An Ethnographic Inventory: Field Devices for Anthropological Inquiry 1032124393, 9781032124391

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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 practice 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 Contributors Introduction: The ethnographic invention

viii ix 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 L E AH ZANI

83

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) DENIELLE ELLIOTT

200

Contents

Interlude III: The politics of invention

vii

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 2.1 4.1 5.1 6.1 7.1 9.1 10.1 11.1 12.1 13.1 14.1

15.1 15.2 16.1 17.1

Counter/mapping Queen Mary map (2010) Entrelazados (Entwined) Medicine for all A sketch of Keedron Bryant’s nanostory in the form of a mind map, created by the authors in Coggle Broken tools to be used in the installation ‘Failure is Practice’ Two explosive technicians survey a rice field with metal detectors. The technicians are listening for the pinging sounds of the detector sensing metal underground Testing games at the Spiele für eine kritische Nachbarschaft 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 An image composition showing a map of Santa Anna and the process of collaborative hermeneutics A moment during an entrevista en movimiento in Mexico City Sketch from a memory of a moment before Clément ended his life 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 Examples of pictures chosen by children The photo-story method Participants in an auto-construction workshop organized by Ciudad Huerto and held in the urban community garden of Adelfas (Madrid) Results of a probe activity (22a, 5 October 2018): Make a collage from field site images

28 36 58 66 80 86 110 120 129 137 147

156 166 169 177 190

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, HumboldtUniversity 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: creating 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 relational 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 rhetoric turn and the provoking claim that anthropological writing is essentially 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 naturalistic 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 standardization 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 relational 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 engagement. 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 politics of invention, an argument that can be retraced to the influence of Roy Wagner (1981). Dattatreyan and Marrero-Guillamón’s proposal has certainly 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 anthropological 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 relational commitments that sit at the core of ethnography in its best forms’, they propose ‘that analysis is a creative and organized process of generating insights’ (Ballestero and Winthereik 2021, 3). Recent calls for creative 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 straightforward 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 inspirational, 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

4 Adolfo Estalella and Tomás Sánchez Criado aligns with Wagner’s idea that ‘the task of building an awareness of invention 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 creativity 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 practice: 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 (PérezBustos), 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 situations, 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), curating 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 project: what we call field devices. Beyond observation and participation, habitually 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 illuminating 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 activities 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 dimension 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 methodologies) 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 experiencing terminal illness, a difficult phenomenon to grasp and one for which, he argues, conventional methodological approaches are ill-equipped. Under

6 Adolfo Estalella and Tomás Sánchez Criado 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 difficult 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 contribution 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 conceive 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 ethnographic encounter. Yet, there is a second sense for the concept of disposition that reveals a different dimension of field devices, one closer to an anthropological sensibility. This draws on Bourdieu’s understanding of disposition as an inclination constitutive of habitus. We understand Leah Zani’s conceptualization 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 contrast 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 particular 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 demonstrate – 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 certain 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 essential 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 conventional 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 combine 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 unpredictability 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

8 Adolfo Estalella and Tomás Sánchez Criado 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 creative 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, particularly in domains such as art, design or technology. Instead, we draw on a radically 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 improvisation. Far from an individual quality of certain people, anthropological literature 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 relational 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 creativity. 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

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within the field. Let us consider, for instance, Letizia Bonanno’s contribution, 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 acknowledge 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 convention stand in a dialectical relationship to one another, a relationship of simultaneous 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 practice 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 situation. This invention takes expression in unstable, provisional and situated arrangements that we have called field devices. Far from totalizing methodological approaches, these should be regarded as concrete interventions, made relevant by their capacity to respond to specific ethnographic situations. 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 possibilities […] 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 knowledge 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 anthropologist 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

10 Adolfo Estalella and Tomás Sánchez Criado collectively composing theatrical episodes. The counter-mapping workshops organized by the 3Cs collective, Counter-Cartographies Collective (originally 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 relevant questions.

Inventing relevant questions Anthropologists have diverse ways of approaching and understanding ethnography, 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 ethnographic 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 invention: 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 improvisational 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.

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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 relevant 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 formulate a correlated endeavour that we deem as relevant: to speculate with ethnography 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

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2

3

4

5

6

7

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 project of urban pedagogy involving the design of a digital infrastructure in collaboration 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. 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. This is the case with Helen Verran’s disconcertment, a response to those situations that cause the anthropologist epistemic trouble. Verran proposes cultivating 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 ethnographer has experienced. 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. The contributions of Monika Streule and Tania Pérez-Bustos illuminate two completely 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. 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. 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

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gestures. The epidemiography of Shama Patel and John Postill is the outcome of seizing the distinctive qualities of digital technologies to investigate viral phenomena 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.

14 Adolfo Estalella and Tomás Sánchez Criado 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 improvisation 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 understand, 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, controlling 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 interdependent. 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

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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 improvisation, 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

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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 necessarily 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 perhaps, 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 vertiginous 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 invention 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 gratuitous 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

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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 outside: 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 general laws, to universal principles, rational knowledges, and timeless truths (Toulmin 1990). A world, in other words, all given in advance, a throughand-through universe whose unruly edges and unformed exteriorities could be safely ignored, and eventually confined to mere footnotes in the providential unfurling of History. Which is why to refuse to prolong the recent history that turned invention into an affectation of the mind, to escape the story that made of invention 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 fundamentally 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 complexion from the future’ (James 1975, 122). In this incomplete world, invention 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’.

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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

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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, therefore, 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 unfinished, 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 conjunction ‘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

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most groundless, unhinged and unprincipled of all– would offer neither guides nor guarantees. It is only fitting that it would confront every practice – 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 constitute 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.

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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.

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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, ethnographic 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 transform 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

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Feminist Geography Conference, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA, May 2017 Conference participants gather around large sheets of butcher paper, collectively 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 countermapping 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 student 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

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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 cartography 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 cartography 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 production, 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 epistemological trap of the split between researcher and researched, subject vs. object. The ‘ivory tower’ myth functions to sweep under the table urgent political 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 contrary, 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

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‘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 intervene 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 militant 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 context 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 precarious worker. Instead of an exotic and unplanned itinerary, the precarias’ version of drifting consisted in deliberately following an already-lived trajectory. 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 transformative research. A series of drifts, each led by a different precarious woman worker, and each grounded in the individual’s life trajectory, made it possible to recognize shared conditions among previously unconnected people. This transformed the participants into the researchers of their own precarious 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

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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 spatial 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 trajectories 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 (CounterCartographies Collective).

