homes following
established genres. Despite this shared vision, we know that anthropologists
DOI: 10.4324/9781003253709-18
How to remediate ethnography 173
have always resorted to more media than written text, although the discipline
has traditionally been reluctant to admit it (Edwards 2011). Both the represen-
tation of ethnography and the genres and formats used in the production of
field records have relied on a variegated diversity of media (photos, films,
drawings, and even poetry). Nowadays, in a hyper-mediated world, this media
diversity is integral to the ethnographic relationships that anthropologists
establish with their counterparts in the field. In this piece, I describe the design
process of a digital platform that was essential to an ethnographic inves-
tigation I carried out in Madrid with two urban guerrillas (Basurama and
Zuloark). The project started with an initial failure – since I was kicked out
of the field – but the collective design of a digital infrastructure allowed me
to get my counterparts involved in a prolonged collaboration. In this piece,
I describe how my ethnographic project was imbricated with the design pro-
cess of a digital platform, an activity that remediated the difficult situation
I confronted by changing the media of my ethnography.
I started my ethnographic project in Madrid after obtaining authorization
from my future counterparts, members of the urban guerrilla Basurama. It
was set to be an investigation of the reusing practices and urban interventions
of a collective whose artistic/urban professional practice revolved around
the topic of re-utilization of garbage (basura in Spanish, hence its name).
I started to visit their studio for a few hours during some days of the week.
An old garage located in a peripheral neighbourhood, it was a mess of
materials, tools and funny stuff – with a working arcade machine among
their flashiest items. Just a few weeks had passed, time enough to have me
visit the premises a couple of times per week, and they asked me to end my
investigation. It was shocking but, simply, they didn’t feel comfortable with
my presence. I was asked to wait until the beginning of a project they offered
me to join, but months passed, and their call never happened. We were really
interested in their work so with my colleague and fellow partner Alberto
Corsín Jiménez we decided to change the situation by proposing Basurama,
and the urban guerrilla Zuloark, join us in a funded research project1.
Basurama and Zuloark are two colectivos de arquitectura (in their
common vernacular denomination) founded at the turn of the century in
the School of Architecture in Madrid (ETSAM). During their university
time, they started to experiment with modes of collaboration and irreverent
interventions that explored the intersection of art, urbanism and architec-
ture. Pushing the limits and strictures of formal education, these collective
endeavours were the breeding ground to cultivate an architectural practice
that displaced the conventions of their profession. Instead of following the
track of an architecture focused purely on construction – especially at that
time, before the financial crisis – their professional activity was inflected
with an artistic sensibility that questioned the epistemic primacy of architec-
ture and urban planning in the design of the city. Their interest in the urban
space led them to engage in all kinds of material interventions in the public
space through auto-construction practices and multiple collaborations with
174 Adolfo Estalella
neighbours and urban residents. The influences that their practice received
were diverse, but among them, it was central the influx of free culture and
open-source movement – this was a distinctive trait of some of the urban
contexts I had been engaged in during previous investigations. It was vis-
ible in the pedagogical inflection of their activities and the diverse arch-
ival and documentation projects aimed at liberating their designs, methods,
and knowledge. An endeavour that led them very often to experiment with
formats, languages and diverse aesthetics: creating archives, exploring
different visual aesthetics for designs, and testing pedagogical formats for
sharing their knowledge.
The initial proposal made to Basurama and Zuloark was vague enough
to offer ample room for improvisation: we found their work interesting,
and we just wanted to explore the possibility of doing something together,
so for more than a year we periodically met (initially weekly) for a few
hours to explore the kind of project we could carry out together. Sometimes
we gathered in Basurama’s studio and on other occasions we met in
Zuloark’s, an ample and ramshackle flat in the city centre cramped with
offices that were crowned with a ping-pong table in their meeting room.
It was 2014 and the effects of the global financial crisis of 2008 were still
present in a city burdened with an imposed austerity, but despite these dif-
ficulties, it was a vibrant moment. The wave of initiatives that came after
the 15M movement – Spanish precursor of the Occupy movement – spread
throughout the city. Our conversations fleshed out many of the urban and
political issues emerging out of the many initiatives developed by neighbours
and urban residents: auto-constructed urban spaces, community gardens,
self-managed initiatives, squatted buildings and all kinds of neighbourhood
projects. We were especially attentive and intrigued by the many infrastruc-
tural needs and achievements involved in these projects: the modest pieces of
auto-constructed furniture that refurnished the public space, the methodolo-
gies used to document those designs, the many different practices of reuse
materials involved in these activities …
The material practices of intervention characteristic of my ethnographic
partners aligned with my theoretical interests – inflected by an STS sens-
ibility – into the heterogeneous materialities of urban worlds. This practical
and conceptual orientation was made explicit in the original name we gave
to the project: 15Muebles – a pun with the acronymous 15M and the Spanish
name for furniture (mueble). Besides this interest in the material retrofitting
of public space, our attention – mine and that of my counterparts – was
caught by the many apprenticeships urban residents needed to get engaged
in these urban interventions. Those involved in community gardens learned
how to auto-construct modest infrastructures (like benches and terraces),
while others involved in the 15M movement learned how to address a pol-
itical collective in the many assemblies they held together, or got involved in
(and learned) how to use digital technologies in their coordination efforts.
In all these cases, participants devised methodologies for documenting their
activities, created large digital archives, and learned how to use digital tech-
nologies to collectively coordinate their actions. Our conversations not only
were carried out in this context of urban agitation but were drawn into it.
As time went by, our periodic meetings were intermingled with other
encounters (seminars, events, workshops), they were enriched with new
venues, and diverged into a few more initiatives we developed together.
Somehow, my ethnography about architects turned into an ethnography with
architects since they became formal research members and epistemic part-
ners in our shared inquiry into the efforts of urban residents to make the city
inhabitable again. This change involved for me a process in which I gauged
the limits of previous learning and experimented with my ethnographic
practice, shifting from what I had conceived – and previously practiced – as
a form of participant observation to an ethnographic modality in which
I was engaged in an experimental collaboration with my epistemic part-
ners, as I have argued elsewhere (Sánchez Criado and Estalella 2018). The
prolonged relationship with Basurama and Zuloark devised the conditions
to think together about what was happening in the city, a situation that let
us engage in an activity of joint problem-making, and those that I had ini-
tially considered informants turned into epistemic partners.
Our conversations were coming to an end when an opportunity opened: we
received funding from the Reina Sofia Museum, and we figured out a pro-
posal that materialized our long conversations. Out of this came Ciudad
Escuela (The City as a School),2 a project of urban pedagogy that formalized
our interest in the learnings involved in auto-construction practices of self-
managed autonomous spaces. The project translated into a formal pedagogic
programme our diverse interests at the same time that it sought to open the
sources of urban learnings – such was the description we coined at the time.
An art-cum-research project, Ciudad Escuela was devised to both inquire
and instigate the inventive practices that proliferated throughout the city at
that time. We designed a series of workshops and seminars that happened in
different autonomous spaces and addressed topics like open designs, digital
autonomy, distributed documentation, data and maps, resources, sustain-
ability … These encounters allowed us, on the one hand, to animate the
liberation of the many learnings taking place in autonomous self-managed
spaces, and on the other hand, they offered a platform to inquire in the
many initiatives we visited. I followed the trail of Ciudad Escuela to the
different locations where the project activities were carried out, in this pro-
cess, Ciudad Escuela prolonged in time and expanded through the city my
previous ethnographic projects.
The digital platform was a cornerstone in the overall configuration
of the project; indeed it served as a proxy for the whole endeavour. We
counted for this with the skills of two architects turned over the years into
hackers and digital provocateurs, Alfonso Sánchez Uzábal and Domenico
Di Siena. Far from a mere publicity website, this digital infrastructure ful-
filled three functions: it made public its pedagogical programme, served as
a documentary archive for learnings, and certified the apprenticeships of
participants. The certification mechanism used Mozilla Foundation open-
source badge technology, a system designed to verify skills and learnings
achieved by those earning a badge. The documentation that participants
produced, and Ciudad Escuela archived, had a twofold goal: it allowed to
certify participants’ skills – since this documentation was attached to each
personal badge – and at the same time it offered resources for others to
learn. A beautifully drawn map of a community garden serves as proof of
learnings associated with the topic of designing space, and a graphic of a
piece of furniture proves the participation in an open infrastructure work-
shop. This certification mechanism materialized our profound shared con-
viction – and theoretical affinities to STS scholars – that sound knowledge
is not produced just by traditional experts (Callon and Rabeharisoa 2003).
Besides, this documentation and archival activity responds to the drive to
liberate and open the sources of the knowledge produced in the project. In
this sense, Ciudad Escuela was built in its entirety as an open-source infra-
structure: not only was the source code of its software open but also all of its
contents were published under a free license that authorized any kind of use
and modification. I would like to pause for a moment to consider the role of
Ciudad Escuela digital infrastructure in my ethnographic endeavour. I will
draw on the recent anthropological literature that has shown us to appre-
ciate that beyond their material form, infrastructures are singular objects
that inscribe particular rationalities, desires and aspirations.
Anthropology has long envisioned the ethnographic encounter as an unme-
diated situation constructed in intimate and close face-to-face encounters.
This is certainly true of many ethnographies, but it may not be considered
a faithful description for many projects anymore. We are well aware that
ethnographies in the contemporary are deeply engaged with diverse techno-
logical mediations because anthropologists use all kinds of digital media to
get in touch and sustain relationships with their ethnographic counterparts.
Email, phone messages and video conferences are part of the routine tech-
nologies we use to relate to our counterparts. My experience evinces this
increasing digital mediation in the field, but beyond this truism, Ciudad
Escuela infrastructure represents a distinct kind of engagement with digital
media, a differential quality that has a number of dimensions that I would
like to unpack. First, the infrastructure I have described is not a ready-to-
use technology but a digital platform designed at the centre of the ethno-
graphic project; it was in this process that my ethnographic relations were
built and sustained. Designing Ciudad Escuela infrastructure thus devised a
situation that allowed me to relate to my ethnographic counterparts, those
that had previously kicked me out. I would intimate that this digital infra-
structure thus remediated this complicated ethnographic situation by chan-
ging the media of my ethnography. It was not just an infrastructure for the
pedagogic activities of Ciudad Escuela, but an infrastructure for my own
ethnographic endeavour. Under these circumstances, my field activity and
Figure 16.1 Participants in an auto-construction workshop organized by Ciudad

Huerto and held in the urban community garden of Adelfas (Madrid).
Image by Adolfo Estalella.
the infrastructure became intimately imbricated, resourcing each other, as

I discuss below.
Ciudad Escuela could be aptly described as another urban infrastructure
of the many that my partners auto-constructed during those years, some
of them shared with Ciudad Escuela a mixed condition since their digital
and urban qualities resourced each other – that was the case, for instance,
of the inspiring archive Inteligencias Colectivas3 developed by Zuloark
and other colleagues over the years. Our imagination rapidly runs to large
technological systems when thinking about infrastructures (dams, roads, or
power systems come to us), however, when invoking the concept of infra-
structure, I have in mind Casper Bruun Jensen and Brit Ross Winthereik’s
conception of infrastructures as ‘platform[s] for action that are simultan-
eously imaginative and practical, simultaneously conceptual and technical’
(Jensen and Winthereik 2013, xv). In this sense, Ciudad Escuela digital
infrastructure does not merely refer to its website. Instead, I am thinking in
the situated expression that Ciudad Escuela takes in each event and inter-
vention that the project carries out. The infrastructure may thus be under-
stood as the relational world that unfolds as the project ambulates through
the city.
A second reflection touches upon the semiotic qualities of Ciudad Escuela
infrastructure. While our imagination tends to pay attention to the pre-
eminent materiality of infrastructures, Brian Larkin (2013) highlights the
relevance of their poetic dimension and even their semiotic qualities for
they are always evocative objects inviting imagination and offering a lan-
guage to be learned. Certainly, the material design, conceptual proposal,
and pedagogic aspiration of Ciudad Escuela speak of the urban contexts
it was set to intervene in. However, it is the pedagogical programme that
largely encapsulates the semiotic qualities and conceptual vision of Ciudad
Escuela. It is composed of what we called itineraries, conceptual vectors
aimed at understanding the emergent climate of the city, as their names
evince: interfaces, codes and languages, beta urbanism, etc. One of the last
meetings we had to close this programme and its contents took place in a
bar in Lavapiés, the centric neighbourhood of my previous ethnographic
project. Cramped around a small table in the back we drafted the final
design of six pedagogic itineraries. Each itinerary was composed of specific
topics (badges) like open designs, cities in beta, open pedagogies, sustain-
ability, resources and urban archives, among others.
The itineraries were a journey through learnings, but they were a lit-
eral displacement throughout the city too, honouring the ambulatory meth-
odology of the project. More importantly, though, the composition of the
pedagogic programme put together and aligned our multiple sensibilities.
On the one hand, it offered a faithful expression of the urban sensibility and
distinctive intervention practices of my ethnographic partners – this was vis-
ible in badges like open design, sustainability practices, and recycling activ-
ities. On the other hand – and this is especially relevant for this piece – it
inscribed the empirical findings and conceptual efforts of my ethnographic
endeavour at the time. This was visible in itineraries like cities in beta or
open infrastructures, and some of the badges like urban archives, these were
ethnographic insights and conceptual elaborations that came out of the
ethnographic situation.
I have always seen in this infrastructural composition the ethnographic-
like qualities that I would have expected in any written monograph. Not
just a material platform for action, Ciudad Escuela infrastructure thus
offers conceptual expression of the ethnographic relations out of which
it emerged. Certainly, these are not the same semiotic qualities we would
expect from a textual representation, but nonetheless they offer a faithful
relation of the empirical encounter. The legal licenses, the archival activity,
the open-source code, the conceptual pedagogical programme … Each of
these elements offers relevant insights into the complex urban entangle-
ments Ciudad Escuela grows out and relates to. Anthropology has for too
long assumed that writing is the paradigmatic (or even exclusive) repre-
sentational media for anthropological knowledge. Clifford Geertz’s (1973)
dictum decades ago is still alive in our visions of ethnographic activity: the
fundamental practice of anthropologists is writing; they write in the field
and they write again when they have left it. However, we know very well
that plain text is no longer a sufficient media for ethnographic relations: nei-
ther for the relations in the field – those relationships we establish with our
ethnographic counterparts – nor for those other relations produced out of
the field – those narrations of the field taking the form of a monograph.
Recent invocations for multimodal anthropology evince the multisensorial,
performative and inventive qualities of many ethnographies of the con-
temporary (Dattatreyan and Marrero-Guillamón 2019). In contrast to this
fixation with text, I see in my engagement in Ciudad Escuela an index of
the diverse sociomaterial textures and heterogeneous media through which
ethnographic relations are built today – both in the field and out of the
field. In my case, it is a site-specific infrastructure with ethnographic-like
qualities that represents the ethnographic relations while contributing to
sustaining them.
The recent anthropological interest in infrastructures turns over ethnog-
raphy itself in a recent reflection by Marilyn Strathern (2018) foregrounding
the conditions under which anthropological inquiries are carried forward.
Strathern calls for attention to infrastructures because it affords insights into
the changing circumstances of ethnographic work. It would be intriguing
to consider the relevance of Bronislaw Malinowski’s tent in his innova-
tive fieldwork practice on Trobriand Island (Stocking 1983); perhaps the
modest technology set in the middle of Omarakana village is, though, no
more than the visible epitome of a whole practical infrastructure of support
that the anthropologist used in his innovative fieldwork (Strathern 2018).
Besides this practical infrastructure, Strathern highlights the relevance of
ideational or conceptual infrastructures that subtend in any ethnographic
project: theories that support the ethnographic endeavour. These (practical
and conceptual) ‘infrastructures of ethnography’, as Strathern calls them,
are outsides to ethnography. They may become of interest for the ethno-
graphic inquiry when specific practical support or theoretical frameworks
are problematized, in this case, the infrastructures of ethnography become
objects of inquiry and turn into ‘infrastructures in ethnography’. The trans-
formation of the infrastructures of ethnography, she argues, bespeaks of
changes in ethnographic enquiries in the contemporary.
Ciudad Escuela is not an infrastructure of ethnography – on the out-
side – and certainly, it is not a mere object of inquiry – an infrastructure
in ethnography – but something different. I would like to call it an ethno-
graphic infrastructure: it is the media through which I build relations with
my counterparts in the field and the media that (somehow) accounts for
my ethnographic relations too. Ciudad Escuela is an infrastructure with
ethnographic-like qualities that sustains my relations in the field at the
same time that it offers a relation of them. It speaks of the centrality of
digital media in diverse ethnographic projects in the contemporary (Collins,
Durington, and Gill 2017) that are carried out by designing infrastructures
as an integral activity of their ethnographic endeavours.4 In these situations,
infrastructures are not mere accessories to the inquiries but sociomaterial
devices for the remediation of ethnography. I use the concept of remediation
in the two senses suggested by Paul Rabinow (2011): remediation refers
to putting a remedy to a complex ethnographic situation, but remediation
signals a transformation in media too. Neither an outside of ethnography
nor an object of investigation, this kind of infrastructure shows how the
ethnographic encounter is mediated by site-specific material designs that
invite us to envision ethnography as an infrastructural endeavour.
How to
Beyond the traditional fixation with text – as the paradigmatic form of
representation in the field and out of the field – anthropologists may resort –
and have always used – other kinds of media and formats for their ethno-
graphic relations.
The incorporation of standard digital technologies is a common trait in
many ethnographies in the contemporary. Besides this practice, on certain
occasions, the design of a digital infrastructure may be a way to carry for-
ward an ethnographic project. On these occasions, ethnography may be
conceived as an infrastructural project.
Designing a digital infrastructure with our counterparts may dispose of
the conditions for relating to them. In these cases, the infrastructure is not
an accessory or mere support but the relational world out of which ethno-
graphic relations can be established and sustained.
The anthropologist is not a mere observer in this process but an active
participant in the design process and later infrastructural activity. More than
an observational activity, it may be described as a situation of experimental
contours.
An ethnographic infrastructure is not just a material network but a
sociotechnical entanglement of people, techniques, spaces and materialities.
Devising it takes time, requires funding, and demands technical abilities: it
cannot be built on voluntary efforts, it needs resources.
Devising the infrastructure entails inscribing multiple logics, values
and goals. Frictions and tensions may appear, and this is not a problem
but a valuable insight. It might even happen that the design process is not
successful, which is not necessarily a failure since it may indeed be a fertile
ethnographic situation.
Notes
1 The project I describe here was part of a long ethnographic investigation
I carried out with my colleague Alberto Corsín Jiménez in Madrid between 2012
and 2016. I use the first person purely with a narrative intention, but to a great
extent, the activities and decisions I describe were not my exclusive responsi-
bility but were the result of a sustained collaboration with my partner Corsín
Jiménez.
2 See https://ciudad-escuela.org/ and its spin-off Ciudad Huerto (The City as a
Urban Community Garden): https://ciudad-huerto.org/
3 https://inteligenciascolectivas.org/es/inicio/
4 There are other ethnographic projects in this book that turn a site-specific digital
platform into an infrastructure for their ethnographic endeavour, this is the case
of The Asthma Files and EthnoData. The first, developed by Kim Fortun, Mike
Fortun and many other collaborators, have designed a digital infrastructure for
collaborative hermeneutics that allows to ‘cultivate and sustain continual multipli-
cation of perspective on various complex problems’ (Fortun et al. n/d: 8). Another
paradigmatic case would be EthnoData, a collaborative digital platform created
by Jorge Núñez and Maka Suárez that explores the possibility of hybrid analysis
between large data sets and ethnographic stories.
Sources
Callon, M., and V. Rabeharisoa. 2003. ‘Research “in the Wild” and the Shaping of
New Social Identities.’ Technology in Society 25: 193–204.
Collins, Samuel Gerald, Matthew Durington, and Harjant Gill. 2017.
‘Multimodality: An Invitation.’ American Anthropologist 119 (1): 1–5. https://
doi.org/10.1111/aman.12826.
Dattatreyan, E. Gabriel, and Isaac Marrero-Guillamón. 2019. ‘Introduction:
Multimodal Anthropology and the Politics of Invention.’ American Anthropologist
121 (1): 220–28.
Edwards, Elizabeth. 2011. ‘Tracing Photography.’ Made to Be Seen: Perspectives on
the History of Visual Anthropology, 159–89.
Geertz, C. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.
Jensen, Casper Bruun, and Brit Ross Winthereik. 2013. Monitoring Movements in
Development Aid: Recursive Partnerships and Infrastructures. MIT Press.
Larkin, Brian. 2013. ‘The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure.’ Annual Review of
Anthropology 42: 327–43.
Rabinow, Paul. 2011. The Accompaniment. Assembling the Contemporary. Chicago
and London: The University of Chicago Press.
Sánchez Criado, Tomás, and Adolfo Estalella. 2018. ‘Introduction. Experimental
Collaborations.’ In Experimental Collaborations. Ethnography through
Fieldwork Devices, edited by Adolfo Estalella and Tomás Sánchez Criado, 1–30.
New York, Oxford: Berghahn.
Stocking, G. 1983. ‘The Ethnographer’s Magic: Fieldwork in Bristish Anthropology
from Tylor to Malinowski.’ In Observers Observed. Essays on Ethnographic
Fieldwork, edited by G. Stocking, 70–120. Madison: The University of Wisconsin.
Strathern, Marilyn. 2018. ‘Infrastructures in and of Ethnography.’ Anuac 7 (2): 49–
69. https://doi.org/10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3519
17 How to disrupt our field habits
with sensory probes
Anna Harris1
Sensory probes are devices designed to deliberately disrupt ethnographers’

