Home
In Death without Weeping, anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes reminds us that fieldwork “has a way of drawing the ethnographer into spaces of human life where she or he might really prefer not to go at all and once there doesn’t know how to go about getting out except through writing, which draws others there as well, making them party to the act of witnessing”.
Her words, and particularly the twin rationales of drawing others in and getting ourselves out, sum up much of the rationale for Ethnographic Marginalia.
Ethnographic writing affords us the capacity to document and demonstrate how broader social, political, and economic forces play out in the minutiae of daily social life, and to provide the context and meaning of people’s actions and words. We firmly believe that what makes ethnographic research persuasive, powerful, and perspicacious is that it allows us to draw the reader into fascinating social worlds. Ethnography makes us tell a story.
In the process of ethnographic immersion and doing fieldwork, we become archives of facts and feelings, myths and memories, reports and rumors. However, all too often when we come back from the field, we sit at our drawing boards and try to remind ourselves that we are sociologists. Well-disciplined by our disciplines, we cast our experiences as data with value only insofar as they help us theorize XYZ. We turn reams of experiences into bite-sized, digestible, but rarely delicious chunks of strategic information. And thus, the most interesting and provocative parts of ethnographic writing are discarded in service to academic journals that demand a clear intervention filling a stated gap within the literature or the creation of neat typologies. Instead, we want to provide a space for the building blocks that make ethnographic mansions: the notes, stories, photographs, and conversations that come out of fieldwork.
Through this endeavor, we also hope to build community through dialogue and the sharing of knowledge, techniques, and experiences. After all, ethnographic work is an exercise in getting comfortable with solitude and the field can be a lonely place, even after you return. In this website, we are interested in the raw material of ethnography and we aim to provide space for critical, compassionate, and collective, reflection on what it means to do ethnography, and the travails, the perils, and the joys of this craft.
Latest Posts
DISPATCHES FROM THE FIELD
On Loving a Hostile City
Medha V.
9 October 2023
I remember this one evening as I was walking around Okhla with a male friend, he suddenly turned into a dark alleyway. I was startled at how casually he took that turn, while my brain and body froze even though I was in the company of someone I trusted deeply. With every path we don’t take, how many sights, sounds, smells and sensations do we miss out on? My body knows how to absorb these shocks and quickly bounce back to its default setting now. But I am sure our systems store these things somewhere. What happens to these memories? Will my body ever learn to let go of them?
Methodological Appendix
Writing differently in and about space
Friederike Landau-Donnelly
21 September 2023
This text cuts through the weeds of academic writing traditions, and proposes to reflect (again) on where and how we write about space. In the context of spatial disciplines such as human geography, planning, urban studies, landscape design and architecture, I argue, the places from where we write matter in the production of academic (or not-so-academic) knowledge. While this text is not a methodological guide to creative methodologies for spatial analysis1, it offers a poetic exploration of how places of writing reinforce the embodied experiences of writing in and about space. On the one hand, this reflection gestures towards approaching the writing about places with more caution, care, reflexivity and attunement. On the other hand, it mobilizes awareness on how writing in specific places affects access, process(ing) and interpretation of empirical data to be gathered in the writing environment, be it proximate or far away.
THE PODCAST
Episode 21: Coastlines, Climate, and Comics: In Conversation with Dr. V Chitra
7 November 2023
How can we use comics to present ethnographic research in new and unique ways? In this episode, we talk with Dr. V. Chitra about the fieldwork and comics in her soon-to-be-released book Drawing Coastlines. She talks about the ethnographic insights on contamination and climate change that came from sorting fish, and her process of developing comics that portray the everyday experiences and environmental degradation of coastal communities in Mumbai. She also discusses future problems on human-insect and human-dog relations, questioning our own capacity to accept the feral.
Finally, she ends with a few recommendations of ethnographies for our listeners: Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds, Marisol de la Cadena; Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas, Radhika Govindrajan; On Line and On Paper: Visual Representations, Visual Culture, and Computer Graphics in Design Engineering, Kathryn Henderson; and When Species Meet, Donna Haraway. And related to comics: Making Comics, Lynda Barry; Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud; and Forecasts: A Story of Weather and Finance at the Edge of Disaster, by Caroline E. Schuster and illustrated by Enrique Bernardou and David Bueno.
Disclaimer: Perhaps it is a function of disciplinary blinders, but it has been brought to our attention that our website shares its name with a series curated by the Society of Cultural Anthropology on their official website. We would like to clarify that this website is not affiliated with Cultural Anthropology but we do share with our accidental namesake a commitment toward making ethnographic writing accessible to a wider public. We see this serendipitous syncing of names as a dovetailing of our vision – one that exceeds disciplinary boundaries.
Ethnographic Marginalia 