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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 collectively 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 university history. Group walking tours, archival research into campus history, and collective mapping workshops are part of a much broader and more expansive project to remake the campus landscape, to share knowledge from generation 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.

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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 facilitate 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 countercartographic 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

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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 qualitative 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 knowledge 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.

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Note 1 See our origin myth story, ‘Drifting through the Knowledge Machine,’ in CasasCortes & 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.

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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

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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 platform 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 families 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 collaboratively with the justice system to standardize methodologies and harmonize data collected from various sources. EthnoData was part of that process and the platform served as a model for devising a public website on

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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 intervention’ 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 capacities like EthnoData was the impact it could have on policy and accountability, 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 interpretations 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 collaborative 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 ‘responsive 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

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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 abolition 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 government to prisoners and their families. Before undertaking the quantification 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

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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 evidence file did not mention that the list of missing inmates was significantly larger than the bodies counted in the process of forensic human identification, 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 statistical 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 customization 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 crucial 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 individual registers for the years between 2014–2021 despite the prison population 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

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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 engineers 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, basically official forms that different bureaucrats must fill out. However, in practice, these indicators are commodities within penitentiaries. The bureaucratic paperwork 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 management system called PRAS, which in turn had a number of shortcomings. For instance, it needed a stable internet connection, which was often unreliable within the prison system. This resulted in partial data collection or a

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mix of paper documents and electronic information, often producing incomplete, 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 histories 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 coproducing short documentaries with families of missing people. In 2020, EthnoData worked with Asfadec, an association of families affected by disappearance 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 ethnographic 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 creative process included elaborating questions, playing with digital resources, and overcoming silences. It built a complex narrative – not without difficulties 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 carceral system more broadly. We worked with family members through a WhatsApp group chat, though Jorge Núñez had conducted long term fieldwork 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 experience with numbers populating Excel worksheets that turned into pricy commodities within prison. We discussed corruption, and how we envisioned

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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 harassment 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 international 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 government 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 increment 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 affirmation, 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

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important to mention that police support to EthnoData did not ensue from a sudden interest in scholarship on their part, but from their institutional reluctance to take control over the prison system. To summarize, EthnoData is a digital research platform for experimentation 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 compositional 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 platform 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 critical 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.

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A platform is built to be used by different publics. Keeping in mind diversity 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.

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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 relationally 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

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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 otherwise sociomaterial realities. In this we are attributing to experience the capacity 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 epistemic affect, distinction is made in the meanings of the adjectives ‘epistemic’ and ‘epistemological’. Epistemic aspects of experience can be named as several types. Perceived tension might concern what is known and/or how the figure of the knower is formulated. These are ontological aspects of knowledge 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 philosophy. 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: teleology. Here the question of ‘Who benefits?’ arises. Here I am speaking of epistemics as sets of practices, of collective doings that inevitably, are collectively 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

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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 demonstration 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 organizational 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 development 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 intervene 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 ecological science concept of ‘healthy ecosystem’. Seeking to experience that concept as expressed in a newly emergent regime of environmental governance 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

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had been brought into being in a local project of environmental rehabilitation funded by a government grant. The local semi-government environmental 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 volunteer organizations. The forest would express high environmental value and serve to promote the use of the concept in effecting market-based environmental 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 ethnographic 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 environment organizations who established and regularly tend this patch

How to use disconcertment as ethnographic field-device 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 ethnography. 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 irresistible 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 contemporary 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, dressedup 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 activities expressing an impressive collective knowing about what temperate 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 perhaps cold council chambers, others in warmer government meeting

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Helen Verran rooms. I imagined words uttered, the technical exchanges between ecologists, or the sometimes loud political debate between local landowners, 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 imagination of those who traversed the road then. In the early years of the twenty-first century, in the workings of the newly gazetted semigovernment authority, the Natural Resource Management Region of East Gippsland, new sets of activities came together as the practice of Australian environmental governance enacting environmental services 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 comfortable 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 elements 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 governance 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

How to use disconcertment as ethnographic field-device 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 EnglishScots-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 organizational 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)

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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 experience. 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, compose 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 articulate 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 manifestation. 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 environmental 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.

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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

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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 ethnographer. 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 autoethnographic 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 ethnographer faces. Despite the renewed academic interest that it has recently attracted, drawing in anthropology is hardly new (Geismar 2014). Drawing has traditionally 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 despite 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 ethnographic 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 theoretical 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

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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 experience, 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 pharmaceutical 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

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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 supposedly 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 experiential 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 primacy in fieldwork practices. Paradoxically enough, participant observation is one of the methodological 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

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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 ethnographic 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, fulfilling 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 citizenship 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

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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 importantly, 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, sometimes 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 medication 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, motionless 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 ethnographic 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.

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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 complexities 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.

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I would keep drawing the interior of the social pharmacy: I would visualize it first as a whole and then I would break down such sort of Gestaltlike 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 disarming 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 sensorial 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

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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 immediately 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 realistic 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.

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2 Stefan Ecks (2005) argues that in Kolkata, the biomedical promise of effective treatments that antidepressants retain comes with a notion of pharmaceutical citizenship. 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: Autoethnographic 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 dramatization of a big bang event by exercising field devices of viral worldmaking, 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 qualitative 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

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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 institutional 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 constellation of old and new media technologies and practices (Chadwick 2013). Qualitatively studying these big bang moments can be challenging for conventional ethnographic methods designed for situated practice through participatory 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 ‘epidemiology’ 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 increasingly 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 lockdown 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 reaction 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 historic 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.

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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 dramatic 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 mobilization 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

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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 contribution, 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

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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 continually 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 storyspecific 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.