habits and cultivate new ways of noticing in the field. They bear witness to
the fact that ethnographers often do fieldwork out of habit, using improvised
practices developed over time and implicitly from others. Sensory probes
help us to not take too much for granted in fieldwork, to develop the intri-
cate muscles of our sideways glances and avoid the traps of complacency.
It is an ethnographic device that is useful not only for the individual field-
worker but can also help align the sensibility of a team of ethnographers
in a common project. Collaborative ethnographic projects are becoming
increasingly common and demand creative approaches to teamwork. The
sensory probe is a seemingly simple yet potentially powerful device for
opening up a new kind of exchange and insight in team projects. Ultimately
the sensory probe acts as a disruptive prompt for discontinuity and elicits a
form of education, through both the crafting and following of instruction,
for sensing ethnographers.
File card
Field device: Sensory probes.
Mode of inquiry: Cultivated noticing of, through disruption, sensory
habits and details of fieldwork.
Ideal for: Team and collaborative ethnographic projects.
Based on the following experiments:
Geographical locations: Maastricht, the Netherlands (50.8514° N,
5.6910° E), Budapest, Hungary (47.4979° N, 19.0402° E) and Tamale,
Ghana (9.4034° N, 0.8424° W).
Duration: September 2017- August 2019.
Collaborators and co-probers: Rachel Vaden Allison, Andrea Wojcik,
John Nott and participants of the Dutch STS Graduate School (WTMC,
year 2018).
Resources: Fieldwork funded by the European Research Council (ERC),
creative inspiration from artists and others (see Sources), IKEA
assemblage experience, digital devices, recorders, pens, glue sticks,
scissors, paper.
Website: Making Clinical Sense, www.makingclinicalsense.com
Degree of difficulty: Medium to hard.
Cross-categories: Collaboration, comparison, instructions, making, senses.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003253709-19
How to disrupt our field habits with sensory probes 183
An unexpected disruption
My fieldsites are medical schools, the current one only a bicycle ride away
from the Arts faculty where I work in Maastricht, the Netherlands. Here
I study aspects of medical practice such as how students learn the sensory
skills of diagnosis. One particular morning I was sitting at the desk in the
office I had been allocated during fieldwork, surrounded by photocopied
pieces of paper, glue sticks and scissors. These were not my usual field-
work supplies. Normally I needed little more in my shoulder bag than my
notepad (stenographer’s), two gel roller pens, some tissues, a hard candy,
my audio recorder, my smartphone, a few coins for the vending machine
and my security pass. Yet here I was as if practically in a craft class. What is
more, I was looking into something I rarely investigated: the archives of my
site. The photocopies were of fragile and yellowed newspaper clippings that
documented my field site’s history. One of my interlocutors and officemates
had carefully filed them away in a manila envelope and kept them in her
filing cabinet until my probing enquiries.
Usually, I am firmly located in the present when doing fieldwork. In this
particular team ethnographic project, I was collaborating with historians,
but my own particular attention was on the practices, routines and tasks
that I found myself part of in my daily fieldwork encounters. Yet here I was
looking at black-and-white images of medical students learning how to
train their bodies to do medical techniques from the 60s, the 70s and the
80s, with mannequins, skeletons and video lessons. As our group project
examines the materiality of medical learning encounters, I had been focusing
on interactions with the objects and tools that were in this particular edu-
cational environment during live lessons for example. The prompt to look
at these interactions differently than I was used to doing had come from a
sensory probe, delivered into our team’s shared drive a few days earlier. It
had been inspired by Harrel Fletcher and Miranda July’s (2007) Learning to
Love you More, an artistic project where the public were given a standard
set of assignments to complete, such as Assignment 28 – ‘Edit a photo
album page’. Our own version of this was to ‘find a photograph of your
field site from “the past”, photocopy it and cut out elements of it so as to
edit/collage it into a new image’, which all members of our team that week
were instructed to complete.
Soon my crafting was attracting attention from my officemates, then
from passers by. Someone stopped with a cup of coffee in their hands to
remark on the image that I had just cut out. After they reminisced about
using the teaching models in the picture, they wondered why I was making
these collages. Another medical teacher stopped to listen. I told them that
I was doing an activity with other members of my research team. We were
all making collages of archival material that week. They asked where these
colleagues were doing their fieldwork. I put the scissors down and picked up
184 Anna Harris
my own cup of coffee. We started talking about medical schools in different
places, about the kinds of materials and techniques which are used to teach
students. Someone retrieved a model from their office to show me a par-
ticular feature of it, and another leafed through my photocopied materials
and pointed out some interesting images I had overlooked. The morning
went by and my notepad lay dormant in my shoulder bag, waiting for
another time.
This story, though on the surface a simple encounter and an unremarkable
moment that happens often during fieldwork, of small talk and showing, of
coffee and sharing, was for me filled with unexpected disruptions to my field-
work habits that I would not have experienced if not for that week’s sensory
probe. Here I think of sensory probes as field devices that open up new possi-
bilities for anthropological inquiry, through ethnographic experimentation.
My understanding of probes builds on previous uses of probes in anthro-
pology, such as material and walking probes (De Leon and Cohen 2005) and
auditory probes (Vokes 2007), both of which are used as ways to tap into pre-
viously hard-to-articulate experiences. It also draws on disruptions outlined
in Harold Garfinkel’s breaching experiments in sociology (Rafalovich 2006)
and the cultural probes used by design ethnographers. Finally, it comes
out of my previous work on sensory instruction (Harris 2020) as a way of
reorientating the senses through instruction, a way of knowing inspired by
others’ transformational and embodied ‘experiments in becoming’ (Latham
and Wagner 2020, 105) and my own experiments in making instructions
(e.g. a video for how to make a cyanometer, a knitting pattern for a uterus
and a smartphone cover) (see Harris 2020).
The sensory probe device I outline here was developed in the context of
a team ethnography. Three ethnographers (me, Andrea Wojcik and Rachel
Vaden Allison) and a historian (John Nott) undertook research during an
overlapping period of time (the ethnographers synchronously September
2017 – May 2018, the historian followed, January 2018 – August 2019) for
the Making Clinical Sense project. As stated above, this study focused on
the role of technologies in how medical students learn sensory skills of diag-
nosis, such as listening to hearts, palpating lumps and orientating them-
selves within the body at an anatomical scale. We were located in three
different medical schools – I was in a place called a Skills Laboratory, in
Maastricht, in the Netherlands, which was dedicated to learning practical
clinical skills; Rachel did her fieldwork in the anatomy department of a med-
ical school in Budapest, Hungary; and Andrea did her fieldwork in another
Skills Laboratory in Tamale, in Northern Ghana. John travelled across the
three sites.
The sensory probe field device helped our team to work together across
time and place. It offered our collaboration a different way of reorien-
tating our sensory knowledge as ethnographers through disrupting what
we were observing and learning about in the field. It was a form of sensory
education, both in the writing and in the following of the instructions. In
the following section, I explore our team instructions and probes in more
detail.
Making instructions
Before starting fieldwork the three ethnographers embarked on a series of
methodological experiments in kitchens in Maastricht to test our compara-
tive approach. We have written about these sensory methods experiments
elsewhere (Harris et al. 2020), showing how such a ‘proof of concept’ meth-
odological approach can reveal assumptions and habitual research practices
in a group, helpful before starting out on team fieldwork. This study then led
to another series of experiments which I refer to here as the sensory probes.
We realized, before heading into the medical schools, that we wanted to
share our materials in a way that would complement the immersive experi-
ence of fieldwork rather than impose upon it. We decided to share sensory
snippets of data, drawing inspiration from artists’ work (e.g. Fletcher and
July 2007), and from sensory ethnographers’ lessons such as Dara Culhane’s
sensing exercises (Culhane 2016). Our own snippets would be generated
through weekly assignments designed to be able to be incorporated into
our ‘regular’ fieldwork. The idea was that they would offer accessible bite-
sized windows into each other’s fieldwork to help us unravel some of the
specificities of our field sites, through comparison in real time.
We decided to write the first set of probes on the fly. Before leaving for
fieldwork, we created a shared folder and a word document with blank
spaces each week for us to fill in the activities. Our homework, each
week, was to take turns writing instructions for the other, then upload our
outcomes, whether sound recordings, drawings or videos, to a shared folder.
Our rules were simple:
1) We would take turns writing the activity by midday Thursday for

everyone to do the following week.
2) The activities should involve multimedia in a feasible way (we all had
the same tools: smartphones for taking photos and videos, digital
drawing notebooks for making sketches, audio recorders for recording
interviews).
3) The activities must be able to be performed in around 15 minutes.
4) The activities must explore the relationship between sensing and
technologies.
5) Instructions needed to have clear boundaries and specifics where
possible.
6) We needed to upload our results by the end of that week.
And so, we gave ourselves over to the instructions of others. In total, we

created and attempted 25 sensory probes. The first round had a fairly open
format and the topics of the instructions varied greatly. We did not always
186 Anna Harris
adhere to our own rules but the more specific the instructions were, we
realized the easier it was to find creative synergies and points of intersection,
to explore the differences and similarities across our sites. We had telephone,
video and face-to-face meetings throughout this period of time, with these
discussions influencing how we noticed in our own field sites in subsequent
fieldwork. Halfway through our fieldwork, back in Maastricht, we looked
at our list of activities and reassessed what we wanted to investigate in our
remaining fieldwork. In our second round of probes, we decided to think
of themes and topics we wanted to explore and assigned each week one
of these topics, being: materiality, sensoriality, history, recording equipment
and ‘getting outside of yourself’.
Whatever the topic of our probes, the instructions expanded our imagina-
tive spaces and reorientated our ways of noticing, whether in how to
describe touch through new words, through creating disruptions in field-
work encounters through collage making, through rethinking our own
materials from making, or from outside, from other points of view. I explore
this sensory reorientation further below.
Sensory reorientation
In the Making Clinical Sense project, instructions were both an object of
enquiry (in the medical school) and a methodological approach (the probes).
Instructions also simultaneously give form to this written piece, are explored
as a way of learning in the field, of knowing our fields, and as the guidebook
for instructions to play further with (see more in the guide for researchers
at the end). Perhaps this entry may prompt you, the reader, in the same way.
In this final section I explore sensory probes further as a way to educate the
sensing and noticing of fieldworkers.
Ethnography is always a form of disruption; intense attention to reflex-
ivity and positionality has long disregarded claims of capturing an isolatable
real in fieldnotes. However, that said, how we do fieldwork often comes with
routines and norms, standard materials and habits that can be hard in them-
selves to disrupt. In their own methodological enquiry geographers Alan
Latham and Lauren Wagner highlight that John Dewey’s understanding
of habit, which informed theories of habitus, was led by a curiosity about
techniques that might explicitly refashion the habitual ways we are embodied
in the world (Latham and Wagner 2020). While ever more attention is paid
now to disrupting what were long-entrenched traditional conventions of
ethnographic research, others have looked helpfully at how to productively
explore existing cracks through our awkward collaborations (Yates-Doerr
2019) for example, that upturn taken-for-granted assumptions.
Sensory probes are a particular form of habitual disruption. They work by
way of education through instruction, offering a prompt for ethnographers
to try something new, suggested in the team situation by collaborators.
While fieldwork is always an act of invention, sometimes field workers need
a prompt, a probe, to get them out of their own particular routines of impro-
visation and invention. In our weekly activities in Making Clinical Sense, we
tried different forms of notation – drawing, musical notation, dance nota-
tion. We performed re-enactments, a method that is being used increasingly
in the history of art and science (Dupré et al. 2020) and which has so far
had a limited presence in ethnographic research. We stood on tables, when
allowed, to get a different view, and experimented with the idea of developing
a digital-sensory elicitation kit that we could use in our interviews.
Our probes helped our research team to collaborate while doing simultan-
eous fieldwork, and in the case of the historian, connected fieldwork, to find
points of comparison and new avenues to explore. We played with the genre
of instruction writing in order to inform our project on how instructions
are used in medical education, but this technique has wider relevance. In
discussion with a team of media archaeologists, for example, they became
interested in how the sensory probes may allow them to explore aspects
of media technologies they had not previously considered. PhD students
have experimented with our sensory probes in graduate school seminars.
Elsewhere my colleagues Andrea Wojcik, Rachel Vaden Allison and I have
written about these activities in the context of an edited book on collab-
orative fieldnotes (Wojcik et al. 2020), where we explored the relationship
between bumbling and accountability in writing fieldnotes simultaneously.
We suggested that the rise of team ethnography also challenges ethnographic
practices built around the ideal of a ‘lone ranger’ in the field, and demands
creative, research practices that facilitate new forms of collaboration. We
showed, following anthropologist Janelle Taylor (2014), the value of being
able to ‘bumble’ using devices such as this – allowing ourselves to be flexible
and responsive to our experiences in the field.
Thus, the sensory probes aim not only to facilitate comparisons and gen-
erate data but also to disrupt, in the most productive way, our routines
of fieldwork. They help, similar to Calhune’s exercises (Culhane, 2016),
to educate closer attention to our own and others' sensory practices and
knowledge, and reflect on the specificities of this in our field. They provoke,
through disruption, purposeful, closer attention to ‘observing assumptions’,
working as part of the fieldworkers’ apparatus to reconfigure and help attune
researchers to what may be ‘intelligibly observable’ (Latham and Wagner
2020, 94). In making probes in our team we made a kind of self-fashioned
ethnographic manual, on the fly, yet one which seriously considered our
goals and circumstances, for as Latham and Wagner (2020) point out, such
disruptions need to be designed with care.
How might similar sensory probes be crafted and used in other ethno-
graphic projects, in ways which attend, carefully, to the needs and curi-
osities of the researchers and teachers? How might others learn from this
project or draw inspiration from our endeavours? What kind of ethnog-
raphy may happen through probes? I have suggested in this device descrip-
tion that sensory probes offer a means by which to disrupt ethnographic
188 Anna Harris
habits, through instruction. Our team’s experiments with sensory probes
show how productive they are for group projects particularly. The kind of
project that sensory probes make possible is a collaborative ethnography,
where ethnographers align or resonate with each other, through making and
experiencing shared disruptions and instructions. This also makes ethnog-
raphy an instructive space, the device merely a catalyst and highlighter of
the learning and teaching that makes up all of our encounters in the field.
How to
General comments
• Sensory probes are devices designed to deliberately disrupt ethnographers’
habits and cultivate new ways of noticing in the field.
• Sensory probes are ideal particularly for collaborative/team projects.
• Sensory probes aim not only to facilitate comparisons and generate
data but also to disrupt, in the most productive way, our routines of
fieldwork.
• Be as specific as possible when designing probes, the more concrete the
activity the better.
• Probes must be feasible for members of the research team to do within
the environment they find themselves in.
• Probes must not take too long to do.
Instructions
• The research team decides on who will take part in the probe activity
and whether they want the topics of the probes to be open or focused
on particular themes or topics in their project.
• Probes are then created by each member of the team. This can be done
all at once, before fieldwork starts, or on a week-by-week basis as field-
work progresses.
• Share the results of the probes on a shared drive or online folder.
• Meet regularly to discuss insights from the probe activity, during field-
work and afterwards.
• Redesign probes if you wish, to focus on more specific themes.
Appendices
This device can also be used in the classroom by following these instructions:
• Each group takes a blank index card (or an online document) and writes
out some keywords or phrases concerning their particular ethnographic
topic, focusing on the issues that they would like to explore with this
probe activity.
• Share the index cards (or online document) with another group and
take time to read the topics.
• Each group now takes another blank index card (or a new page of an
online document) and writes a ‘probe’ that helps the other group inter-
rogate one or more aspects of their topical interests. If this is too diffi-
cult, then another stimulating probe activity can be crafted.
• Swap probes with the other group.
• Each person in the group now completes the probe individually or
in pairs.
• Return to the group and compare results. The group discusses together
what they find interesting and insightful in comparing their findings,
tacking their postcards (topic list, probe description and any relevant
findings) to a large sheet of paper/online document and drawing analyt-
ical threads where relevant.
• Reconvene as a larger group and discuss insights, questions, reflections
on the activity.
Possible probes ideas

• Find something that is broken in the field and see if you can offer to
repair it.
• Insert a creative poster or banner into your field site somewhere that
shares some of your insights so far.
• Design a lesson plan for one of your interlocuters to follow or ask them
to design one for you.
• Reread your favourite ethnographic textbook or text from the first year
you trained in ethnography.
• Make a paper replica of some objects or furniture in your field site.
• Find a way to document colour and texture in your field site.
• Take a photo of a set-up in your fieldsite.
• Conduct a body mapping exercise.
• Make something that is used in your field site.
• Use time-lapse/slow-motion video recordings on a phone to capture
a scene.
• Take a 360-degree photo.
• Circulate a picture to the others from your fieldsite. Everyone then tries
to recreate the scenes received in their own field sites.
Acknowledgements
In preparing this text I am indebted to the collaboration with Andrea Wojcik
and Rachel Vaden Allison and also to John Nott, the historian on our project
who contributed to the experiments in the final stages. My thanks to Andrea
for feedback on an earlier draft and also to the rest of the Making Clinical
Sense team, especially Candida and Carla who have helped in organizing
190 Anna Harris
Figure 17.1 Results of a probe activity (22a, 5 October 2018): Make a collage from
field site images.
our probes administratively and with references, as well as Sally Wyatt and
Harro van Lente. The probes were shared in the local Ethnography Group
and with members of the Dutch Graduate School WTMC. Kristen Haring
inspired us to pursue these methods. Finally, all of the researchers on this
project are incredibly grateful to all in our field sites who share time and
space with us and patiently taught us. This project has received funding
from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon
2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 678390) for
which I am grateful, and ethical approval from Maastricht University’s
Ethical Review Committee Inner City Faculties.
Note
1 Based on experiments conducted with Rachel Vaden Allison, John Nott and
Andrea Wojcik.
Sources
Culhane, D. 2016. ‘Sensing.’ In A Different Kind of Ethnography: Imaginative
Practices and Creative Methodologies, edited by D. Elliott and D. Culhane, 45–
67. University of Toronto Press.
De Leon, J., and Cohen, J. 2005. ‘Object and Walking Probes in Ethnographic
Interviewing.’ Field Methods, 17(2): 200–204.
Dupré, S., Harris, A., Kursell, J., Lulof, P., and Stols-Witlox, M., eds. 2020.
Reconstruction, Replication and Re-enactment in the Humanities and Social
Sciences. Amsterdam University Press.
Fletcher, H., and July, M. 2007. Learning to Love You More. Prestel.
Harris, A. 2020. A Sensory Education. Routledge.
Harris, A., Wojcik, A., & Allison, R. V. 2020. ‘How to Make an Omelette: A Sensory
Experiment in Team Ethnography.’ Qualitative Research 20 (5): 632–648.
Latham, A., and Wagner, L. B. 2020. ‘Experiments in Becoming: Corporeality,
Attunement and Doing Research.’ Cultural Geographies 28 (1): 91–108.
Making Clinical Sense – see more details of our own fieldwork activities here: www.
makingclinicalsense.com/bumbling-through-fieldwork-activities
Rafalovich, A. 2006. ‘Making Sociology Relevant: The Assignment and Application
of Breaching Experiments.’ Teaching Sociology 34 (2): 156–163.
Taylor, J. S. 2014. ‘The Demise of the Bumbler and the Crock: From Experience to
Accountability in Medical Education and Ethnography.’ American Anthropologist
116 (3): 523–534.
Vokes, R. 2007. ‘(Re)Constructing the Field Through Sound: Actor-networks,
Ethnographic Representation and “Radio Elicitation” in South-western Uganda.’
In Creativity and Cultural Improvisation, edited by E. Hallam and T. Ingold, 285–
303. Berg.
Wojcik, A., Allison, R. V., and Harris, A. 2020. ‘Bumbling along together: Producing
collaborative fieldnotes.’ In What about Fieldnotes? Approaches, Practices, and
Ethical Considerations in Educational Research and Teaching, edited by C.
Burkholder and J. Thompson, 201–216. Routledge.
Yates-Doerr, E. 2019. ‘Whose Global, Which Health? Unsettling Collaboration with
Careful Equivocation.’ American Anthropologist 121 (2): 297–310.
18 How to stitch ethnography
Tania Pérez-Bustos
Stitching ethnography is engendered, first as an empirical need to

understand the continuity between textile materialities and bodies that
embroider, and second as a methodological device with which to study
collectively and to study how our bodies feel and connect. As an initial
discovery, learning how to stitch shows the ethnographer how her body
knows and listens differently when immersed in textile-making. This
learning process creates an intimate atmosphere in which the ethnog-
rapher relates with those she studies (embroiderers and embroideries),
and is invited, then, to explore how stitching with others or inviting
others to stitch can unfold new questions with which together we stitch
what we are trying to understand ethnographically. In this process,
embroidering learning as a device transforms from an object to study
ethnographically into an artefact with which to ask new ethnographic
questions.
File card
Field device: Stitching Ethnography.
Mode of inquiry: From learning to embroidery to embroidering learnings.
Geographical location(s): Colombia (Cartago, Bogotá, Sonsón, Bojayá,
Quibdó, María la Baja, Medellín).
Duration / time: 2014 – ongoing (9 years).
Ethnographic counterparts: Companion textile materials (thread and
needles, using daily life textile cloths as surfaces for stitching makes a
difference, in case this is not possible, other cloths can work as well),
people willing to slow down, professionals from engineering or artistic
areas are always welcome.
Resources: Funding for the companion materials and for those using
them (to recognize their time), time for textile-making.
Substantive outputs: www.artesanaltecnologica.org/proyectos/
Degree of difficulty: Medium (beware: it is time-consuming, albeit
time-transforming).
How are bodies affected by listening and how can this be answered through
embroidery? These questions frame stitching as an ethnographic device,
that is, as an invitation to embroider collectively as a way of unfolding and
exploring together (people and textile materials) different questions which
have a profound intimate, reflexive and personal dimension. In what follows
I display how this device works. I set this description, initially, by looking
DOI: 10.4324/9781003253709-20
How to stitch ethnography 193
closely to research with several professionals devoting their labour days
listening to war stories in Colombia. With them, we searched to enquire,
through a series of textile explorations, how their bodies were affected by
this listening task. Before presenting the device, I must say, however, that it
does not exist in itself, that is, it cannot be understood or dimensioned out-
side the way in which it has emerged. Stitching ethnography evolves as an
empirical need to learn to embroider. It is this pedagogical approach to this
making practice the one that frames and allows the device to unfold. I will
come back to this in the second part of this entry.
The research from which I describe stitching as an ethnographic device
was called Embroidering Bodies that Listen, and it started with an open call
for workers in the transitional justice system in Colombia. This system was
born after the signing of the peace agreement between the Colombian gov-
ernment and the FARC in 2016. It seeks to guarantee the rights of victims
to truth, justice, reparation, and non-repetition. The institutions that com-
pose it have at the centre of its work the collection of victims’ testimonies
of their experiences of half a century of violence. For this, the Colombian
Transitional Justice System has implemented a process for receiving these tes-
timonies, which are then transmitted to professionals in charge of listening,
systematizing and transcribing them. The work carried out by these people
is crucial for arriving at the truth about what happened during the conflict
in Colombia. While national reparation guides the mandate of the system,
little attention has been paid to the experiences of officials whose days are
taken up by listening to the testimonies presented by victims – which include
descriptions of violence and traumatic acts.
With this framework, the call that started the research, invited professionals
of this system to apply to be part of it, sharing an initial thought of how
it was for them to work with testimonies about the internal conflict in the
country, and explaining why they thought a textile exploration could be a
useful method of inquiry. For them, this call was an opportunity to meet
others like them as a way to process how they felt, and they perceived
embroidering as an entry into this with curiosity and interest.
To think of embroidering as a mechanism to inquire about something
implied, in this case, to gauge what was needed to do a first stitch, how
this was going to take place, and why. Although these questions could
be answered more conceptually (something that in fact happened), what
I want to highlight here is the way they were answered through a series of
material invitations (Woodward 2016), some of which anticipated the act of
stitching, framing it in such a way that people felt part of the research; that
is, willing to reflect upon themselves while in the company of others (people
and materials), as well as open to materially explore their own questions, to
discover them through stitching (Pajaczkowska 2016).
Thus, before our first meeting, we sent to participants’ homes a tote bag
with a sewing kit and a cloth badge with their name handwritten in pencil
and a threaded needle attached. All these materials were handmade and put
194 Tania Pérez-Bustos
together by people from the team; our hands had taken time in the sewing
of fabrics, the winding of yarns and the threading of needles. Thus, these
materials were as much a direct invitation for people to stitch their partici-
pation in the project and do it from their homes – embroidering their name
in the place they belong, a gesture that implied an intimate recognition of
who and where they were – as they were a way to bond us through our
makings. They were not just things to work with, they were companion
materials that starred a continuity between our body makings before we
met and their body makings to come, those in potentiality (Ahmed 2010).
With these companion materials, there was also a letter addressed to
them personally in which we welcomed participants to the explorations
and suggested a question related to their work. This first letter was followed
by other material correspondences that were sent every time before our
encounters happened; each one had a new open question and the request
to bring to the meetings a surface to stitch. One time, for example, we
asked participants to bring a personal cloth that needed to be mended;
another time, it was a pillow cover or a blanket. We wanted surfaces that
came from their domestic surroundings, that were close to their bodies,
and therefore that could work as extensions of them; as to materially elicit
intimate reflections, thinking with those clothes, going through them, pier-
cing them with threads and needles as ways to inquire their own body
affectations (Muñoz Toro 2020; Pym 2018). Some of the questions that
guided the textile encounters as well as the epistolary reflections in between
them were the following: What paths have you had to walk again in your
listening to war stories? What marks has this exercise left on you? What
has broken or is about to break in this task? What swaddles and comforts
you when performing it? Each question was as much an invitation to think
about their work as a bid to reflect upon the textile materials that accom-
pany them while doing it, a job that, given its nature, was inhabiting their
daily life.
For each encounter and material exploration, we received participants
in a wide-open and bright atelier carefully organized for the meeting. We
welcomed them with some fruits and coffee; we gave them room to arrive
to drop their bags, to recognize the space. Only then we invited them to
stitch something into their personal belongings and connect that textile-
making with their own reflections about their work and how their bodies
felt about it. Only after they were welcomed in a space prepared for
them did stitching begin. Hospitality here was a way to continue caring
for the bonds that we had started to curate when sending materials and
letters to their homes before the meeting as we did. Thus, hospitality
framed embroidering. Stitching as an ethnographic device was sustained
by all these small textile gestures that were part of the preparation of the
meeting (winding, handwriting, stitching, threading) and that involved
researchers’ bodies and times, and participants felt recognized by them.
Methodologically speaking, hospitality created an atmosphere of care and
intimacy that framed the encounters in the stitching and the way they could
contribute to collectively exploring certain questions.
The first time we met, for example, participants were asked to draw,
with a threaded needle, a line below their name using a simple stitch called
backstitch. In embroidery, these stitches are used to outline shapes. To make
them, one must go back to the general direction of the embroidery, bringing
the needle through the fabric, and then back down into the same hole at the
end of the last stitch, passing over the path that the threaded needle has left
behind the fabric. They got together in small groups and looked introspect-
ively at the cloth badge with their names written in pencil, and while trying
to start the textile labour, they talked about who they were and how their
paths had brought them to this exploration (Ingold 2007).
Sometimes participants did not know how to thread a needle, how long
a thread should be cut to do the stitch, how to knot the end of the thread
to start the embroidery, or if doing so was necessary at all. So, we helped
the participants do these simple things while talking about the common
questions we had about their listening work. We got close to each other, really
close, something never imaginable in a normal ethnographic encounter. Our
hands grazed each other in that very first body exchange, eyes on the textile
materials, ears on the making instructions, and as well on what others were
sharing at a more personal level.
With each stitch, the collective is being embroidered, and this togethering
speaks back to the maker. Doing a backstitch opens for participants,
personal, intimate, and material reflections on the difficulties of listening to
tales of a conflict that seems to repeat itself one and again in a country like
Colombia. While engaging with testimonies of war, the stories take these
professionals back to territories they have already visited, they think of these
while bringing the threaded needle back from its own path, in this movement
they share their questions about what has happened to the people who live
in those areas now affected, but also about how the stories affect them per-
sonally. ‘These paths that I have walked and walk now through listening,
are my paths … these stories go through me’, one of the professionals shares
while her words come out of the stitching itself, through the fabric while
forming the reflection.
The intimacy produced in textile-making affects listening, transforming
the explorative exercise into a collective vessel. Participants felt welcomed
and cared for through the space and the explorations we have created for
them. They were grateful for the time and room allowed to meet with others
like them and to pause in the textile-making, to dwell through the stitching
on what they were feeling and to see it reflected in the other people with
whom they did the exploration, to feel that their embroidery brought them
together in that mutual reflection.
As an ethnographer prototyping participants’ experience (Marcus 2014)
and caring for their wellbeing, I was attentive to how the stitching was
generating this intimate listening atmosphere, but I was also part of the
whole performance that sustained this happening, and the hospitality that
characterized it. However, in this, I was not alone.
For this project, the company of artists was very important in the crafting
of this device. The sensitivity to the role of material beauty, in the shaping
of the atmosphere we were trying to create in the textile explorations, was
brought and curated by them. They saw the poetics embedded in how
the small textile gestures that we all made before the meeting were then
repeated during the encounters by the participants. They were touched by
those repetitions and by how they wrapped them collectively. Stitching, as
an ethnographic device, was then nurtured as much as prototyped by this
sensitivity, which was shared during the planning of the textile explorations.
It also contributed to highlighting the intimate continuity between bodies
making and materialities in the making, and how it affected knowledge pro-
duction. This is in the sense that there is a body that is stitched in the embroi-
dery, one that listens and relates differently because of stitching, something
that in turn necessarily affects the research she performs.
Although the crafting of stitching as a device was highlighted and enhanced
by this artistic sensitivity, I did not learn about the methodological possi-
bilities of embroidery only through them. This device was engendered and
unfolded initially out of my personal learnings with traditional embroiderers
and, in particular, their continuous call to grab a threaded needle to under-
stand what they were doing with it. I delve into this in the next section.
Learning to embroider
My approach to embroidery goes back to 2013 when I reached traditional
embroiderers of Cartago, Colombia, with an interest to understand how
what they carefully made with their hands could teach me something about
care as a knowledge-making practice. In this region, women of advanced
age craft a technique called calado, which is a Spanish tradition and is also
made in other parts of Latin America (Mexico and Brazil). This technique
is performed in the underlying construction of fabrics. Before any stitch
takes place, women must partially destroy the cloth, carefully removing
fibres from it to widen its grid, which is later embroidered with new threads,
usually of the same colour and thickness as the original fabric. This process
leaves in the embroidered cloth a series of complex tessellated figures. I can
give this very general description of this way with stitching because I spent
long hours living with women embroiderers at their houses for almost a
year. I saw how they crafted this technique in between performing other
domestic chores and labours of care, and I also saw the care that the craft
itself implied (Molinier 2012), the time and attention it involved, and the
intimacies and silences it created for them.
In my ethnographic work with these women artisans, I learned to
embroider when doing research, but I also learned to research embroidering.
These enmeshed-making practices occurred at the domestic level where
embroidery takes place, which means that my learnings (both about research
and about embroidery) were affected by the daily life pedagogies that
emerged in this scenario (Luke 1999). These everyday learnings contributed
to understanding the dynamics of advice and solidarity that emerged in
the act of embroidering collectively, which were characterized by shared
intimacy and mutual support. This contributed to giving account for the
ways in which one learns to be part of a group, to become part of others on
a daily basis. Therefore, learning to stitch was a way of learning to care and
relate to others, both people and companion materials, a process that took
place while learning to stitch itself.
I would sit close to them and watch what they did, and I asked questions,
but they were unable to respond, not because they did not know the answer,
but because they knew it with their hands. Acknowledging that their know-
ledge was embodied in the sense of touch was a way of recognizing that,
in order to access it, I had to touch as well (Paterson 2009; Puig de la
Bellacasa 2009). This turned my ethnographic exercise into an ethnography
of contact, and this transformed my relationship with needlework and
embroiderers. I was able to discover that there are bodily, affective, and cog-
nitive dimensions of this making that not only pass-through words and that
the perception of the knowing body when embroidering is affected by the
embroidery itself. My body needed to make the stitches to understand them,
and in that making, I drew closer to those who taught me how to make
them (Lindström and Ståhl 2016). Learning to embroider was a political-
epistemic requirement to think differently about embroidery, to think by
embroidering: hence, this learning is then constitutive of the possibility of
embroidery becoming an ethnographic device.
As embroiderers taught me how to stitch, I was discovering how embroi-
dery made me dwell on the movement of the needle in the fabric. Focused on
that slowness, I perceived differently what was being shared between us. The
materials passed from their hands to mine touching each other; our bodies
came closer when I required some explanation of what I was doing. Between
this, the time came to prepare the food, and they got up from their labour and
went to cook. It was impossible to continue embroidering while they spent
time taking care of the house, which at that time included me as well. If they
shared their time to teach me, I would share my time to help them, as well. So,
I would go with them and contribute to the preparation of food, the setting
of the table to eat, and the cleaning up of the mess left by cooking and eating.
We would share the food and then go back to embroidering. In that constant
back and forth from embroidering to other labours of care, we would talk
about them, about their personal history with embroidery, about the materials
they used, and about their life in general. They also asked questions about me,
about what I was doing there, and about why I was interested in their labour.
We got to know each other in that intimacy while learning what they were
doing with my own hands. Learning to investigate amid those daily gestures
was research that was deeply rooted in what they did and what it taught me
about what I did and could do (in terms of hospitality, care and intimacy).
There, a material, corporal, cognitive, responsible, and careful relationship
was unfolding, and I was learning to investigate with embroidery.
This passage from embroidery as a theme to embroidery as a methodo-
logical device, without abandoning its status as a subject to be studied,
changes the daily gaze of the researcher with respect to textiles, allowing her
to realize the epistemic content of this making and its way of inquiring and
of relating to that which is being inquired. It is there where the device with
which this text opens is configured: an initial search to understand the know-
ledge hosted by the craft of those who embroider, gradually allows itself to
become part of spaces for collective embroidery to experience their intimacy,
and then invite others to embroider collectively to answer questions intim-
ately together in the making of the embroidery.
Thus, embroidery as an ethnographic device is presented as a set of material
explorations where questions are answered through embroidery. Here, stitching
itself is amplified, even when talking about something not directly related to
textile-making, such as about bodies affected by the listening of war stories,
to the point that what is shared in relation to this becomes stitched. Thus, in
these textile explorations, the body-textile materials continuities are central
to the methodological design in itself, in the sense that they are thought of as
permanent invitations to dwell in the making with others (people and com-
panion materials), to take care of the listening that is generated there, to take
responsibility for it and for the intimacy which emerges and is shared in this
continuity and which is understood in the making itself. It is in this continuity,
between the bodies that make and the materialities that emerge from that
making, that a subject that inquires in a different way, one that investigates
from that continuity, is embroidered. Here to stitch becomes, rather than just
embodied knowledge, a form of embroidered knowledge.
How to
Stitching ethnography starts with a material invitation, to think with textile
surfaces, as companion materials, to reflect upon what this gesture invites
to think back.
As an ethnographic device stitching is not just about stitching, but it
cannot be without stitching either. It implies the emergence and creation
of a disposition to stitch, to understand, and to dimension that stitching is
always in relation to materialities and contexts. Stitching an ethnography is
a collaborative mise en scene of stitching.
Stitching ethnography is a performative device that creates intimacy, and
so it demands researchers be responsible with this intimacy, to think about
how to be hospitable and caring, not as moral demands but as body and
reflective practices that imply labour.
In the bonding of bodies and materials, the objective of this device is to
invite to listen differently, creating a material atmosphere that generates a
common space for understanding, crafting, and participation.
Stitching (ethnography) is a practice that generates collective know-
ledge. It is an analytical tool; it makes relations (between stitching and
listening, for example) as threaded needles do. In this device, that which is
shared becomes textile, a thing in the hands of those making, a thing that
can be remade, repeated, and mended. In this sense, this device produces
embroidered knowledge.
Stitching (ethnography) might become an easy formula to create intimacy;
when it does, it is in danger of commodification. Hence, it is necessary to be
careful in assuming textile-making as an easy metaphor to interpret what
emerges from its actions. For example, not by stitching something to mend
it, the one who stitches is healed. There, stitching is imposed as an inter-
pretative framework for healing, while both practices are trivialized. As a
device, embroidering an ethnography invites us to think carefully about
what is embroidered and how. To think of the surfaces, the materials, and
the questions that the mise en action of these surfaces and materials ask us
back. Stitching a needle in a fabric is not an ethnographic device per se.
Sources
Ahmed, S. 2010. ‘Orientations Matter.’ In New Materialisms Ontology, Agency, and
Politics, edited by D. Coole and S. Frost, 234–257. Duke University Press.
Ingold, T. 2007. Lines: A Brief History. Routledge.
Lindström, K., and Ståhl, Å. 2016. ‘Patchworking Ways of Knowing and Making.’ In
The Handbook of Textile Culture (1st ed.), edited by J. Jefferies, D. Wood Conroy,
and H. Clark, 63–78. Bloomsbury Academic.
Luke, C. 1999. Feminismos y pedagogías en la vida cotidiana. Ediciones Morata.
Marcus, G. 2014. ‘Prototyping and Contemporary Anthropological Experiments
With Ethnographic Method.’ Journal of Cultural Economy, 7(January): 399–410.
https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2013.858061
Molinier, P. 2012. ‘El trabajo de cuidado y la subalternidad.’ Catedra Inaugural –
Posgrados En Estudios de Género – 1 de Marzo de 2012.
Muñoz Toro, J. 2020. Desbordarse. Libro artesanal.
Pajaczkowska, C. 2016. ‘Making Known: The Textiles Tollbox – Psychoanalysis of
Nine Types of Textile Thinking.’ In The Handbook of Textile Culture, edited by J.
Jefferies, D. Wood Conroy, and H. Clark, 79–94. Bloomsbury Academic.
Paterson, M. 2009. ‘Haptic Geographies: Ethnography, Haptic Knowledges and
Sensuous Dispositions.’ Progress in Human Geography, 33(6): 766–788. https://
doi.org/10.1177/0309132509103155
Puig de la Bellacasa, M. 2009. ‘Touching Technologies, Touching Visions. The
Reclaiming of Sensorial Experience and the Politics of Speculative Thinking.’
Subjectivity, 28(1): 297–315. https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2009.17
Pym, C. 2018. ‘Mending and Anatomy: Making Your Hands Knowledgeable.’ Utopian
Studies, 28(3): 562–575. https://doi.org/10.5325/utopianstudies.28.3.0562
Woodward, S. 2016. ‘Object Interviews, Material Imaginings and “Unsettling”
Methods: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Understanding Materials and Material
Culture.’ Qualitative Research, 16(4): 359–374. https://doi.org/10.1177/14687
94115589647
Interlude II An elimination dance
(a history of disciplining
the field/s)1
Denielle Elliott
This intervention considers what it might mean if we approached our field/