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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 authenticity 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

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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 12year-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

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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 performance. 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 communication 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

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to life’ (Ingold 2010) and provides a methodological approach to qualitatively 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 information 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 semistructured 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 temptation 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- crowdsize.html

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7 www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/06/10/blacklivesmatter-surges-on-twitterafter-george-floyds-death/ 8 www.nytimes.com/article/george-floyd-protests-timeline.html 9 www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52969905 10 www.atla ntic coun cil.org/ blogs/ new- atla ntic ist/ geo rge- floyd- prote sts- worldracism/ 11 www.cbc.ca/ pare nts/ learn ing/ view/ when- geo rge- floyd- cal led- for- his- mama- ifelt-pain-because-im-someones-mama 12 https://cafemom.com/entertainment/keedron-bryants-mom-discusses-what-itslike-to-raise-a-young-activist 13 www.lati mes.com/ polit ics/ story/ 2020– 06– 28/ white- vot ers- rac ism- reckon inggeorge-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 19 www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52942105 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-killingof-george-floyd-make-you-feel/ 23 www.today.com/ video/ meet- the- 12- year- boy- who- sang- i- just- want- to- liveabout-george-floyd-84170821553 24 https://cafemom.com/entertainment/keedron-bryants-mom-discusses-what-itslike-to-raise-a-young-activist 25 www.insi der.com/ geo rge- floyd- obama- keed ron- bry ant- i- just- wanna- livesong-2020–5 26 https://news.sky.com/story/keedron-bryant-12-signs-deal-with-warner-recordsafter-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.

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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.

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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 communicate 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

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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 manoeuvre – 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 attitude 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 representation of political concerns and aesthetic objections. Artists were invited to find, manipulate, revisit or invent existing things as a mode of collective 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, collaboration 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 sociomaterial 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 industrial 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 interpretation of the artworks. For example, artist Eva Mustonen contributed to

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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 crossfertilization 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 professional curator was the long hours spent at the desk transcribing my

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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 ethnography as an exercise of redesigning the social. I was exhibiting knowledgein-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 cultivate 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, accelerative, 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

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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 particular 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 knowledge production impel us to reconsider the research process and include actors in new ways, encouraging reciprocity between academic and nonacademic 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 participate, 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 epistemic 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 negotiations 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

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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 process 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 previously 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

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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 document 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 transformation 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 eventually 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.

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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 inspiration 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 disciplinary 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 investigation 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.

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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 generosity. 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 entanglements and devices constructed for the exhibition, need not always be harmonious 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 collaborative as a modality of action. Traditionally, mainstream scientific epistemologies 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 experimentally addressed, examined and redesigned. For that, one has to: –

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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,

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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 Experimentally.’ 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.

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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 sensibility 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 territory during the Vietnam-American War. The bombing was intended to prevent 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

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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 simplest 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

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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 mindfully 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.

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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 outside: 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

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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 demolition team was using a new type of explosive trigger that was unfamiliar to the managing technician and his first few trigger attempts were unsuccessful due to operator error. For safety, the demolition was split into several 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 explosion 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 meditation 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 explosion 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

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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

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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 rustling 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 loudspeaker 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 confusing 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

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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 practice 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.

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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. Durham: Duke University Press. 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.

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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 sensory, 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, creativeliterary 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

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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 participating 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 phenomenon (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 transparency and accountability of how things come to be, in order to improve their social and environmental impact (Klein 2000).

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This mode of enquiry emerged from researching the field of (mostly selfbuild) 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. daylight, 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 surprising that they have become a focus! However, for me, this focus is certainly 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 imaginative, 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 multiple 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, historical, cultural and relational characteristics. Works such as the writer-chemist

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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 multivocality to it because of concrete’s syncretic aggregate nature and – because of concrete’s celebrated position within Modernism and narratives of development 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 distribution. 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

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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 anthropology) 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 orchestration 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

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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 generally, 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, standardization 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 practice 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

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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: extraction 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 entanglements (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

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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 historian 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 citizens 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, feasible, 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?).

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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 perception 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 Transformations 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.

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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.

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How to game ethnography Ignacio Farías and Tomás Sánchez Criado

Games have recently become relevant spaces for anthropological experimentation, enabling alternative approaches to critical analysis, conceptual work, and ethical discussion. But how can games become relevant as field devices? Using games in the field entails more than doing ethnography by playful means or playing games with ones’ counterparts. Indeed, the practices of ‘game design’ and ‘game testing’ afford peculiarly 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 critically 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 recursive 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

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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 ethical 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 several 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 knowledge, 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 collective 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 political 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

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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 critically 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 ethnographically 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 partially 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 workshop 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.

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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 particularly 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 imperative 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

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open player identities, like the ones encountered in the field. The design process 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 problematize early game ideas based on cooperative gameplays and altruistic actions by considering that a main challenge for activists is how to articulate unsalaried 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 eliminating 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 ethnographically 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 ethnographic 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 redescription 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.

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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 strategies 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 discussable 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 creating conditions for what Cantarella, Hegel and Marcus describe as a ‘revelatory 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 KarlMarx-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 properties rapidly entering the market. In this context, our games were to take two roles: to trigger conversations among local residents about current transformations 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.

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In this context, we brought our games to a one-day neighbourhood festival 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 critical 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 unsuccessful 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 neighbourhood 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’.

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Game testing, we would argue, not only creates occasions where ethnographic encounters are facilitated. It also creates conditions for paraethnographic reasoning. Para-ethnography is a concept proposed by Douglas Holmes and George Marcus for describing how fieldwork needs to be relearnt 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 resembling the ethnographer’s. This is certainly correct but misses one key characteristic 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 perspective 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 epistemic 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 further affordances of games for anthropological research might be recursively opened up as we game on. …

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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 fieldwork, 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.

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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 GonzálezTennant, 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, anthropological fieldwork methods, and affect theory. For both ethnographers and theatre makers working with the ‘real’, this writing and research methodology 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 composition, 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, elements 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

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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 dissertation; 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 analytical 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 performance 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’,

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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, archival 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 available 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.

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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 character 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 cultural 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

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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 liveliness 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 repetition becomes other than the words uttered, and it also may start mobilizing 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 process 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.