s undisciplined: to expand our understandings of what counts as ethno-
graphic fieldwork, to destabilize conventions that restrict, and to re-envision
the field/s as something else altogether, opening up spaces for unruly schol-
arship and for caring relations. I explore these themes through a satirical
elimination dance, where one by one, anthropologists are disqualified and
expelled from the dance floor and the field/s (both the temporal-spatial
locations we conduct our research, but also the field of anthropology as a
discipline).
This playful performative dance is fictional and meant to be satirical,
poking fun at our disciplinary politics and practices while also mocking the
proclivity for ancestor worship in anthropology. Rather than being a guide
for how to behave, I imagine this dance as a tale on how to misbehave: a
story with bite but as earnest gesture pointing towards possible and different
anthropological figurations and fabulations, not as better representations
but as affirmative forces that add to the world, if ever so modestly changing
it. Satire, as a genre, is meant to unsettle conventional ideas and practices
through ridicule, to make absurd that which has been normalized. Adopting
satire to poke fun at the boundary-making in which anthropologists are
engaged, including the micro-practices of exclusion from the elite club
and the disciplining of the field along lines of ability, sex, gender, class and
race, this elimination dance shows how seemingly random and somewhat
inconsistent the rules are. Through satire I consider, the epistemological
stakes of an undisciplined field, asking how we might re-fictionalize anthro-
pology as something that recognizes its compromising logics, contends with
them, and yet plays with them in rescuing anthropology as weak theory
(Stewart 2008).
This is a performance about the force behind the discipline; how anthro-
pology becomes anthropology, and anthropologists, anthropologists. The dis-
cipline disciplines: we are taught to be certain types of scholars, researchers,
and writers through formal education, informal mentoring but also through
insidious shaming practices (Probyn 2004). Questions like, ‘how is that
anthropology?’ or more direct statements like ‘but that isn’t ethnographic’.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003253709-21
Interlude II: An elimination dance 201
This policing and boundary-making around the ethnographic field and
anthropology as a disciplinary field remains an obsession of many amidst
concerns of declining enrollment in anthropology programmes and neo-
liberal restructuring of post-secondary institutions that see anthropology as
no longer relevant. In response, anthropologists try to find significance, espe-
cially with every global crisis, promising to help solve the world’s problems,
even though the very practice of fieldwork has so often reproduced the lib-
eral (Boasian) logics involved in the creation of those world problems in the
first place.
Fieldwork, and field techniques, remain a vestige of our colonial his-
tories and our imperial presents. Though perhaps no longer seen as a
rite of passage, the field and fieldwork continue to be romanticized, even
fetishized, and governed by a set of often unstated rules and unexamined
customs. At times the codified rules are passed on informally, advice from
supervisors or mentors; or lessons we pick up in classic ethnographies like
the Case Studies in Cultural Anthropology series once edited by George
and Louise Spindler; or through scholarly bureaucracies and professional
associations like the American Anthropology Association. A field guide
for anthropologists might list a set of instructions and offer etiquette
guidelines for anthropologists including cultural taboos and disciplinary
proscriptions.
Bring gifts.
Learn the language.
Live locally.
Take fieldnotes.
Don’t have sex.
Despite robust critiques of the empire hauntings of which anthropology

consists today, the field remains central to how anthropologists approach
ethnographic research. Field science, fieldwork, fieldnotes and field research
are methods used by many researchers from forestry to biology, to geology, to
epidemiology (Brinitzer and Benson 2022). It remains somewhere else, spa-
tially and temporally (Clifford 1977). Alfred Haddon, considered by some
to be the founder of contemporary British social anthropology, left zoology
and anatomy studies to become an anthropologist where he adopted the
intensive fieldwork practices of zoology for ethnographic research (Rouse
1999). Yet as Savannah Shange argues in her push for an abolitionist anthro-
pology, ‘fieldwork is never completely out of sight of another set of fields –
cotton, cane, tobacco, rice’ (2019, 9). Our discipline’s canonized forefathers
and mothers – white, educated, European or American – continue to shape
the imaginaries of the field/s. Indigenous, racialized, and differently-abled
anthropologists are often pushed to the margins of the field through a
range of practices including citational and pedagogical practices where
those white, privileged men and women maintain authority (see especially
202 Denielle Elliott
Halme-Tuomisaari 2016; but also da Col et al. 2017; Mullings 2005). As
Dobson argues, anthropology often appears as an ‘elite professional frater-
nity’ (2019, 260), with demoded conventions and the enduring problematic
liberal politics of Mead and Boas.
In an interview, George Marcus explained, ‘My idea is that eventually the
natives come back! Eventually they invade the seminar room, whoever the
native is, and change the project of ethnography in its very home preserve
of the academy’ (2016). As readers, you may be expecting the same here –
that the dance floor is flooded with differently abled, working class, Black,
Indigenous, Global South, or trans anthropologists, those redefining the
boundaries and rules of anthropology to be more inclusive, radical, undis-
ciplined, but the field is born from colonial logics, imperialist agendas, and a
violence of extraction (if only a type of ‘conceptual mining’ to use Deborah
Thomas’ language) (2022). With fieldwork at its core, our raison d’être, is it
possible to undiscipline? Is it possible to re-work our practices as a means
to re-imagine the field, to redefine what counts as ‘data’ and our writing as a
craft, to challenge form, coherence, conventions? Or does our undoing/elim-
ination result in an empty dance floor, even the canonical figures dismissed?
Perhaps Audre Lorde was right all along.
Scene
I invite you to imagine a fictive2 dance hall, where generations of
anthropologists have gathered for an evening of fun and socializing with
old friends, colleagues, and students. The cast of characters is drawn from a
history of anthropology. Inside a large wooden dance hall, anthropologists
from the past and present gather on the dance floor. A caller stands with a
microphone and, to a rhythmical beat, describes clichéd fieldwork incidents
and ethnographic conventions. Dancers must leave the dance floor if they
identify with the call.
Anthropologists from all the decades have gathered around for this social
affair. There is nervous chatter, lip gloss is reapplied, ties are smoothed, the
lights dim, and the music begins. Anthropologists drink wine, some have
cold beers, others imbibe the stronger stuff – a ginger and Jameson, a shot
of tequila, gin and tonic with a slice of lime. There are whispers and flirta-
tious glances, as many of the women head to the dance floor, excited to get
started. The men follow. Some dance alone, others in groups, a few pair up.
There are gifted dancers, and some with two left feet, but it’s all in fun so
no one really cares. There is laughter, smiles, giggles, and hugs as old friends
reunite, and new friendships form. The music starts with Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I
will survive’.
At first I was afraid, I was petrified,

kept thinking I could never live without you by my side …
The caller, Franz Boas in a dark grey tweed suit jacket and his black bow
tie, walks to the stage and stands in front of the microphone. There
are cheers, but also some scornful side glances, as Boas takes the stage.
Boas [caller]: All right folks let’s start dancing! Get your groove on! Please,
no heckling or humiliating those who are eliminated from the dance floor!
[The lights dim. Music plays for 2–3 minutes.

The dancers sway, move, glide, shake, and feel the music.
There is laughter and giggles.]
And so you’re back

From outer space
I just walked in to find you here with that sad look upon your face
If you never consumed ayahuasca, khat, betel nut, kava, or moonshine

in the field
If you have never started a paper with an ethnographic anecdote from

fieldwork
Anyone who has been told that they write too well
[Angela Garcia and João Biehl shimmy off the floor.]
If your office wall doesn’t have a ‘tribal’ mask gifted by a Chief

hanging in it
But then I spent so many nights thinking how you did me wrong
And I grew strong
Anyone who has criticized the discipline as colonial, white, liberal
[Talal Asad and Michel-Rolph Trouillot promenade off together.

Zoe Todd yells, ‘I’ll leave when I’m damn well ready to leave!’ and
keeps dancing.]
If you never lived in a grass hut, igloo, long house, or haus tambaran
during fieldwork
If you have never written fieldnotes
If you have ever been asked to explain what is ‘new’ about your
research
[Elsa Fan throws her hands up in frustration and marches off to
the side.]
If you did fieldwork ‘at home’
[George Hunt, William Jones and Ella Cara Deloria leave the dance floor,
and Ella whispers, ‘white boys club …’]
If you have never read Tristes Tropiques
[Claude Lévi-Strauss smiles knowingly.]
Anyone who uses twitter
[Adia Benton steps off the floor, ‘Get with the times! Twitter is where
it’s at!’]
I just walked in to find you here with that sad look upon your face
I should have changed that stupid lock, I should have made you leave
your key
Anyone who thought that Dorothy Smith’s Institutional Ethnography

was ethnography
If you have never cited Marshall Sahlins
[Marshall laughs from the dance floor, as he shimmies and slides.

Pointing at Victor Turner who leaves the dance floor,
he yells ‘I cited you! You didn’t cite me back?!’]
If you had a rejection letter from American Ethnologist saying your

paper wasn’t ethnographic
[Zora Neale Hurston walks off with head held high.]
Go on now, go, walk out the door

Just turn around now
‘Cause you’re not welcome anymore
If you have never worked in at least two of the four sub-fields
[Lila Abu-Lughod takes a seat alongside Zora on the side of the dance
floor.]
If your anthropologist husband never had eyes for a graduate student
Anyone never adopted as kin by a family in their community of study
All those who have never drawn a kinship diagram of their fieldsite
[Didier Fassin moonwalks toward the bar.]
If you’ve ever adopted the rhetorical devices of satire in your writing
[The author writers herself off the floor, and she is

joined by Shannon Rose Riley, Kirsten Bell and John Jackson Jr.]
If you have ever been accused of being uncollegial
[David Graeber stops in the middle of a twist, walks off, ‘I can’t be the
only one!!’]
If your first research project was away but your second project
at home
[Emily Martin charitably bows out.

Hortence Powdermaker saunters off the dance floor.]
If you never supported the local economy of your research community

by purchasing local arts and crafts
And I’ve got all my love to give and I’ll survive

I will survive, hey, hey
If you have never had malaria/dengue/schistosomiasis/zika/cholera
[Orville Elliott, skin still slightly yellow from jaundice resulting from
malaria while hewas doing research on tree shrews in Java, keeps
pace with the beat]
Anyone who does not have a current membership with the American
Anthropology Association
[Tomás Criado who was mid-tango with Ruth Landes, pauses and
exits the dance floor with Adolfo Estalella, dozens of Europeans, a
handful of Canadian anthropologists, and many African scholars.]
If you never had to explain that, no, you do not do the same work as
Indiana Jones
If you ever replied to someone, ‘Yes, just like Indiana Jones!’
[Napoleon Chagnon stubbornly bows out, pushes

his dancer partner aside and exits the floor grumbling all the while.]
It took all the strength I had not to fall apart

Kept trying hard to mend the pieces of my broken heart
Anyone who hasn’t eaten soup broth with a chicken stomach in it as

the ‘honoured’ guest
Anyone who has fallen asleep during an AAA conference panel (that
they were on)
[Kathleen Stewart shrugs, sticks her tongue out at Boas, and exits the
dance floor.]
If you are a white anthropologist who has critiqued the white saviour
complex and yet continues to be photographed surrounded by
‘natives’
[Paul Farmer begrudgingly leaves his dance partner,

mumbling under his breath that he’s also a doctor.]
If you never published a book-length ethnography
Weren’t you the one who tried to break me with goodbye?

You think I’d crumble?
You think I’d lay down and die?
If you ever offered a bribe to a police officer during fieldwork
[George Marcus, who’s twisting and turning the night away, leaves the
dance floor.]
If you ever taken a photo during fieldwork with a runny-nosed

toddler
[Jean Briggs, annoyed, stomps off the dance floor, muttering to herself,
‘I was studying children!’ and then picks a fight with Chagnon at
the bar.]
If you fell in love in the field
[Paul Rabinow walks off smiling; several others follow.]
If you’ve been called an activist-anthropologist
[Sol Tax and Leith Mullings leave the floor;

Mullings asks, ‘Why else do we do the work?!’]
If you started out your career in engineering, later converting to

anthropology
[Akhil Gupta looks surprised but departs from the floor,

along with Sir Edmund Leach.]
I’ve got all my life to live

And I’ve got all my love to give and I’ll survive
I will survive
If you have ever been offered a gun for protection during fieldwork
[Carolyn Nordstrom does one last spin and dip with

her partner before walking off to take a seat beside Emily.]
If you haven’t read Horace Miner’s Body Ritual among the Nacimera
If you spent more time in the archive than in the field
[Ann Stoler shimmies off the dance floor; Eric Wolf tags along.]
If you have ever published a paper or book and did not use
pseudonyms for your research participants
If during fieldwork you were never given a gift by the

community elders
Go on now, go, walk out the door

Just turn around now
‘Cause you’re not welcome anymore
If you ever forgot the batteries for your audio recorder or camera
[Michelle Rosaldo retorts, ‘it only happened once!’ and twirls her way
off the floor.]
If you deceived research participants, even a little bit, during
fieldwork
[Nancy Scheper-Hughes trudges off the dance floor clearly annoyed.]
If you have ever published a novel
[Kirin Narayan and Laura Bohannan find seats beside Michelle.]
If you published under a non de plume
If you ever criticized ethnography
[Tim Ingold walks off, ‘You guys just won’t let go of that will you?’]
If you accidentally killed another anthropologist (on a dance floor)
[Ken Little throws his arms up in the air! ‘It wasn’t my fault he died!’]
If you have never read Patrick Tierney’s Darkness in El Dorado
If you read Tierney’s Darkness in El Dorado and didn’t feel a little

sympathetic for Napoleon Chagnon
[Chagnon yells from his seat, ‘I didn’t do anything wrong! It was

James Neel!’
Vincent Crapanzo shakes his head in dismay and walks off.]
If you have never read Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People without
History
If anyone has ever yelled ‘mzungu’, ‘white lady’, ‘toubab’, or ‘waet

missus’ reminding you that you are the other
[Jane Goodall and Diane Fossey laugh,

and then gracefully waltz off to the sideline together.]
If you have ever written an autoethnography
[Paul Stoller sensuously kisses his dancer partner on the cheek,

then leaves the dance floor, flicking his white silk scarf.
Ruth Behar also takes a seat.]
If you have never been mistaken for a missionary

[Ever fashionable Rosemary Coombe smiles as she takes a seat off the
dance floor.]
If you don’t know how to pronounce a glottal stop
If you published your diary and called it ‘fieldwork’
[Michael Taussig waves, and cartwheels towards the seats.]
If your doctoral research was done in a library
[Oscar Lewis exclaims, ‘I didn’t have funding and I was poor!’]
Anyone who has written up their fieldwork as creative fiction
[Hilda Kuper joins the other women standing off to the side.]
If you have ever published ethnographic poetry
[Renato Rosaldo smiles, exclaims ‘I’d rather be a poet!’ as he mambos

to his seat.]
If your research was done on/through the internet
[Biella Coleman and Tom Boellstorf shrug, ‘Really?! It’s the 21st century!’]
If your primary theoretical engagement is with a dead white

philosopher from the 20th century
[A dozen anthropologists walk off.

Someone asks, ‘Like Foucault? Or Derrida? Or Marx?’
Someone else replies, ‘No, no, Deleuze!’]
If you have been seduced to write about nonhumans instead

of humans
[Anna Tsing, John Hartigan, Melanie Rock, Hugh Raffles,

and Heather Paxson are all eliminated.]
Anyone who has not thrown up during fieldwork after eating

something unidentifiable
Anyone whose PhD was not in Anthropology

[Elsie Clews Parsons shimmies off the dance floor, waving her hand
in dismissal at all those anthropologists left behind. Clifford Geertz
exclaims – ‘Really?! I trained with Talcott Parsons and Clyde
Kluckhohn! I can’t be eliminated!’]
If you have never casually mentioned the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis in a

conversation
[Marcel Mauss shakes his head and sashays off the dance floor.]
If you have never engaged in participant observation
[Lewis Henry Morgan who has been two-stepping, is escorted off the
dance floor.]
Anyone who has not read Primitive Culture
Any anthropologist who served as a spy for their government
[Sylvanus Morley leaves the floor with his head hung low]
Anyone who conducted research from a veranda
[Sir James Fraser storms out rather ungraciously.]
Anyone who had sex in the field with a research participant
[Evans-Pritchard quietly disappears from the floor.]
Anyone who had sex with Margaret Mead
[Ruth Benedict, Edward Sapir, Reo Fortune and

Gregory Bateson shrug and laugh at
each other as they exit the dance floor. Margaret blushes.]
Anyone who was ever knighted by the British government
[EB Tylor shuffles off the dance floor,

mumbling ‘that’s no reason to eliminate someone …’]
Anyone whose fieldwork was funded by the American government
[Margaret Mead, now dancing alone, pauses and yells ‘You can’t
eliminate me!
I’m the most well-known anthropologist in the world!’]
[Boas, seemingly oblivious that the dance floor is now empty, makes
one final call.]
If you hired a translator for fieldwork
[Boas, pauses for a moment,

‘Um, wait, I hired, well, Kwakʼwala is really difficult so I …
but I’m the FATHER of anthropology and I’m the caller, if you
eliminate me …’]
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to Ken Little, Matthew Wolf-Meyer, Dara Culhane and the
editors for reading multiple drafts of this essay and for their feedback.
Notes
1 Inspired by the poem by Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje.
2 I adopt Ruha Benjamin’s (2016, 2) conceptualization of fiction here: ‘Fictions
are not falsehoods but re-fashionings through which analysts experiment with
different scenarios, trajectories, and reversals, elaborating new values and testing
possibilities for creating more just and equitable societies.’
References
Benjamin, R. 2016. ‘Racial Fictions, Biological Facts: Expanding the Sociological
Imagination Through Speculative Methods.’ Catalyst: Feminism, Theory,
Technoscience, 2(2): 1–28.
Brinitzer, C. and E. Benson. 2022. ‘Introduction: What is a Field? Transformation
in Fields, Fieldwork, and Field Sciences since the Mid-Twentieth Century.’ Isis,
113(1): 108–113.
Brodkin, K., Morgen, S., & Hutchinson, J. 2011. ‘Anthropology as White Public
Space?’ American Anthropologist, 113(4), 545–556.
Col, G. da, Sopranzetti, C., Myers, F., Piliavsky, A., Jackson, J. L., Bonilla, Y.,
Benton, A., & Stoller, P. 2017. ‘Why do we read the classics?’ HAU: Journal of
Ethnographic Theory, 7(3): 1–38.
Clifford, J. 1977. ‘Spatial practices: Fieldwork, travel, and the disciplining of anthro-
pology.’ In Anthropological Locations, 185–222. University of California Press.
Halme-Tuomisaari, M. 2016. ‘Where Are the Ladies, Didier Fassin? #EASA2016
Keynote.’ Allegra Laboratory, July. https://allegralaboratory.net/where-are-the-
ladies-didier-fassin-easa2016-keynote/
Jobson, R. C. 2020. ‘The Case for Letting Anthropology Burn: Sociocultural
Anthropology in 2019.’ American Anthropologist, 122(2), 259–271.
Marcus, George. 2016. ‘The Ambition of Fieldwork.’ Terrains/Théories [En ligne], 5
| 2016, mis en ligne le 05 janvier 2017, consulté le 28 mars 2022.
Mullings, L. 2005. ‘Interrogating Racism: Toward an Antiracist Anthropology.’
Annual Review of Anthropology, 34(1): 667–693.
Probyn, E. 2004. ‘Shame in the Habitus.’ The Sociological Review, 52(2): 224–248.
Rouse, S. 1999. ‘Haddon, Missionaries and “Men of Affairs”.’ Cambridge
Anthropology, 21(1): 9–27.
Shange, S. 2019. Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Antiblackness, and Schooling in
San Francisco. Duke University Press.
Stewart, K. 2008. ‘Weak Theory in an Unfinished World.’ Journal of Folklore
Research, 45(1): 71–82.
Thomas, D. 2022. ‘What the Caribbean Teaches Us: The Afterlives and the New Lives
of Coloniality.’ The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, 27(1).
Interlude III The politics of invention
Isaac Marrero-Guillamón and
E. Gabriel Dattatreyan
Our previous writing on multimodality and invention (Dattatreyan and