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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, character 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

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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 associations 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 culminate 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 interruption; 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.

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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, monologue, 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.

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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).

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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 (hopefully, 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 empirical focus: an artefact, like an image; a place; a person, group or organization; 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-anacalifornia-usa https://disaster-sts-network.org/content/enviro-injustice-building-globalrecord/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 hermeneutics’? 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

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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 interpretation; 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 reproducibility. 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 particular epistemic and discursive commitments (Fortun et al. 2017). Another challenge has been the assumption among many ethnographers that ethnographic 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, collaborative 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

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‘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 hermeneutics 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 hermeneutics 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 interpretive 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, collaborative 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, subjective and intersubjective. People don’t just come together, organically, especially in our fissured, late industrial times – times marked by structural adjustments that undercut many forms of collectivity (labour organizing, for example) while also powering forms of collectivity that are rigid, internalist, violently exclusionary, and virally reproductive (Fortun 2012).

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‘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 collaborative 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 dramatic 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 environmental 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 GREENMPNA in a collaboration, led by air chemists, focused on “beyond-thetailpipe” pollution (particles and gases from tires and brakes) that will persist after vehicles are electrified. A key challenge in this collaboration is

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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 corridor 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 opportunities for explication and interpretation – explication and interaction that is richer if produced collaboratively, drawing in people who tell different backstories 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 analytic 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, especially 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

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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 leadup 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 sometimes 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, ideologies, 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 discourse 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 infrastructure 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 collaborating researchers within our Santa Ana project, and among the much

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wider group of collaborating researchers working on our Environmental Injustice Global Record project, an array of projects focused on environmental 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 juxtapositional than comparative). The question set and analytic structure supporting this scale of analysis foreground the lingering effects of historical 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 interpretation; 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, ecological – 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 integrative 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 political 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 ethnography, 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 software like ATLAS-ti, NVivo and MAXQDA, all proprietary and thus difficult to use in extensive collaborations), PECE analytics don’t encourage researchers to uncover themes that can then be tracked across data

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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 hermeneutics – 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

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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 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. 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 collaboration 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 collaborative 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

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tent was critical infrastructure for his work. Marilyn Strathern calls out the conceptual 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 permitted 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 governance, 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 hermeneutics 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-injusticebuilding-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

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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 complementary 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 empirically studying urbanization – and one that is inventive, comparative and possibly useful for analyzing other current multi-sited and multiscalar 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 comparison. Basel: Birkhäuser. Degree of difficulty: Medium/Advanced (depends on the researcher’s disposition 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 ethnography 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

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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 precisely because it opens up possibilities to develop more experimental and inventive techniques. ‘Fieldwork on foot’ can thus mean very different strategies 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), methodologically 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 formation 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 territory 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 socioterritorial 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

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thus to adopt and adapt conventional methods in urban studies and anthropology 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 extensive 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 preparation 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 direction 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

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the Pantaco freight station and the Vallejo industrial zone. Despite the clear industrial past of these districts, urban transformation through de- and reindustrialization 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, improvising 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 accessible 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 perceptual walks, based on ‘the greatest possible openness and constant availability 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 knowledge – 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

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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 ethnographic 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 neighbourhood. 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.

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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 industrialization 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.

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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 considerable increase in the spatial quality of the ethnographic data during the research process. The spatiality of the data results primarily from the combination 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 territory 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

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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 particular 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 typical interview techniques – or also compared with the floating observations of the recorridos explorativos – is that they allow the researcher to foreground 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 socialization, and learning processes of and with the interlocutors. This is exemplified 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 territories. 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 profoundly influenced the analysis by writing and mapping. In other words, mobile ethnography is shaped by and deeply invested in a specific urban

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context and adapted to a particular research question. As such, this methodology is always in relation to particular situations and problems and therefore 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 multiple 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 collaborative 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 historical analysis and cartographic synthesis, thereby moving beyond the usual predisposed set of data. Rather than serving only an illustrative function, ethnographic, 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 ethnographically well-established thick description write-up – I applied a specific qualitative mapping method. This mapping method was collaboratively developed and designed as a part of the aforementioned comparative project. My study

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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 confrontation 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 concept, 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 significant precisely because of the evocation of an emotion, or perhaps more

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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 emotional gesture, from helpless melancholy to murderous cannibalism’ (ibid.). Warburg’s Mnemosyne Bilderatlas was an attempt to render visible this process 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 representation of life in motion’ (ibid.). And this was one of the things that was particular 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 gesture. 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 gesture 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 consciousness 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).

146 Anthony Stavrianakis 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 ethical 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 gesture 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 ‘gesture’ 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 illegitimacy 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 signification 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 signification for self and others, it could be said, is not a correlate of a technique (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

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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 photographer, 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.

148 Anthony Stavrianakis 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 associations, 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 medical 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.

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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 gesture, 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 protosignifications 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 gesture (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 sculptural 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 postByzantine figuration of compassion in lamentation, or Pietà (Giotto’s

150 Anthony Stavrianakis 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 alienating form, leads away from the descriptive ethnographic reality of experience (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.

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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 relationship 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 performative character of social and cultural life encountered in the field is too often rendered static through the rigidity of the discipline’s theoretical and literary 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

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been used, with varying degrees of success, to bring to life the vitality and depth of people’s lived experiences and expressive activities, Turner himself 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 experience. 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 history only to find that ‘mapping my life with its never-ending string of melodrama 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 methodological 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 understand 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, practicebased 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 language. 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 critical 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 present 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 ethnographically 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 ‘fieldwork performance’ begins. I accompany them but take on a tertiary role.1

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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, education 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 experience. 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 economic 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 interest’, 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 storytelling mix well-rehearsed narratives and existential concerns with spontaneous 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

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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 photography 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 ethnographic 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 performative 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 commonality 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 citizens, 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.

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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 diagnosis 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 recollection or description (of an event, object, situation) is anything other than a momentary expression in relation to its performative context. The fluidity 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 epistemological 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 theoretical 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 distinct 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 history. Because the externalization of the person’s thoughts and acts of remembering are carried out in the actual locations in which the original events and experiences occurred, this will also generate unexpected 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.

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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. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 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 engagement 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 ultimately 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

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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 children, 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 children 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 definition. 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 phenomena 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

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part of it, have experienced or witnessed or dreamed it, but for which perhaps 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, eventually 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 phenomenological 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

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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 discussion 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

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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 photostories 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 formulation, 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).

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afford the sort of privacy we value in western research paradigms, the project 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 stigmatization, 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 particularly 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 citizenship, 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

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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 highlight 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 picture 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 participate 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

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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 picture 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 / photostories. Ask your participants to choose one of the covered photostories, 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, imagination 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).

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Acknowledgements Photo-storying childhood publics into being was devised as part of the European Research Council-funded Connectors Study (ERC-StG335514): 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-ofpublic-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.

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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: putting 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 proliferation 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 ethnography 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 ethnographic 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 perform 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

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have always resorted to more media than written text, although the discipline has traditionally been reluctant to admit it (Edwards 2011). Both the representation 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 investigation 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 process 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 architecture. 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 architecture 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 visible in the pedagogical inflection of their activities and the diverse archival 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 difficulties, 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 infrastructural needs and achievements involved in these projects: the modest pieces of auto-constructed furniture that refurnished the public space, the methodologies 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 sensibility – 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 political 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

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activities, created large digital archives, and learned how to use digital technologies 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 partners 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 partners, 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 initially 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 proposal 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 selfmanaged 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, sustainability … 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 process, 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 fulfilled three functions: it made public its pedagogical programme, served as

176 Adolfo Estalella a documentary archive for learnings, and certified the apprenticeships of participants. The certification mechanism used Mozilla Foundation opensource 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 workshop. This certification mechanism materialized our profound shared conviction – 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 infrastructure: 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 appreciate 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 unmediated 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 technological 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 technologies 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-touse technology but a digital platform designed at the centre of the ethnographic 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 infrastructure thus remediated this complicated ethnographic situation by changing 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

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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 infrastructure, I have in mind Casper Bruun Jensen and Brit Ross Winthereik’s conception of infrastructures as ‘platform[s] for action that are simultaneously 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 intervention that the project carries out. The infrastructure may thus be understood as the relational world that unfolds as the project ambulates through the city.

178 Adolfo Estalella A second reflection touches upon the semiotic qualities of Ciudad Escuela infrastructure. While our imagination tends to pay attention to the preeminent 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 language 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, sustainability, resources and urban archives, among others. The itineraries were a journey through learnings, but they were a literal displacement throughout the city too, honouring the ambulatory methodology 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 visible in badges like open design, sustainability practices, and recycling activities. 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 ethnographiclike 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 entanglements Ciudad Escuela grows out and relates to. Anthropology has for too long assumed that writing is the paradigmatic (or even exclusive) representational 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

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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: neither 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 contemporary (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 ethnography 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 innovative 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 ethnographic 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 transformation 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 outside – and certainly, it is not a mere object of inquiry – an infrastructure in ethnography – but something different. I would like to call it an ethnographic 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,

180 Adolfo Estalella 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 ethnographic 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 forward 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 ethnographic 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 responsibility but were the result of a sustained collaboration with my partner Corsín Jiménez.

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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 multiplication 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 intricate muscles of our sideways glances and avoid the traps of complacency. It is an ethnographic device that is useful not only for the individual fieldworker 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

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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 fieldwork 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 educational 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 particular 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 fieldwork 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 possibilities for anthropological inquiry, through ethnographic experimentation. My understanding of probes builds on previous uses of probes in anthropology, 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 previously 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 diagnosis, such as listening to hearts, palpating lumps and orientating themselves 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 medical 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 reorientating 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

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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 comparative approach. We have written about these sensory methods experiments elsewhere (Harris et al. 2020), showing how such a ‘proof of concept’ methodological 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 experience 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 bitesized 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 imaginative spaces and reorientated our ways of noticing, whether in how to describe touch through new words, through creating disruptions in fieldwork 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 reflexivity 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 themselves 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

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a prompt, a probe, to get them out of their own particular routines of improvisation and invention. In our weekly activities in Making Clinical Sense, we tried different forms of notation – drawing, musical notation, dance notation. 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 simultaneous 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 collaborative 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 generate 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 ethnographic projects, in ways which attend, carefully, to the needs and curiosities of the researchers and teachers? How might others learn from this project or draw inspiration from our endeavours? What kind of ethnography may happen through probes? I have suggested in this device description 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 ethnography 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 fieldwork progresses. Share the results of the probes on a shared drive or online folder. Meet regularly to discuss insights from the probe activity, during fieldwork 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.

How to disrupt our field habits with sensory probes • •

• • •

•

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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 interrogate one or more aspects of their topical interests. If this is too difficult, 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 analytical 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

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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.

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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 ethnographer 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

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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 outside 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 government and the FARC in 2016. It seeks to guarantee the rights of victims to truth, justice, reparation, and non-repetition. The institutions that compose 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 testimonies, 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 participation 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, piercing 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 accompany 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 textilemaking 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

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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 introspectively 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 personally. ‘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

196 Tania Pérez-Bustos 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 production. This is in the sense that there is a body that is stitched in the embroidery, 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 possibilities 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 understand 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

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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 knowledge 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 cognitive 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 politicalepistemic 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 embroidery 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

198 Tania Pérez-Bustos 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 methodological 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 knowledge 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 intimately 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 companion 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.

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Stitching (ethnography) is a practice that generates collective knowledge. 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 interpretative 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 ethnographic fieldwork, to destabilize conventions that restrict, and to re-envision the field/s as something else altogether, opening up spaces for unruly scholarship 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 anthropology 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 anthropology becomes anthropology, and anthropologists, anthropologists. The discipline 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

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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 neoliberal restructuring of post-secondary institutions that see anthropology as no longer relevant. In response, anthropologists try to find significance, especially with every global crisis, promising to help solve the world’s problems, even though the very practice of fieldwork has so often reproduced the liberal (Boasian) logics involved in the creation of those world problems in the first place. Fieldwork, and field techniques, remain a vestige of our colonial histories 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, spatially 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 anthropology, ‘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

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Halme-Tuomisaari 2016; but also da Col et al. 2017; Mullings 2005). As Dobson argues, anthropology often appears as an ‘elite professional fraternity’ (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, undisciplined, 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/elimination 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 flirtatious 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 …

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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

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Denielle Elliott [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.]