Marrero-Guillamón 2019) emerged out of multiple conversations grounded
in our role as visual anthropology teachers, scholars and practitioners. In
our article, we argued these two concepts offer ways into imagining another
visual anthropology – closer to the multimedia and multisensorial worlds
our collaborators and us inhabit, less tied to the canon of ethnographic
cinema that dominated the field we inherited and orientated towards more-
than-representational approaches. Invention, we suggested, offers a way to
think about how anthropologists can find ‘ways to experiment with what
is to contribute to the what may be’ (221). In turn, building on Collins
et al. (2017), multimodality signals the centrality of media production in
everyday life, a robust entry point to making with others that doesn’t repro-
duce an a priori subject-object epistemological stance.
When Tomás and Adolfo invited us to contribute to this volume, we
decided to elaborate on our interest in what we theorized as a politics of
invention in our previous piece. We do so by staging a conversation – a
textual re-enactment of the ways in which our thinking together has unfolded
over the years, through talking and walking together. In fact, the idea for
textually re-staging our conversational exchanges emerged during a walk we
took through East London. We decided a more dialogic approach to writing
would, perhaps, open up unexpected lines of flight around our thinking,
which had already found form in our previously published piece. It would
also make visible each of our distinct ways of thinking about questions
regarding the future of anthropological practice when invention and shared
production are foregrounded. What follows is a lightly edited version of a
shared Google document where we fashioned a textual staging of our long-
term conversations – a piece of dialogic writing that further conceptualizes
what makes invention political in the context of doing ethnography.
Gabriel: The first thing that occurred to me when we started discussing
multimodality was that fieldwork necessarily generates a politics of
encounter. I’ve often been surprised by how, in anthropological writing, our
encounters with those who we seek to learn from/engage with often fall out
of our writing. Encounter, rather, becomes what Erving Goffman (1959)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003253709-22
214 Isaac Marrero-Guillamón and E. Gabriel Dattatreyan
famously called the ‘backstage’ of research, the stuff that is hidden behind
the curtains of what we showcase in our front stage representations – which
are often more in conversation with the citational field we choose to inhabit
than with our fieldwork interlocutors.
The backstage, as my PhD advisor, John Jackson Jr helped me to articu-
late, is the space where invention thrives. Invention is found in the mundane
and the ordinary. In linguistic play; in social improvisation. Those moments
when a joke is told, a social interaction fails, a chess piece is moved on a
board, a phone is taken out of a pocket to take a photograph. These seem-
ingly ubiquitous moments can animate the potentials and possibilities for
ethnographic practice to engage in the political, to point towards new
horizons of possibility, relational and otherwise, by revealing the shifting,
uncertain, and emergent dynamics that relationships during fieldwork are
constituted in and through.
When encounter does appear in anthropological writing, however, it is
often smoothed out and instrumentalized as mise en scene. I have, admit-
tedly, used this method for narrating anthropological stories and animating
ethnographically grounded arguments. Yet, it has felt insufficient, somehow
a betrayal of the laughter, play, and serious thought that relations emerge
from (Jackson Jr 2012). This is one of the reasons I have gravitated towards
forms of making together. The density and intensity of relationships that
emerge out of ‘fieldwork’ and their affective dimensions have the potential
to drive a different kind of intellectual project forward – one that is more
collaborative, less logocentric, and that is grounded in and develops an aes-
thetics of accountability (Ginbsurg 2018). Put differently, through making
with others I was and continue to be after a shared intellectual project that
recognizes the politics of the everyday made through encounter and exchange
as a starting point for shared study, to borrow from Fred Moten and Stefano
Harney (2013), and vibrant and creative knowledge production.
Isaac: Indeed, more often than not, the relational infrastructure that
underpins fieldwork remains obscured by the ethnographer’s theoretical
excursions, as opposed to being treated as a source of collective creation.
Ginsburg’s (2018) idea of an aesthetics of accountability is compelling
because it describes a form of ‘relational’ documentary work that takes ser-
iously the accountability that accompanies the privilege of making films
with/about people, that stresses the ethical/political dimensions of the
relations that sustain such projects, and that ultimately seeks ‘to catalyze
a dynamic exchange not only between screen and viewers but also with
the off-screen world of the film’s subjects’ (2018, 43). She discusses this
form of ‘co-involvement’ in contrast to the work coming out of the Sensory
Ethnography Lab, whose innovation is mostly formal and centred on the
auteur.
Gabriel: Evoking co-involvement feels a great way to acknowledge that
the politics of the everyday and any ethnographic encounter that emerges
out of it is shaped by broader political trajectories and impulses. Our social
performances, after all, are not sui generis but the product of history as
it unfolds in the present, as it shapes (our) bodies, material conditions,
landscapes, and encounters itself. My projects (and many of the examples
we touch upon here) have, for this reason, focused on communities of prac-
tice and social movement formations where everyday social performance
is linked to shared repertoires and felt impulses towards creative shifts
away from the inherited and the status quo. An anthropology of invention,
I would submit, is attentive to historical discourses and their attendant
materialities while resisting the urge to treat them as immutable. An
inventive anthropology turns towards the creative and pedagogical possi-
bilities of encounter and, in so doing, activates its capacity to reorient, play,
improvise, and make together – thereby pointing towards new horizons of
possibility.
Isaac: This is very much the dimension of politics I am interested in
foregrounding in this exchange. I would call it the ‘otherwise’, the ‘not-yet’,
the subjunctive – that which does not exist but could. Politics in this sense
would consist in the art of imagining, invoking, cultivating new life possi-
bilities and arrangements. I just called it an art, but it may well be called a
craft too, since I think of the otherwise as the result of actual experimenta-
tion, embodied praxis, collective improvisation. Put differently – the other-
wise is not an endpoint, but rather a possibility, divergence or ‘perhaps’ that
must be endlessly enacted. I am drawing here from Martin Savranky’s recent
work on the ‘politics of the pluriverse’, which he defines as the ‘imperative
of struggling for another possible world’ linked to an ‘ongoing experimenta-
tion with worlds in the making’ (2021, 124).
I would like to refer here to the research of one of our doctoral students.
Rae Teitelbaum’s work engages with LGTBQIA+ eco-communities in
Southern Europe as ‘queer worlding’, that is, ‘a process of fostering shared
imaginaries, dreams, interests, forms of communication and practices which
contribute to the development of collective realities that are rooted in an
inherently queer experience and existence’. Drawing from José Esteban
Muñoz’s (2009, 1) understanding of queerness as ‘the rejection of a here and
now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another
world’, Teitelbaum attends to the ways in which these eco-communities
bring about the possibility of personal, communal and socio-ecological
transformation. These are spaces where anti-hegemonic liveable worlds
are experimented with – away from the violence and constraints of cap-
italist heteronormativity, off-grid, in dialogue with a range of more-than-
humans excluded from mainstream society (which is not to say they’re
completely free from the possibility of reproducing neocolonial utopias in
their constitution).
Gabriel: I think the approach you are describing offers an opportunity
to critically and collectively engage with the material conditions that
shape struggles for another possible world, in contrast, say, to Pandian’s
(2019) culturalist investment in possibility as a condition and precursor for
anthropology as a (radical) humanistic project. The queer eco-communities
example also raises the question of whether and how an anthropology
geared towards invention engages with already ongoing experiments taken
up by political subjects in the world. In Teitelbaum’s project, there is an
existing collectivity who have their own devices for experimentation, for
exploring political horizons. How does an experimental method brought
in by the anthropologist work within these spaces? What sorts of questions
regarding ethics, practice and so on, arise?
Isaac: That’s a key set of questions. Teitelbaum’s project is still ongoing,
but I can say that it is constructed around a series of experimental method-
ologies including visual art making, scriptwriting, and performance. They
argue that in order to do justice (epistemological, ethical, political) to these
worlding initiatives they needed to devise strategies of co-creation and
world-making too – that is to say, ways of doing fieldwork that partake and
draw from the participants’ inventiveness, rather than merely ‘capturing’ or
‘recording’ it.
When I think of invention in the context of ethnography, I think of a
‘distributed’ skill or practice. The ability to make something new out of
the familiar, to produce a difference that makes a difference, to recreate
and reimage, is something one can observe in multiple locales, embedded
in people’s everyday lives. Linguistic inventiveness, musical improvisation,
tinkering with technology, crafting one’s dress style, playing a sport …
invention is far from rare – it is part and parcel of many domains of social
life. Acknowledging this is important to prevent the illusion that it is solely,
or even mostly, the ethnographer’s remit. In this sense, I think that a politics
of invention in ethnographic practice refers in the first instance to the ability
and willingness to attune ourselves to the inventiveness that surrounds us
and to work with it in ways that are contextually appropriate. Sometimes
it may take the form of writing that prolongs a certain dynamic or oper-
ation. Or perhaps a filmic strategy able to host and act as a platform for an
inventive practice.
Let me elaborate through an example. I was profoundly touched and
inspired by Ouvertures, a film by The Living and the Dead Ensemble (2019).
The film engages with the afterlives of Haitian revolutionary Toussant
L’Ouverture. In the first part, it follows the steps of a researcher searching for
traces of L’Ouverture’s in Jura, France, where he died in exile. In the second
and third parts, the film documents the work of a young group of actors in
Port-au-Prince, who are adapting Éduard Glissant’s Monsieur Toussant, a
play about Toussant’s last days. The first part employs an exquisite mise en
scene to summon the ghost of Toussant in Jura – the main character’s lone
movement through landscapes and his encounter with materials (documents,
prison walls) have the capacity to evoke a haunting, spectral presence. The
second and third parts, in contrast, make use of a documentary aesthetic to
accompany the theatre company’s work. Here, the emphasis is on the mul-
tiple translations at play in re-enacting Glissant’s play – both in the sense
of acting it out and re-activating its political dimension in the present. As
they navigate the text and prepare its scenography, the actors also trans-
form it. Words are changed, resonances with Haiti’s present and the actors’
own lives discussed. Here, the film takes a step back stylistically (for lack of
a better word) and creates an understated space of care for the ensemble’s
practice – a form of attentive, respectful listening.
Gabriel: You use the word care to describe the work of the ensemble,
which resonates with me very much. Care work, as Lakshmi Piepzna-
Samarasinha (2018) notes, centres radical collective responsibility. By
bringing care and care work into conversation with research we highlight,
I think, the shared responsibility to create spaces for listening, attentiveness,
and accessibility. Engaging with historical traumas and their ongoing effects
in the present demands this kind of attention and sensibility. Of course, care,
as it is instrumentalized in neoliberal orders, also has the potential to enact
violence. Here, I think it is worth noting that inventing an otherwise requires
careful attention to language, an attunement to the ways the liberatory
potential of concepts can be co-opted towards reproducing the status quo.
Perhaps one way to approach and disrupt the potential violence of concepts
is to think more carefully about the inventive practices that undergird them.
Isaac: Definitely. There is another example that may be relevant here.
I met public works, the art/architecture group led by Torange Khonsari and
Andreas Lang, when I was doing fieldwork in Hackney Wick, East London,
in 2011–13. I was interested in how artists were negotiating an intense pro-
cess of gentrification in this ex-industrial area, which until then had offered
affordable warehouse-type spaces for a diverse range of artists, designers
and makers. There was an acute sense of an ecology about to be radically
transformed by an intense wave of real estate development.
public works’ R-Urban Wick project appealed to me because it avoided
the temptation of grand gestures (material or discursive) and was instead
grounded in an understanding of space as a relational effect. They effect-
ively did a form of what we would call fieldwork, and in the process iden-
tified anti-hegemonic spatial practices that pointed at another, actually
existing, neighbourhood, one which relied on collective ingenuity, make-
shift approaches, or non-monetary exchanges. Guerilla gardening, food
re-use and up-cycling initiatives, do-it-together warehouse retrofitting
tactics, and unsanctioned public space improvements were some of these
practices. public works would work with those involved and generate
texts, images, guides and events that documented the multiple knowledges
involved and made them available to others (public works, 2013; see also
https://r-urban-wick.net/).
I would argue their work was both political and inventive. Political in the
sense of insisting on the possibility of an otherwise; their work with these
space-making practices treated them as much more than curiosities – they
were rather elevated to serious alternatives to accepted cycles of urban devel-
opment, consumption and waste. public works were also inventive in their
commitment to finding appropriate and compelling ways of making public
these practices and knowledges. They designed and experimented several
intervention strategies, including a roaming production and recycling unit
built using a repurposed milk float; an alternative archive documenting the
area’s unofficial history through an eclectic collection of memories, local
produce, memorabilia, oral history, songs and stories; and a series of talks,
walks and workshops which provided a regular public forum for debating
and creating a shared body of knowledge around commoning and bottom-
up development. Rather than trying to capture or re-signify the practices they
engaged with, public works seemed to want to operate underneath them, to
provide infrastructural support in the form of access to new relations and
(controlled) visibility. These strategies became an endless source of inspir-
ation for the kind of ethnographic work I wanted to do in Hackney Wick. In
fact, we collaborated on several occasions.
Gabriel: I really appreciate these examples. It’s absolutely essential to
think with the sorts of vibrant projects you’ve pointed us to as it helps
flesh out, in more tangible terms, what we’re getting at when we evoke the
political and invention in the same frame to rethink/reimagine anthropo-
logical praxis. Your discussions make me think that it’s important to turn
to another aspect of invention and politics that we touched upon earlier,
which I frame as questions here: How we might engage with the broader
historical-political forces that shape the potential for thinking and doing
otherwise? How do we navigate the very real power differentials that shape
relations of encounter and its potential for invention? I’ve recently been
reading Nicole Fleetwood’s (2020) book, Marking Time: Art in the Age
of Mass Incarceration. The book places the art world directly in conver-
sation with the US prison industrial complex, by focusing on and taking
seriously, art produced in prison and the artists who make this work. In a
chapter titled ‘Fraught Imaginaries: Collaborative Art in Prison’, Fleetwood
discusses collaboration between artists on the outside and incarcerated
artists. Fleetwood argues that these collaborations open up necessary oppor-
tunities for incarcerated artists to share their work, bend the time/space and
rules of the prison, and expand their professional networks.
Yet, these collaborations pivot on various power dynamics. Fleetwood
illustrates a few of the consequences of the skewed positions that working
inside/outside prison entails, noting that incarcerated artists can easily
be regulated to becoming subjects/objects for outside artists and that the
process to choose prisoners who can participate in these collaborations –
often led by prison officials, ‘can reproduce racial and ethnic hierarchies
that exist inside carceral facilities’ (155). She argues, convincingly, that
prison art collaborations are ‘shaped by these disparities (free/unfree,
mobile/immobile, captive /roaming) and function in tense relation to
the institutional frameworks of prison and its divisions of imprisonment
versus public life, bad subject versus good subject, captive versus free
person’ (157).
The dialectics Fleetwood illustrates in her work on prison art
collaborations – while made stark in context of the prison and the US
carceral industrial complex – are not so different from many of the field
encounters we have with interlocutor/participants who inhabit very
different social, political, and economic positions than us. Disparities and
differentials around freedom, mobility, access, and resources often define
our relations in and across home and field. Perhaps counterintuitively, these
power imbalances become amplified when we take up explicit modes of col-
laboration to engender a shared inventive process of making in so far as they
highlight the expertise, networked capital, and channels of circulation of
some over others. A politics of invention must recognize the ethical responsi-
bilities linked to our roles as facilitators and participants in the act of making
together with others by, first, recognizing how we and they are located and
second (and imperatively), finding ways to make together that are mutually
generative. As importantly, tuning into a politics of invention should entail
an attentiveness that accepts and even embraces productive refusal, failure,
and disagreement. It certainly is the case that inventive projects sometimes
fail or generate refusal because of the political conditions that circumscribe
it. These don’t necessarily need to be endpoints but rather can be treated as
creative openings.
Isaac: Indeed. I personally wish I had found the way to think through
collaborative failures in my work more productively – to be able to speak
well of the things that didn’t go well, as it were. When doing research in
Hackney Wick, for instance, there were several moments when collabora-
tive projects (say curating an exhibition or editing a publication) became
riddled with difficulties and tensions. Rather than exercises in co-invention,
they became stages where artistic ideas, political commitments, inherited
privileges, or personal ambitions clashed. Some of these projects were never
finished, others were, but as weak compromises between divergent sensibil-
ities. I still haven’t found a good way to talk about these instances.
Gabriel: Yes, talking about failure is challenging but I think is crucial if
we are to understand and engage with the politics of invention in ways that
don’t fall back on easy or digestible representations of collaboration. In so
doing we might recognize that, at least in some instances, it is not our place
to invent with our interlocutors but rather, work alongside their projects.
As our colleague and friend Shela Sheikh argues, working with Olivier
Marboeuf (2021) to think through the work of the Bureau des Dépositions,1
the speculative and inventive are sometimes clearly the provenance of
others. As they demonstrate, our work as researchers might simply be to
witness and document a creative process that seeks to call into question
and rework state power through creative methods. Witnessing the inventive
interventions of those who – in this case – are impacted by the colonial
border politics of the nation-state, however, requires a fine-tuning around
questions of shared authorship that generate a project’s afterlife. If we are
writing, filming, photographing, or otherwise curating the inventive political
interventions of our collaborators, what is our responsibility regarding the
representation of these more-than-representational acts? Moreover, what
are our commitments beyond a vicarious sharing of events that takes into
account the real conditions of impossibility that shape their lives well after
learning together has come to an end? These questions, I believe, require us
to invent a way of being researchers above and beyond the expectations of
the discipline or our institutions.
In short, the politics of invention is what we don’t necessarily expect
or are trained to anticipate but must attend to and can learn from. This
requires, on the one hand, a rigorous reorientation to anthropological praxis
as a space to cultivate attention, care, and inventiveness. On the other hand,
it requires an openness to the unanticipated, the surprising, and the difficult.
Note
1 The Bureau des Depositions is an ‘ensemble is comprised of ten co-authors with
varying legal and administrative statuses, the majority of whom were born and
lived in Guineaprior to making their journey to France in 2016 or 2017 in order to
demand asylum’ (Sheik and Marboueuf 2021, 1). The Bureau’s art performances
do not simply represent or comment on legal claims but are rather ‘the conduit
through which the legal case is enacted’ (ibid., 4).
References
Collins, S., Durington, M., Gill, H. 2017. ‘Multimodality: An Invitation.’ American
Anthropologist, 119 (1): 142–46.
Dattatreyan, E.G. and Marrero-Guillamón, I. 2019. ‘Introduction: Multimodal
Anthropology and the Politics of Invention.’ American Anthropologist, 121
(1): 220–28.
Fleetwood, N. 2020. Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Ginsburg, F. 2018. ‘Decolonizing Documentary On-Screen and Off: Sensory
Ethnography and the Ethics of Accountability.’ Film Quarterly, 71 (1): 39–49.
Goffman, E. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor
Books.
Jackson Jr, J. L. 2012. Ethnography Is, Ethnography Ain’t. Cultural Anthropology,
27 (3): 480–497.
Moten, F. and Harney, S. 2013. Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study.
New York: Minor Compositions.
Muñoz, José Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity.
New York: NYU Press.
Pandian, Anand. 2019. A Possible Anthropology: Methods for Uneasy Times.
Piepzna-Samarasinha, L. 2018. Carework: Dreaming Disability Justice.
Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press.
public works. 2013. Beyond Received Wisdom: An Anthology of Experiments in
Household Knowledge. London: public works.
Savransky, Martin. 2021. Around the Day in Eighty Worlds: Politics of the Pluriverse.
Durham: Duke University Press Books.
Sheikh, S. & Marboeuf, O. 2021. ‘Speculative Justice as Decolonial Intervention. The
Aesthetics and Politics of the Bureau des Dépositions.’ estetica. studi e ricerche,
11(1/2021): 63–112.
Conclusion
Taking inventory
Tomás Sánchez Criado and Adolfo Estalella
This book is an invitation to take inventory of the endless creativity

that is essential to the ethnographic encounter. Anthropology has barely
acknowledged the relational invention that pervades fieldwork. What is
more, as we discussed at length in our Introduction, regular ‘methodological’
descriptions of anthropology’s empirical practices have rarely exhibited its
distinctive improvisation. Conventional ‘tales of the field’ have tended to
follow a rather canonical pattern (Gupta and Ferguson 1997; Marcus 2012)
and narrations of ethnographic fieldwork regularly foreground the norm and
form of a vocabulary of ‘method’. This can be seen in how ethnographers
tend to talk about their field encounters, whether in reflexive after-the-fact
depictions, such as in the ‘methods chapter’ of many PhD dissertations, or
turning practice into normative prescriptions, such as in the distillation
of ethnographers’ experiences in manuals or handbooks of ethnographic
methods. We believe that learning to appreciate – and being able to account
for – the creativity of ethnography’s empirical practices requires going
beyond the conventional narrative genres that highlight the commonalities
of these activities, to be standardized and replicated anywhere and anytime.
The creativity and inventiveness of the ethnographic encounter requires con-
sideration of the irreducible singularities of field situations and their rele-
vance for ethnographic inquiry. This also entails going beyond the canonical
archives of handbooks and manuals. In order to respond to the challenges of
the empirical encounter and the inventiveness it always demands, we posit
the importance of taking inventory.
Taking inventory means attending to improvisational gestures and cre-
ative responses in the field. But how to describe them? By foregrounding
what we call ‘field devices’, this inventory composes a different tale of
the field, an account of the singular dispositions – social and material
arrangements, but also personal sensibilities and predispositions – brought
creatively together to undertake anthropological inquiry. Following from
this, we argue that taking inventory of ethnography requires a systematic
approach and an appropriate genre, one capable of narrating the overflows
and relevant singularities of the empirical encounter. Drawing on the sys-
tematizing archival practices of countercultural and digital activists, we
DOI: 10.4324/9781003253709-23
Conclusion 223
suggest a ‘how to’ aesthetic for these descriptions. Rather than curtailing
creativity, we believe a systematic approach is essential to make the details
of these fragile and often fleeting practices legible. Thus, in what follows, we
provide readers with a key to how, in a joint effort with our colleagues and
fellow contributors, we approached the task of taking inventory of modes
of ethnographic inquiry.
Composing other tales of the field

We start with perhaps the most obvious question readers may have: why do
we call this an inventory of ethnographic invention? Certainly, the use of
this concept is not trivial or capricious. In a certain sense, it builds on a long-
standing vision of anthropology as an archival endeavour. George Marcus
(1998), for instance, argued that anthropology could be conceptualized as an
archive of cultures, a practice of accounting for the multiplicity and diverse
forms of the relationality of human existence. While ‘inventory’ resounds
with the idea of an archival impulse, our formulation of the object and
expression of this activity is different: rather than describing and archiving
the forms of human relationality, we focus on and inventory anthropologists’
modes of relationality in the field.
In conceptualizing this book as an inventory rather than a handbook or
manual of ethnography, we wish to stress the distinctive nature and practice
of the peculiar archival task at hand: our aim is to pay descriptive attention
to the improvisational, non-standard, and even minor activities of fieldwork
that are essential to any anthropological investigation. Thus, taking inven-
tory means documenting and acknowledging the everyday acts of inventive-
ness that all relational forms of ethnographic fieldwork entail. In calling this
‘an inventory’ our approach is in line with other initiatives that foreground,
exhibit, and make conceptually available the ‘inventory’, not as an archive
of convention but as a record of invention.
In this sense, our proposal resonates with Celia Lury and Nina Wakeford’s
(2012) Inventive Methods, the chapters of which narrate the use of singular
and varied research devices and approaches to knowledge production within
the social sciences. The gathering of these stories is intended to contribute
to ‘a perpetual inventory … testimony to the irreducibly unstable relations
between elements and parts, inclusion and belonging, sensing, knowing
and doing’ (2012, 2). Similarly, by taking inventory of ethnography, we
endeavour not to capture and ‘methodologize’ the empirical practices of
anthropologists in the field but, in Lury and Wakeford’s wake, sustain an
ongoing description of the relational complexity present in ethnographic
projects.
To better understand what this entails, our approach to the practice
of taking inventory reverberates with Jara Rocha and Femke Snelting’s
powerful conceptualization of ‘inventorying’:
224 Tomás Sánchez Criado and Adolfo Estalella
Rather than rarefying the items, as would happen through the practice
of collecting, or pinning them down, as in the practice of cartography,
or rigidly stabilizing them, as might be a risk through the practice of
archiving, inventorying is about continuous updates, and keeping items
available … The temporalities of inventorying are discontinuous and
its ways of being, pragmatic: it is about finding ways to collectively
specify and take stock, to prepare for eventual replacement, repair or
replenishment.
(Rocha & Snelting 2017, 44–45)
Similarly, we envision the practice of ethnographic inventorying to be based

on collectively taking stock of the multiple creative arrangements required
in field encounters. Inventorying is thus an activity that looks to the past – as
we have – but is oriented towards the future, enabling others to draw inspir-
ation from previous inventions when engaging in their own work. We thus
take stock of invention for further use.
Taking inventory of ethnography poses two interrelated challenges that
contributors to this book have faced head on: first, it demands highlighting
those situations that, due to unconventionality or irreproducibility, could
go unnoticed; and second, it requires finding an appropriate vocabulary, as
well as the adequate means for capturing the creative nature of ethnography.
We use the concept of ‘field devices’ as a particular heuristic intended to
capture and account for the ethnographic invention that takes place in any
practice of relating in the field. Having field devices as the main object of
our inventorying directs our descriptive gaze towards the dispositions and
arrangements that make fieldwork possible, and the relational adaptations
or tweaks that pave the way to singular modes of anthropological inquiry.
By enabling an alternative composition of our tales of the field we wish
to reflect on the continuous adjustments that must be undergone in order
to inquire. This has led us to privilege elaborate accounts of that which
was encountered in the process of undertaking ethnographic inquiry, the
circumstances and the inventiveness or creativity demonstrated throughout
the venture. Rather than displaying a fetishism of material gadgets with
which to conduct research, or the methodical reproduction of procedures,
this inventory contributes to an appreciation of the multiple expressions
of ethnographic invention. As a result, this volume inventories 18 pieces
describing distinctive modes of ethnographic investigation. In this task,
fellow contributors document improvised gestures, discoveries, and creative
forks, revealing the peculiar social and material dispositions developed to
undertake fieldwork in a wide variety of topics, places, and ways.
In our vision, inventorying is a hands-on practice that requires curating,
documenting, and making available the arrangements and dispositions
through which ethnographers inventively relate in the field. And yet, this
inventory is just ‘an’ inventory, a version of the many possible ways in which
Conclusion 225
this could be done. We believe the task of taking inventory could take place
in a variety of archival forms. This book is one example within a larger effort
that also includes the open-source digital platform xcol. An Ethnographic
Inventory (www.xcol.org), through which we aim to enable a wider inven-
torying of anthropological modes of inquiry. As colleagues in STS and media
studies habitually remind us, reflecting on the materiality of the particular
ways in which we record and make knowledge available for future use is
crucial. We believe that taking inventory may also require experimentation
with the media we use for this task (Waterton 2010) since the aesthetics
of knowledge inscription – such as files and documents (Gitelman 2014) –
and the materializations of archival forms – with their different technical
and infrastructural specifications that shape enduring knowledge (Bowker
2005) – matter. As a collaborative open-source infrastructure, xcol enables
such experimentation and provides pedagogical resources for ethnographic
learning.
Launched in November 2020, xcol inventories four kinds of activities: (1)
the relational inventions produced in the field by anthropologists and their
companions (what we have called in this book ‘field devices’); (2) peda-
gogic formats and venues for ethnographical apprenticeship (what we
call ‘open formats’); (3) interventions towards the inside of the discipline
drawing inspiration from our fields of study (what we call ‘intraventions’);
and, (4) material experiments enabling different forms of anthropological
problem-making (what we call ‘prototypes’). Although separate objects, this
book and the digital archive are conceived as intermingling projects with
the potential for creative synergies and recursive relations to facilitate varied
takes on what we mean by taking inventory. Whereas the website inven-
tories a wider variety of forms of anthropological invention in perhaps more
provisional, revisable, and updatable ways, the book focuses on 18 accounts
of field devicing. We envision this collection as an introduction to ethno-
graphic inventories as archival forms, and as an alternative descriptive genre
to the standard ethnographic manual.
The ‘how to’ as a systematic genre