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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.]

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Denielle Elliott 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.]

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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.]

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Denielle Elliott 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

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[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

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Denielle Elliott [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!’]

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[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 anthropology.’ 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-theladies-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.

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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 morethan-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 reproduce 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 longterm 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

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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 articulate, 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 seemingly 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, admittedly, 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 aesthetics 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 seriously 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

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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 practice 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 possibilities 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 possibilities 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 experimentation, embodied praxis, collective improvisation. Put differently – the otherwise 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 experimentation 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 capitalist heteronormativity, off-grid, in dialogue with a range of more-thanhumans 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

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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 methodologies 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 operation. 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 multiple translations at play in re-enacting Glissant’s play – both in the sense

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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 transform 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 PiepznaSamarasinha (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 process 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 effectively did a form of what we would call fieldwork, and in the process identified anti-hegemonic spatial practices that pointed at another, actually existing, neighbourhood, one which relied on collective ingenuity, makeshift 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 development, consumption and waste. public works were also inventive in their

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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 bottomup 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 inspiration 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 anthropological 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 conversation 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 opportunities 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).

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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 collaboration 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 responsibilities 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 collaborative 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 sensibilities. 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

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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. Durham: Duke University Press. 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.

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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 consideration of the irreducible singularities of field situations and their relevance 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 creative 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 systematizing archival practices of countercultural and digital activists, we DOI: 10.4324/9781003253709-23

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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 longstanding 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 inventory means documenting and acknowledging the everyday acts of inventiveness 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 inspiration 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

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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 inventorying 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) pedagogic 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 inventories 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 ethnographic 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

226 Tomás Sánchez Criado and Adolfo Estalella 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 speculative 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, architectural historian Cathy Smith studied the aesthetics and relevance of doit-yourself manuals: ‘an important educational platform through which counterculturalists could disseminate not only practical know-how of construction 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 reconstruct 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 invention 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 provide 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

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their distinct modes of inquiry. The core elements of each piece are accompanied by a series of further attempts to systematize these practices in procedural 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 appreciate 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 aficionado, 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 fieldwork 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

228 Tomás Sánchez Criado and Adolfo Estalella 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 inventorying 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 mechanism for lines of creative process, under continuing variation’ (Massumi 2016, 6). We envision the practice of inventorying not as an act of preserving 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 recognize 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 nonprofessional 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 contemporary DIY making, in which practitioners work tirelessly to present the traceability of sources, as well as the different versions being produced. In her

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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 technical 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. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 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.

230 Tomás Sánchez Criado and Adolfo Estalella 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 Affect Theater 112–15, 118–19; b more 112, 114–15, 118 Agu, Marika 75 Allison, Rachel Vaden 182, 184 archive 33, 49, 112–13, 126, 137, 174–8, 183, 207, 218, 222–9; anarchiving 228; digital archives 63–70; Kiez Mind Archive 108; see also inventory Asad, Talal 203 assisted suicide 4, 143, 145–6, 147, 148–9 Asthma Files, The 5–6, 126, 128, 181n4 Aruldoss, Vinnarasan 4, 12n4, 162–71 Ballestero, Andrea 3, 9 Banks, Marcus 165 Barba, Eugenio 113, 117 Bateson, Gregory 210 Behar, Ruth 208 Bell, Kirsten 205 Benedict, Ruth 210 Benton, Adia 204 Berger, John 53 Biehl, João 203 Bindal, Rojîn 105 Blanchot, Maurice 18 Boas, Franz 201–3, 206, 211 Boellstorf, Tom 209 Bohannan, Laura 208 Bonanno, Letizia 9, 52–61 Borges, Jorge Luís 49, 123 Bourdieu, Pierre 6 Briggs, Jean 206

Bryant, Johnetta 68 Bryant, Keedron 66, 68–9 Cantarella, Luke 107 Celan, Tjaša 105 Chagnon, Napoleon 206 childhood 12n4, 83, 86–7, 155, 157, 162–70, 166, 169, 206 Colectivo Situaciones 26 Coleman, Biella 209 collaboration 1, 4–5, 12n1, 19, 29, 33, 35–7, 40–1, 74, 76–8, 107, 110, 113, 122, 125, 129–31, 133, 164, 173–5, 180n1, 182, 184, 186–7, 189, 218–19, 229n2; see also collaborative; collective collaborative 5–6, 27, 33–6, 39–41, 73, 79–81, 114, 122–33, 140–1, 143, 146, 150, 152–4, 159, 164–5, 181n4, 182, 187–8, 198, 214, 218–19, 225–6; collaborative hermeneutics 5, 122–32, 130, 181n4 collective 1, 10, 19, 21, 23–31, 33–5, 40, 43–5, 47–8, 65, 74, 103, 134, 173–5, 192, 195–9, 214–15, 217, 224, 226 Connectors Study 162–3, 166, 169 Coombe, Rosemary 209 Corsín Jiménez, Alberto 173, 228 Counter-Cartographies Collective (3Cs) 10, 23–32; Counter-mapping Queen Mary 23, 27, 28; see also counter-mapping counter-mapping 10, 23–32, 28 Cox, Katie 125 Crapanzo, Vincent 208 creativity see invention

232

Index

Criado, Tomás S. 1–14, 19, 102–11, 205, 222–30 Culhane, Dara 4, 185, 187 dance 15–19, 21, 114, 187, 200, 202–11 data 4–5, 27, 31, 33–41, 43, 63, 65–7, 70, 79, 122–4, 126, 128–31, 134, 137, 139–41, 154, 159, 175, 181n4, 185, 187–8, 202 Dattatreyan, E. Gabriel 3, 213–21 Deacon, Arthur Bernard 9 Deloria, Ella Cara 204 device see field device, disposition devicing 4–5, 11, 225; see also field device, disposition Dewey, John 186 digital 1, 3–5, 12n1, 12n7, 33–42, 62–70, 122–9, 162, 164–5, 172–80, 182, 185, 187, 222, 225, 228; digital platform 33–42, 62–70, 122–9, 173–80, 181n4, 225 disconcertment 4, 12n3, 43–51 disposition 2, 6, 9–11, 89, 134, 140, 198, 222, 224, 226–7 disruption 6, 27, 62–3, 112, 118, 153, 182–9, 217 documents 39, 47, 76, 112–16, 127, 144, 185, 188–9, 213, 216, 223–9; document, to 33, 64, 111, 159, 174, 183, 217–19, 223–9; documentaries 34, 39, 112, 145, 148–9, 214–16; documentation 76, 79–80, 102, 174–6 Domínguez Rubio, Fernando 228 dramaturgy 112, 114, 117–21 drawings 9, 24–5, 30, 52–60, 58, 144, 160, 163, 169, 173, 176, 185, 187, 189, 205 drifting 26–7, 30, 32n1, 129, 135, 141 Dumit, Joe 104, 106 Durington, Matthew 104 eco-building 94, 96, 98–9 EcoGovLab 122, 125–8 Edu, Ugo 120 Elliott, Denielle 4, 200–12 Elliott, Orville 205 embodiment 25, 29, 45–6, 50, 55, 67–8, 95, 97, 115, 133, 149, 153–5, 158–9, 184, 186, 197–8, 215 epidemiography 13, 62–72 Escobar, Arturo 26

Estalella, Adolfo 1–14, 19, 131n4, 172–81, 205, 222–30; Ciudad Escuela (The City as a School) 172, 175–9; Ciudad Huerto (The City as a Urban Community Garden) 172, 177 EthnoData 5, 33–6, 38–41, 181n4 ethnographic 1–2, 4–11, 15, 19, 21, 23, 25–6, 31, 33–5, 39, 41, 43, 46, 49–50, 52–3, 55–7, 59–60, 62–3, 73–6, 79–81, 83, 92, 99, 102–12, 122–4, 133, 135–7, 139–140, 144, 150, 152–4, 157–9, 162–4, 172–6, 178–80, 182–4, 186–9, 192–204, 209, 213–14, 216, 218, 222–8; ethnographic drawing 9, 52–60, 58 ethnography 1–3, 7–11, 12n5, 13n7, 17, 24, 33, 35–7, 40–1, 43, 46, 47, 50, 52–5, 62–3, 69, 76–7, 79, 83, 85, 92, 102–3, 109, 123, 125, 129, 131n4, 133–5, 139–41, 143, 152, 154, 158, 172–3, 175–6, 179–80, 184, 186–90, 192–3, 197–9, 202, 204, 206, 208, 213–14, 216, 222–5, 227; auto-ethnography 50; ethnography in motion 12n5, 133–41, 137; para-ethnography 102, 107, 109 exhibitions 1, 4–5, 12n2, 12n4, 13n8, 34, 73–81, 80, 92, 97, 102, 107, 162, 164, 166–70, 219 experiment 8, 24, 33, 35, 48, 52, 55, 64, 74–81, 90, 97, 100, 110, 113, 118, 123–30, 133–5, 173–80, 182, 184, 187–9, 191n1, 211n2, 213–16, 218, 225–8; ethnographic experimentation 3, 34–5, 41, 49–51, 74–81, 113, 118, 123–30, 173–80, 184–5, 187, 215–16, 225–8; experimental collaborations 19, 39, 76, 80, 123–30, 133–5, 175 Evans-Pritchard, Edward Evan 210 Fassin, Didier 205 Fan, Elsa 204 Farías, Ignacio 4, 11n1, 102–11 Farmer, Paul 206 Favret-Saada, Jeanne 112–15, 118 feminism 24–7, 29–30, 33–5, 123, 163 Feminists Liberating Our Collective Knowledge (FLOCK) 29 field device 1–2, 4, 6–10, 12n1, 12n5, 12n6, 12n7, 23, 33, 43–4, 46, 50, 52–3, 55, 62, 65, 67, 69–70, 73, 83, 89, 92, 102, 112–13, 115, 118, 122,

Index 133–4, 140, 143, 152–4, 159, 162, 172, 182, 184, 192, 222, 224–5, 228 field encounter 1–2, 5–11, 12n6, 26, 52–3, 59–60, 102–4, 106–9, 111, 146, 152–60, 172, 175–6, 180, 183–4, 186, 188, 194–6, 213–15, 218–19, 222, 224, 227 fieldnotes 52–60, 58, 76–7, 83–90, 106, 108, 115, 119, 165, 167, 170n3, 186–7, 201, 203 fieldpoetry 83–90 fieldwork 3, 7, 9–10, 39, 52–60, 73, 75–7, 79–81, 83–90, 97, 104–10, 112, 115, 119, 121, 133–7, 143–6, 150, 152–4, 159, 164, 179, 182–90, 200–11, 213–14, 216–17, 222–4, 227 Fischer, Michael J. 3 Fisher, Roy 146 Fleetwood, Nicole 218–19; Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration 218 Fletcher, Harrel 183 flowing 4, 12n1, 16, 50, 62, 64, 66, 69–70, 92–100, 118, 122–4, 159, 222; flowing with materials 4, 12n1, 92–100 Floyd, George 62–9 Fortun, Kim 5, 35, 122–32, 181n4 Fortun, Mike 5, 35, 122–32, 181n4 Fortune, Reo 210 Fossey, Diane 208 Foucault, Michel 18, 54, 209; The History of Madness 18 Fraser, Sir James 210 games 4, 11n1, 27, 102–11, 110, 165, 168; Cards against Anthropology 104, 106; House of Gossip 102–3, 105–6, 108; Kiez Mind Archive 108; Sue Them All 105–8 game, to 4, 11n1, 27, 102–11, 110; Gaming Anthropology: A Sourcebook from #Anthropologycon 103 Garcia, Angela 203 Garfinkel, Harold 184 Geertz, Clifford 178, 210 genres 3, 29, 83, 85, 103, 129, 150, 172–3, 187, 200, 222, 225–8 get/getting caught 9–10, 85, 112–21 Ginsberg, Faye 214 Giordano, Cristiana 8–10, 112–21; Disrupting the Narrative Urge 112; Unstories 112, 114–17, 120