An inventory of ethnography enables us to recognize the value of the minor
improvisational and creative activities engendered by each field inquiry. The
heuristic of ‘field device’ clarifies the archival object of this task, but how to
approach their narration? What kind of genre might we need to inventory
ethnography? In our view, this task requires a descriptive form that enables
us to appreciate the perhaps non-replicable and certainly non-standardizable
aspects that are nonetheless vital to the ethnographic investigations in which
they emerge. Hence, to assemble this inventory, we drew inspiration from a
particular lineage of ‘how to’ narrative approaches, one which foregrounds
the singularity of creative practices and inventive approaches that transform
our everyday surroundings. We have come to appreciate these varied genres
of documenting invention during our ethnographic investigations, observing
their deployment over the last decade in our own ethnographic engagements
with urban guerrillas, experimental cultural spaces, and activist yet specu-
lative design collectives (Corsín Jiménez and Estalella 2013; Criado 2019).
Summarizing them as a ‘how to’ genre of narrating invention, we refer to a
substantial succession of minor descriptive genres and popular approaches
to recording fragile, unaccounted, popular, and collaborative knowledge,
that systematizes their recollection and enables their circulation. Allow us to
provide an example.
In her study of North American counterculture during the 1960s and
1970s, particularly attempts to take back control of the knowledge and
technical aspects that articulate our social and material worlds, architec-
tural historian Cathy Smith studied the aesthetics and relevance of do-
it-yourself manuals: ‘an important educational platform through which
counterculturalists could disseminate not only practical know-how of con-
struction and technology, but also the philosophical and cultural ethos of
the movement – a direct challenge to mainstream American values and
lifestyles’ (2014, 1). The manuals created by these craftspeople contained
textual and graphic step-by-step accounts of attempts to construct or recon-
struct a wide variety of gadgets. Compiled in systematic formats but with
various aesthetics, these manuals describe the processes of making, as well
as the reasons for doing so, with pictures and diagrams for illustration and
inspiration.
The long history of rich and varied attempts to document everyday inven-
tion presents a reading of creativity as a non-specialist activity.1 Narrative
genres such as the ‘how to’ manual and the recipe, are systematic attempts
to preserve knowledge, efforts that at times take activist contours (Eichhorn
2013). Despite often employing standardized forms, countercultural DIY
manuals, our main inspiration from this long tradition, do not seek to pro-
vide roadmaps on how something ‘should’ be done. Rather, their goal, as
Cathy Smith argued, is ‘to inspire their readers to build projects themselves’
(2014, 2). Unlike the notion of method, these ‘how to’ genres do not assume
a unity of knowledge; unlike research techniques, they do not articulate a
hierarchy of ways of inquiring and making. These narratives aim to trace,
register, and share in a wide variety of vernacular forms, fleeting forms of
popular, experiential, and at times raw and inarticulate knowledge, often
with collective authorship. As a result, they frequently resemble a ‘richly
documented palimpsest’ (Coleman 2013, 177).2
We aim to follow in the footsteps of these practitioners by providing
a systematic approach to the recollection and description of open-ended
and everyday ethnographic invention. At the core of the ‘how to’ genre of
this inventory there is a desire to systematically display the experiences the
contributors underwent when attempting to relate in the field, providing
ethnographically rich depictions of the particular dispositions that enabled
Conclusion 227
their distinct modes of inquiry. The core elements of each piece are accom-
panied by a series of further attempts to systematize these practices in pro-
cedural terms. Hence, all pieces contain:
• a ‘summary’ in the form of an encyclopedia or a glossary entry, helping

readers situate the explorations as part of broader anthropological
inquiries;
• a ‘file card’, like those in gardening and hiking guides, describing the
main contextual aspects of the project, such as geographical location,
duration, relevant ethnographic counterparts, necessary resources, a list
of substantive outputs, and perceived degree of difficulty;
• the ‘sources’ contributors drew from to device their particular ways of
relating in the field;
• a closing ‘how to’ section, with recommendations for practitioners
attempting similar endeavours;
In a nutshell, the systematic aesthetic of the ‘how to’ pieces assembled here
is intended to reveal the singularity of the ethnographic inquiry described
in each contribution. It is precisely this formal similarity that enables the
reader to appreciate the distinctive modes of inquiry of each ethnographic
investigation. This prescribed repetition draws attention to the significant
singular dispositions of each field encounter: the sensibility needed to appre-
ciate the soundscape of the field, the arrangement of spaces to be together, or
the situations devised for sharing material with ethnographic counterparts,
to name but a few. We also contend that this facilitates an appreciation of
how, for instance, apparently similar devices perform in radically different
modes of inquiry. As any hacker or fablab maker, gardening or cooking afi-
cionado, bricolage or mycology practitioner well knows, it is not following
someone else’s ideas that produces the most interesting results but drawing
inspiration from these sources to address one’s own predicament, and the
subsequent situated trials and discoveries that draw and deviate from the
‘how to’ sources.
Cultivating ethnographic invention

Taking inventory of ethnography is our response to anthropology’s lengthy
disregard of these crucial acts of ethnographic invention. In taking stock of
the dispositions and devices needed for any ethnographic inquiry to come
to fruition, we foreground the minor and creative undertakings of field-
work encounters. This task requires an exploration of genres and modes
of curation for narrating these alternative modes of inquiry. Here we have
explored both dimensions in our effort to bring together a variety of ‘how
to’ pieces. Thus, capturing the singularities of the field encounter and
bringing these together is an invitation to acknowledge the distinctiveness of
the relational engagements in each ethnographic investigation. Rather than
treating the accounts here contained as canonical models to be reproduced,
as methods as it were, this depiction enables field devices to be envisioned as
‘prototypes’. In Alberto Corsín Jiménez’s terms, they are to be conceived as
‘a cultural form … always on the move and proliferating into affinal objects,
yet never quite accomplishing its own closure’ (2014, 385). Far from a
finished object, a prototype is an open-ended and modifiable object. In a
similar fashion, this inventory is a record of ethnographic incidents intended
to enable further modifications and variations.
In this sense, the archival-like activity of taking inventory is entirely
different to that of, for instance, museum conservation, the epitome of
modern archival practices. While this is an activity focused on what
Fernando Domínguez Rubio (2020) terms ‘caring for the same’,3 inven-
torying means caring for the singular. In this sense, inventorying is more
akin to the work that Brian Massumi and his collaborators at the Senselab
refer to as ‘anarchiving’, in which the documentary traces are not treated as
‘inert, but … carriers of potential’, ‘reactivatable’, as a ‘feed-forward mech-
anism for lines of creative process, under continuing variation’ (Massumi
2016, 6). We envision the practice of inventorying not as an act of pre-
serving the past but stepping into the future. Thus conceived, inventorying
is a systematic activity, the aim of which is to collect and curate traces for
the purpose of fostering creativity and invention. The principal aim is to
raise awareness without inhibiting exploration, and hence animating the
invention that every ethnographic inquiry demands. Beyond this purpose,
we hope this inventory will spur others to engage in the same cultivation.
Our inventory is an invitation for others to take inventory: that is, to rec-
ognize and honour their situated inventions, to recursively assemble various
inventories, to experiment with their own genres and curatorial approaches,
and to make these available in wide-ranging ways.
Notes
1 In a marvellous account of the importance that vernacular spaces and non-
professional actors had for the development of early modern scientific practice
in England, historian of science Elaine Leong (2019) has addressed the relevance
of recipes. A rather patchy historiographic archive of everyday knowledges and
explorations, some more attentive than others to the context of their production,
recipes enable her to present the household as a significant proto-scientific space.
In her work, Leong addresses the relevance of recipes that were systematically
compiled in their everyday materiality, creating household archives that enabled
the production of knowledge on health issues, plant care, and animal husbandry.
These recipes not only document how things were done, but the networks of kin
and contacts these activities required.
2 This is perhaps most evident in digital and open-source approaches to con-
temporary DIY making, in which practitioners work tirelessly to present the
traceability of sources, as well as the different versions being produced. In her
Conclusion 229
work on hackers and free software developers, anthropologist Biella Coleman
recounts how heavily invested these practitioners are in creating narrative forms
and platforms where ‘accountability and credit are built into many of the tech-
nical tools that facilitate collaboration’ (2013, 177). Indeed, their resulting online
documents, repositories, and websites tend to proffer ‘version control’: that is, a
traceability of the different versions produced, not only for acknowledgement, but
to facilitate the remix and repurposing of this archived knowledge.
3 In his ethnographic project on the conservation practices of the Museum of Modern
Art in New York, Domínguez Rubio describes the activities of the curators and
workers of the museum to maintain the works of art as a ‘mimeographic work of
creating sameness by constantly regenerating and extending the life of something
as a particular kind of object’ (2020, 40).
References
Bowker, Geoffrey. 2005. Memory Practices in the Sciences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Coleman, E. Gabriella. 2013. Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Corsín Jiménez, Alberto. 2014. ‘Introduction. The Prototype: More than Many and
Less than One.’ Journal of Cultural Economy 7 (4): 381–98.
Corsín Jiménez, Alberto, and Adolfo Estalella. 2013. ‘Assembling Neighbours: The
City as Hardware, Method, and “a Very Messy Kind of Archive”.’ Common
Knowledge 20 (1): 150–71.
Criado, Tomás S. 2019. ‘Technologies of Friendship: Accessibility Politics in the
“How to” Mode.’ The Sociological Review 67 (2): 408–27.
Domínguez Rubio, Fernando. 2020. Still Life: Ecologies of the Modern Imagination
at the Art Museum. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Eichhorn, Kate. 2013. The Archival Turn in Feminism: Outrage in Order.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Gitelman, Lisa. 2014. Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents.
Gupta, Akhil, and James Ferguson. 1997. ‘Discipline and Practice: “The
Field” as Site, Method, and Location in Anthropology.’ In Anthropological
Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science, edited by Akhil Gupta
and James Ferguson, 1–46. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Leong, Elaine. 2019. Recipes and Everyday Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and the
Household in Early Modern England. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Lury, Celia, and Nina Wakeford. 2012. ‘Introduction: A perpetual inventory’. In
Inventive Methods: The Happening of the Social, edited by Celia Lury and Nina
Wakeford, 1–24. London: Routledge.
Marcus, George E. 1998. ‘The Once and Future Ethnographic Archive.’ History of
the Human Sciences 11 (4): 49–63.
Marcus, George E. 2012. ‘The Legacies of Writing Culture and the Near Future of
the Ethnographic Form: A Sketch.’ Cultural Anthropology 27 (3): 427–45.
Massumi, Brian. 2016. ‘Working principles.’ In The Go-To How To Book of
Anarchiving, edited by Andrew Murphie, pp. 6–7. Montreal: Senselab.
Rocha, Jara, and Femke Snelting. 2017.‘The Possible Bodies Inventory: Dis-Orientation
and Its Aftermath.’ INMATERIAL. Diseño, Arte y Sociedad 2 (3): 43–60.
Smith, Cathy D. 2014. ‘Handymen, Hippies and Healing: Social Transformation
through the DIY Movement (1940s to 1970s) in North America.’ Architectural
Histories 2 (1): 1–10.
Waterton, Claire. 2010. ‘Experimenting with the Archive: STS-ers As Analysts and
Co-Constructors of Databases and Other Archival Forms.’ Science, Technology &
Human Values 35 (5): 645–76.
Index
Note: Endnotes are indicated by the page number followed by “n” and the note
number e.g., 181n4 refers to note 181 on page 4.
Abu-Lughod, Lila 204 Bryant, Johnetta 68

Affect Theater 112–15, 118–19; Bryant, Keedron 66, 68–9
b more 112, 114–15, 118
Agu, Marika 75 Cantarella, Luke 107
Allison, Rachel Vaden 182, 184 Celan, Tjaša 105
archive 33, 49, 112–13, 126, 137, Chagnon, Napoleon 206
174–8, 183, 207, 218, 222–9; childhood 12n4, 83, 86–7, 155, 157,
anarchiving 228; digital archives 162–70, 166, 169, 206
63–70; Kiez Mind Archive 108; Colectivo Situaciones 26
see also inventory Coleman, Biella 209
Asad, Talal 203 collaboration 1, 4–5, 12n1, 19, 29, 33,
assisted suicide 4, 143, 145–6, 147, 35–7, 40–1, 74, 76–8, 107, 110, 113,
148–9 122, 125, 129–31, 133, 164, 173–5,
Asthma Files, The 5–6, 126, 128, 180n1, 182, 184, 186–7, 189,
181n4 218–19, 229n2; see also
Aruldoss, Vinnarasan 4, 12n4, 162–71 collaborative; collective
collaborative 5–6, 27, 33–6, 39–41, 73,
Ballestero, Andrea 3, 9 79–81, 114, 122–33, 140–1, 143,
Banks, Marcus 165 146, 150, 152–4, 159, 164–5, 181n4,
Barba, Eugenio 113, 117 182, 187–8, 198, 214, 218–19,
Bateson, Gregory 210 225–6; collaborative hermeneutics 5,
Behar, Ruth 208 122–32, 130, 181n4
Bell, Kirsten 205 collective 1, 10, 19, 21, 23–31, 33–5, 40,
Benedict, Ruth 210 43–5, 47–8, 65, 74, 103, 134, 173–5,
Benton, Adia 204 192, 195–9, 214–15, 217, 224, 226
Berger, John 53 Connectors Study 162–3, 166, 169
Biehl, João 203 Coombe, Rosemary 209
Bindal, Rojîn 105 Corsín Jiménez, Alberto 173, 228
Blanchot, Maurice 18 Counter-Cartographies Collective
Boas, Franz 201–3, 206, 211 (3Cs) 10, 23–32; Counter-mapping
Boellstorf, Tom 209 Queen Mary 23, 27, 28; see also
Bohannan, Laura 208 counter-mapping
Bonanno, Letizia 9, 52–61 counter-mapping 10, 23–32, 28
Borges, Jorge Luís 49, 123 Cox, Katie 125
Bourdieu, Pierre 6 Crapanzo, Vincent 208
Briggs, Jean 206 creativity see invention
232 Index
Criado, Tomás S. 1–14, 19, 102–11, Estalella, Adolfo 1–14, 19, 131n4,
205, 222–30 172–81, 205, 222–30; Ciudad
Culhane, Dara 4, 185, 187 Escuela (The City as a School) 172,
175–9; Ciudad Huerto (The City as a
dance 15–19, 21, 114, 187, 200, Urban Community Garden) 172, 177
202–11 EthnoData 5, 33–6, 38–41, 181n4
data 4–5, 27, 31, 33–41, 43, 63, 65–7, ethnographic 1–2, 4–11, 15, 19, 21, 23,
70, 79, 122–4, 126, 128–31, 134, 25–6, 31, 33–5, 39, 41, 43, 46,
137, 139–41, 154, 159, 175, 181n4, 49–50, 52–3, 55–7, 59–60, 62–3,
185, 187–8, 202 73–6, 79–81, 83, 92, 99, 102–12,
Dattatreyan, E. Gabriel 3, 213–21 122–4, 133, 135–7, 139–140, 144,
Deacon, Arthur Bernard 9 150, 152–4, 157–9, 162–4, 172–6,
Deloria, Ella Cara 204 178–80, 182–4, 186–9, 192–204,
device see field device, disposition 209, 213–14, 216, 218, 222–8;
devicing 4–5, 11, 225; see also field ethnographic drawing 9, 52–60, 58
device, disposition ethnography 1–3, 7–11, 12n5, 13n7, 17,
Dewey, John 186 24, 33, 35–7, 40–1, 43, 46, 47, 50,
digital 1, 3–5, 12n1, 12n7, 33–42, 52–5, 62–3, 69, 76–7, 79, 83, 85, 92,
62–70, 122–9, 162, 164–5, 172–80, 102–3, 109, 123, 125, 129, 131n4,
182, 185, 187, 222, 225, 228; digital 133–5, 139–41, 143, 152, 154,
platform 33–42, 62–70, 122–9, 158, 172–3, 175–6, 179–80, 184,
173–80, 181n4, 225 186–90, 192–3, 197–9, 202, 204,
disconcertment 4, 12n3, 43–51 206, 208, 213–14, 216, 222–5, 227;
disposition 2, 6, 9–11, 89, 134, 140, auto-ethnography 50; ethnography in
198, 222, 224, 226–7 motion 12n5, 133–41, 137;
disruption 6, 27, 62–3, 112, 118, 153, para-ethnography 102, 107, 109
182–9, 217 exhibitions 1, 4–5, 12n2, 12n4, 13n8,
documents 39, 47, 76, 112–16, 127, 34, 73–81, 80, 92, 97, 102, 107, 162,
144, 185, 188–9, 213, 216, 223–9; 164, 166–70, 219
document, to 33, 64, 111, 159, 174, experiment 8, 24, 33, 35, 48, 52, 55, 64,
183, 217–19, 223–9; documentaries 74–81, 90, 97, 100, 110, 113, 118,
34, 39, 112, 145, 148–9, 214–16; 123–30, 133–5, 173–80, 182, 184,
documentation 76, 79–80, 102, 187–9, 191n1, 211n2, 213–16, 218,
174–6 225–8; ethnographic experimentation
Domínguez Rubio, Fernando 228 3, 34–5, 41, 49–51, 74–81, 113,
dramaturgy 112, 114, 117–21 118, 123–30, 173–80, 184–5,
drawings 9, 24–5, 30, 52–60, 58, 144, 187, 215–16, 225–8; experimental
160, 163, 169, 173, 176, 185, 187, collaborations 19, 39, 76, 80,
189, 205 123–30, 133–5, 175
drifting 26–7, 30, 32n1, 129, 135, 141 Evans-Pritchard, Edward Evan 210
Dumit, Joe 104, 106
Durington, Matthew 104 Fassin, Didier 205
Fan, Elsa 204
eco-building 94, 96, 98–9 Farías, Ignacio 4, 11n1, 102–11
EcoGovLab 122, 125–8 Farmer, Paul 206
Edu, Ugo 120 Favret-Saada, Jeanne 112–15, 118
Elliott, Denielle 4, 200–12 feminism 24–7, 29–30, 33–5, 123, 163
Elliott, Orville 205 Feminists Liberating Our Collective
embodiment 25, 29, 45–6, 50, 55, 67–8, Knowledge (FLOCK) 29
95, 97, 115, 133, 149, 153–5, 158–9, field device 1–2, 4, 6–10, 12n1, 12n5,
184, 186, 197–8, 215 12n6, 12n7, 23, 33, 43–4, 46, 50,
epidemiography 13, 62–72 52–3, 55, 62, 65, 67, 69–70, 73, 83,
Escobar, Arturo 26 89, 92, 102, 112–13, 115, 118, 122,
Index 233
133–4, 140, 143, 152–4, 159, 162, Goffman, Erving 113, 213
172, 182, 184, 192, 222, 224–5, 228 Goodall, Jane 208
field encounter 1–2, 5–11, 12n6, 26, Graeber, David 205
52–3, 59–60, 102–4, 106–9, 111, Gupta, Akhil 207
146, 152–60, 172, 175–6, 180,
183–4, 186, 188, 194–6, 213–15, Haddon, Alfred Cort 9, 201
218–19, 222, 224, 227 Hallam, Elizabeth 8
fieldnotes 52–60, 58, 76–7, 83–90, 106, Harkness, Rachel 4, 12n1, 92–101; An
108, 115, 119, 165, 167, 170n3, Unfinished Compendium of Materials
186–7, 201, 203 92
fieldpoetry 83–90 Harney, Stefano 214
fieldwork 3, 7, 9–10, 39, 52–60, 73, Harris, Anna 6, 182–91; Making
75–7, 79–81, 83–90, 97, 104–10, Clinical Sense 182, 184, 186–7, 189
112, 115, 119, 121, 133–7, 143–6, Hartigan, John 209
150, 152–4, 159, 164, 179, 182–90, Hegel, Christine 107
200–11, 213–14, 216–17, 222–4, 227 hermeneutics 5, 34, 122–32, 181n4
Fischer, Michael J. 3 Holmes, Douglas 109
Fisher, Roy 146 Hopkins, Rob 99
Fleetwood, Nicole 218–19; Marking ‘How to’ sections 31, 41–2, 50–1, 60,
Time: Art in the Age of Mass 70, 81, 90, 99–100, 110–11, 119–21,
Incarceration 218 129, 141, 150, 159–60, 168–70, 180,
Fletcher, Harrel 183 188, 198–9
flowing 4, 12n1, 16, 50, 62, 64, 66, human rights 33, 36, 39–40, 96
69–70, 92–100, 118, 122–4, 159, Hunt, George 204
222; flowing with materials 4, 12n1, Hurston, Zora Neale 204
92–100
Floyd, George 62–9 imagination 5, 52, 59, 92, 99, 129, 133,
Fortun, Kim 5, 35, 122–32, 181n4 145, 152, 158, 160, 177–8
Fortun, Mike 5, 35, 122–32, 181n4 In, Sarah 120
Fortune, Reo 210 infrastructures 1, 4–5, 12n1, 34–5, 37,
Fossey, Diane 208 41, 48, 122–5, 128–9, 131n4,
Foucault, Michel 18, 54, 209; 172–80, 181n4, 214, 218, 225
The History of Madness 18 Ingold, Tim 8, 65, 69–70, 208
Fraser, Sir James 210 inquiry 1, 3–5, 10–12, 24, 33–5, 41–3,
50–1, 66, 73, 75, 77, 80–1, 85, 92,
games 4, 11n1, 27, 102–11, 110, 165, 94, 96, 102–3, 109, 113–15, 118,
168; Cards against Anthropology 126, 133, 141, 143–6, 148–50, 152,
104, 106; House of Gossip 102–3, 154–5, 172, 175, 179–80, 184,
105–6, 108; Kiez Mind Archive 108; 193–4, 198, 222–8
Sue Them All 105–8 interlude 15–22, 200–12, 213–21
game, to 4, 11n1, 27, 102–11, 110; invention 1–4, 6–11, 12n1, 12n6,
Gaming Anthropology: A Sourcebook 15–21, 24, 26, 30–1, 34, 39–41,
from #Anthropologycon 103 53–4, 56, 58, 63, 66, 69, 73–9, 81,
Garcia, Angela 203 83, 89, 92, 94–9, 102–7, 109,
Garfinkel, Harold 184 113–16, 118–21, 123–7, 133–5, 139,
Geertz, Clifford 178, 210 141, 145, 152–5, 162–4, 167–70,
genres 3, 29, 83, 85, 103, 129, 150, 174–5, 179, 182, 185–9, 192, 194–6,
172–3, 187, 200, 222, 225–8 198–9, 209, 213–20, 222–9; and
get/getting caught 9–10, 85, 112–21 convention 1, 4–10, 15, 25, 63, 81,
Ginsberg, Faye 214 114, 134, 152, 154, 173, 186, 200,
Giordano, Cristiana 8–10, 112–21; 202, 222–3
Disrupting the Narrative Urge 112; inventory 1–2, 7, 10–11, 222–8; taking
Unstories 112, 114–17, 120 inventory 222–8
234 Index
Irving, Andrew 5–8, 152–61; Strange Martin, Emily 205
Distance: Towards an Anthropology Martínez, Francisco 4, 12n2, 73–82;
of Interior Dialogue 153–5, 159 Ethnographic Experiments with
Artists, Designers and Boundary
Jackson Jr, John 205, 214 Objects 73; Objects of Attention
Jensen, Casper Bruun 177 73–4, 77, 79, 81
joint problem-making 19, 175 Marx, Karl 96
Jones, William 204 Masolo, Maria 120
July, Miranda 183 Massumi, Brian 228
Juris, Jeff 24 Mauss, Marcel 210
Mead, Margaret 202, 210
Kant, Immanuel 16 Merry, Sally Engle 34
Kaweesa, Nalongo 6–8, 154–60 Miner, Horace 207
Klinger, Marie 108 Morgan, Lewis Henry 210
Kluckhohn, Clyde 210 Morley, Sylvanus 210
Kohn, Eduardo 16 Moten, Fred 214
Koinoniko Iatreio Alleliggiis (KIA) Muir, John 93
54, 56 Mullings, Leith 207
Kondo, Dorinne 153 multimodal anthropology 3, 33, 41,
Korsby, Trine 146 109, 172, 179, 213; multimodality 3,
Kotb, Hoda 68–9 109, 213
Krischer, Lilian 105, 108 Muñoz, José Esteban 215
Kronemyer, Nora 108 Mustonen, Eva 74
Kuč, Miodrag 107
Kuper, Hilda 209 nanostory 65, 66, 68–9
Kusenbach, Margarethe 139 Narayan, Kirin 208
Neel, James 208
Landes, Ruth 205 Nicolini, Kim 153
Larkin, Brian 178 Nolas, Sevasti–Melissa 4, 12n4, 162–71
Latham, Alan 184, 186–7 Nordstrom, Carolyn 207
Laurelli, Camille 77–9, 80 Nott, John 182, 184
Law, John 5–6 Núñez, Jorge 4, 33–42, 181n4
Leach, Sir Edmund 207
Levi, Primo 95 Ouvertures 216
Lévi-Strauss, Claude 9, 204 Overlie, Mary 114
Lewis, Oscar 209
Little, Ken 208 Pandian, Anand 11, 215
Lorde, Audre 202 Pärn, Martin 75
Lury, Celia 4, 141, 166, 223 Parsons, Elsie Clews 210
Lutz, Catherine 163 Parsons, Talcott 210
participant observation 7–8, 10, 55, 57,
Madison Park Neighborhood 70, 96, 113, 175, 210
Association (GREEN-MPNA) 5, Patel, Shama 4, 13n7, 62–72
125–7 Pathosformel 12n7, 143–50
Malinowski, Bronislaw 179 Paxson, Heather 209
Mammana, Diana 108 Pérez-Bustos, Tania 8, 12n5, 192–9;
mapping 10, 23–32, 34, 49, 62, 65–6, Embroidering Bodies that Listen
66, 69, 118, 135, 140, 141n3, 153, 193
160, 189; see also counter-mapping Pétonnet, Colette 136
Marboeuf, Olivier 219 Photo-stories 12n4, 162–70, 166, 169
Marcus, George 3, 7, 107, 109, 153, Piepzna-Samarasinha, Lakshmi 217
202, 206, 223 Pierotti, Greg 8–10, 112–21; Disrupting
Marrero-Guillamón, Isaac 3, 213–21 the Narrative Urge 112; Moment
Index 235
Work 114; Unstories 112, 114–17, Scheper-Hughes, Nancy 208
120 Schütz, Alfred 16
Piven, Frances 63 Science and Technology Studies (STS)
Platform for Experimental and 5–6, 33, 35, 174, 176, 182, 225
Collaborative Ethnography (PECE) 5, Senselab 228
35, 122–6, 128–30 Sensory Ethnography Lab 214
poetry 67, 69, 83–90, 173, 209 sensory probes 182–90, 190
Poirier, Lyndsay 35, 123 Shange, Savannah 201
politics 2–3, 5, 19, 24–7, 30, 34, 38, Sheikh, Shela 219
40–5, 48–9, 56, 63, 67, 73–4, 78, 92, Simonetti, Cristián 95, 97
94–5, 97–8, 103, 105, 108–9, 124–5, situated knowledges 23, 26
127–9, 162–4, 167–8, 174, 197, 200, slavery 29, 96, 149
202, 213–20 Smith, Cathy 226
Postill, John 4, 13n7, 62–72 Smith, Dorothy 204
Powdermaker, Hortence 205 Snelting, Femke 223–4
Praks, Hannes 77–8 Soans, Hanno 75
Precarias a la Deriva 24, 26–7 sociomaterial assemblages 65, 68–9
publics 35, 42, 103, 162–70 Ssewankambo, Margaret 6–8, 154–60,
156
Quack, Sebastian 104 Stavrianakis, Anthony 4, 12n7, 143–51;
Designs on the Contemporary 146
Rabinow, Paul 3, 143, 146, 180, 207 Stewart, Kathleen 206
Raffles, Hugh 209 stitch 192–9
Real Silent Sam Coalition 29 Stoler, Ann 207
reflexivity 25, 52–3, 57, 74, 107, 109, Stoller, Paul 208
140 Strathern, Marilyn 10, 106, 131n4,
remediation 8, 172, 180 179
response 3, 12n3, 18–20, 25, 27–8, 30, Streule, Monika 8, 12n5, 133–42;
35–6, 65, 74, 83, 110, 118, 126–8, entrevistas en movimiento 133–5,
154, 159, 201, 222, 227 137, 137, 139–41; Ethnography of
responsibility 44, 76, 139, 159, 180n1, Urban Territories 134; Recorridos
198, 217, 219–20 explorativos 133–7, 139–41
responsive ethnography of data, 33, 35, Suárez, Maka 4, 33–42, 181n4
38, 41
responsiveness 3, 33, 35, 38, 41, 187 Taussig, Michael 59, 209
Reyes, David 137–9 Taylor, Janelle 187
Ribes, David 34 Tax, Sol 207
Riley, Shannon Rose 205 Teitelbaum, Rae 215–16
Roberts, Elizabeth 35 thick description 23, 87
Robinson, Jennifer 135 Thomas, Deborah 202
Rocha, Jara 223–4 Thomas, Dylan 89
Rock, Melanie 209 Tierney, Patrick 208
Rosaldo, Michelle 207 Todd, Zoe 203
Rosaldo, Renato 209 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph 203
Ruppert, Evelyn 5–6 Tsing, Anna 209
R-Urban Wick 217 Turner, Victor 64, 113, 152–3, 204
Tylor, E. B. 210
Sahlins, Marshall 204
Salter, Anastasia 104 University of North Carolina 10, 24,
Sapir, Edward 210 26–7, 29
Savransky, Martin 1, 11, 15–22
Sayer, Andrew 163 van Vügt, Sophia 105
Schechner, Richard 113 Varvantakis, Christos 4, 12n4, 162–71
236 Index
Verran, Helen 4, 12n3, 43–51 Winthereik, Brit Ross 3, 177
Viewpoints 114 Wojcik, Andrea 182, 184
Wolf, Eric 207–8
Wagner, Lauren 184, 186–7 workflow 122–4
Wagner, Roy 2–4, 8–10, 15–16, 19–20, writing genres see genre
184; The Invention of Culture 16
Wakeford, Nina 4, 141, 166, 223 xcol. An Ethnographic Inventory 225
Warburg, Aby 143–5; Dürer and
Italian Antiquity 144; Mnemosyne Zallot, Vanessa 105
Bilderatlas 145 Zani, Leah 6, 83–91; Bomb Children
Wasik, Bill 67 83, 86–7
Weigand, Tan 108 Zibell, John 120
Wenneman, Kiane 108 ZK/U-Centre for Art and Urbanistics
Winter, Judith 95, 97 107

An Ethnographic Inventory

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

An Ethnographic Inventory

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

An Ethnographic Inventory

This book provides an inventory of modes of inquiry for ethnographic

Tomás Sánchez Criado is Ramón y Cajal Senior Research Fellow at the

Adolfo Estalella is Associate Professor in Social Anthropology at the

The ‘Theorizing Ethnography’ book series seeks to reorient ethnographic

Stories, Senses and the Charismatic Relation

Queer Word- and World-Making in South Africa

Decolonial Queering in Palestine

List of Figures viii

Introduction: The ethnographic invention 1

Interlude I: The principle of invention (Outside in) 15

1 How to counter-map collectively 23

2 How to produce responsive ethnography of data 33

3 How to use disconcertment as ethnographic field-device 43

4 How to draw fieldnotes 52

5 How to do a digital epidemiography 62

6 How to make ethnographic research with exhibitions 73

7 How to write fieldpoetry 83

9 How to game ethnography 102

10 How to get caught in the ethnographic material 112

11 How to devise collaborative hermeneutics 122

12 How to set ethnography in motion 133

13 How to use Pathosformeln in anthropological inquiry 143

14 How to perform field encounters 152

15 How to invent childhood publics with photo-stories 162

16 How to remediate ethnography 172

17 How to disrupt our field habits with sensory probes 182

18 How to stitch ethnography 192

Interlude II: An elimination dance (a history of

Conclusion: Taking inventory 222

1.1 Counter/mapping Queen Mary map (2010) 28

Vinnarasan Aruldoss, Assistant Professor, Department of Social Wellbeing,

‘inquiry is always a matter of “invention” ’

This inventory bears witness to the relational inventiveness that is essential

Inventing relevant questions

Nothing is given, everything is invented

Pragmatics of the outside

From their conception and design to their production and distribution,

Apartment complex, Carrboro, North Carolina, USA,

Feminist Geography Conference, University of North Carolina at

‘Mapping Loss in the Anthropocene’ Workshop, University of

These experiences, bringing together bodies around paper to collectively

Scene: Queen Mary University campus, London, UK, May 2010

Connect people and build alliances!

Scene: Radical Rush, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,

1. Bringing people and/or organizations together, data collection and

Collaborative and interdisciplinary digital platforms open up novel

After a year of interdisciplinary and collaborative ethnographic research

Figure 2.1 Entrelazados (Entwined). Illustration by La Arisca ©.

The politicization of numbers: a critical production of data

Disconcertment pinpoints the happening of concepts in ways that

A forest reinstated – that’s good isn’t it?

of young temperate rain forest. Logos of organizations representing

rooms. I imagined words uttered, the technical exchanges between

with people who called themselves English or Scottish or Irish –

Drawing is a mode of fieldnote taking in ethnography, an experiential

A mode of visual thinking

Digital epidemiography is an ethnographic approach to studying internet

On 25 May 2020, George Floyd, an African American man, was detained

Conceptualizing digital epidemiography

A dramatic flow of events

Conjuring a viral world

Navigating the deluge

I am a young black man