233

Goffman, Erving 113, 213 Goodall, Jane 208 Graeber, David 205 Gupta, Akhil 207 Haddon, Alfred Cort 9, 201 Hallam, Elizabeth 8 Harkness, Rachel 4, 12n1, 92–101; An Unfinished Compendium of Materials 92 Harney, Stefano 214 Harris, Anna 6, 182–91; Making Clinical Sense 182, 184, 186–7, 189 Hartigan, John 209 Hegel, Christine 107 hermeneutics 5, 34, 122–32, 181n4 Holmes, Douglas 109 Hopkins, Rob 99 ‘How to’ sections 31, 41–2, 50–1, 60, 70, 81, 90, 99–100, 110–11, 119–21, 129, 141, 150, 159–60, 168–70, 180, 188, 198–9 human rights 33, 36, 39–40, 96 Hunt, George 204 Hurston, Zora Neale 204 imagination 5, 52, 59, 92, 99, 129, 133, 145, 152, 158, 160, 177–8 In, Sarah 120 infrastructures 1, 4–5, 12n1, 34–5, 37, 41, 48, 122–5, 128–9, 131n4, 172–80, 181n4, 214, 218, 225 Ingold, Tim 8, 65, 69–70, 208 inquiry 1, 3–5, 10–12, 24, 33–5, 41–3, 50–1, 66, 73, 75, 77, 80–1, 85, 92, 94, 96, 102–3, 109, 113–15, 118, 126, 133, 141, 143–6, 148–50, 152, 154–5, 172, 175, 179–80, 184, 193–4, 198, 222–8 interlude 15–22, 200–12, 213–21 invention 1–4, 6–11, 12n1, 12n6, 15–21, 24, 26, 30–1, 34, 39–41, 53–4, 56, 58, 63, 66, 69, 73–9, 81, 83, 89, 92, 94–9, 102–7, 109, 113–16, 118–21, 123–7, 133–5, 139, 141, 145, 152–5, 162–4, 167–70, 174–5, 179, 182, 185–9, 192, 194–6, 198–9, 209, 213–20, 222–9; and convention 1, 4–10, 15, 25, 63, 81, 114, 134, 152, 154, 173, 186, 200, 202, 222–3 inventory 1–2, 7, 10–11, 222–8; taking inventory 222–8

234

Index

Irving, Andrew 5–8, 152–61; Strange Distance: Towards an Anthropology of Interior Dialogue 153–5, 159 Jackson Jr, John 205, 214 Jensen, Casper Bruun 177 joint problem-making 19, 175 Jones, William 204 July, Miranda 183 Juris, Jeff 24 Kant, Immanuel 16 Kaweesa, Nalongo 6–8, 154–60 Klinger, Marie 108 Kluckhohn, Clyde 210 Kohn, Eduardo 16 Koinoniko Iatreio Alleliggiis (KIA) 54, 56 Kondo, Dorinne 153 Korsby, Trine 146 Kotb, Hoda 68–9 Krischer, Lilian 105, 108 Kronemyer, Nora 108 Kuč, Miodrag 107 Kuper, Hilda 209 Kusenbach, Margarethe 139 Landes, Ruth 205 Larkin, Brian 178 Latham, Alan 184, 186–7 Laurelli, Camille 77–9, 80 Law, John 5–6 Leach, Sir Edmund 207 Levi, Primo 95 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 9, 204 Lewis, Oscar 209 Little, Ken 208 Lorde, Audre 202 Lury, Celia 4, 141, 166, 223 Lutz, Catherine 163 Madison Park Neighborhood Association (GREEN-MPNA) 5, 125–7 Malinowski, Bronislaw 179 Mammana, Diana 108 mapping 10, 23–32, 34, 49, 62, 65–6, 66, 69, 118, 135, 140, 141n3, 153, 160, 189; see also counter-mapping Marboeuf, Olivier 219 Marcus, George 3, 7, 107, 109, 153, 202, 206, 223 Marrero-Guillamón, Isaac 3, 213–21

Martin, Emily 205 Martínez, Francisco 4, 12n2, 73–82; Ethnographic Experiments with Artists, Designers and Boundary Objects 73; Objects of Attention 73–4, 77, 79, 81 Marx, Karl 96 Masolo, Maria 120 Massumi, Brian 228 Mauss, Marcel 210 Mead, Margaret 202, 210 Merry, Sally Engle 34 Miner, Horace 207 Morgan, Lewis Henry 210 Morley, Sylvanus 210 Moten, Fred 214 Muir, John 93 Mullings, Leith 207 multimodal anthropology 3, 33, 41, 109, 172, 179, 213; multimodality 3, 109, 213 Muñoz, José Esteban 215 Mustonen, Eva 74 nanostory 65, 66, 68–9 Narayan, Kirin 208 Neel, James 208 Nicolini, Kim 153 Nolas, Sevasti–Melissa 4, 12n4, 162–71 Nordstrom, Carolyn 207 Nott, John 182, 184 Núñez, Jorge 4, 33–42, 181n4 Ouvertures 216 Overlie, Mary 114 Pandian, Anand 11, 215 Pärn, Martin 75 Parsons, Elsie Clews 210 Parsons, Talcott 210 participant observation 7–8, 10, 55, 57, 70, 96, 113, 175, 210 Patel, Shama 4, 13n7, 62–72 Pathosformel 12n7, 143–50 Paxson, Heather 209 Pérez-Bustos, Tania 8, 12n5, 192–9; Embroidering Bodies that Listen 193 Pétonnet, Colette 136 Photo-stories 12n4, 162–70, 166, 169 Piepzna-Samarasinha, Lakshmi 217 Pierotti, Greg 8–10, 112–21; Disrupting the Narrative Urge 112; Moment

Index Work 114; Unstories 112, 114–17, 120 Piven, Frances 63 Platform for Experimental and Collaborative Ethnography (PECE) 5, 35, 122–6, 128–30 poetry 67, 69, 83–90, 173, 209 Poirier, Lyndsay 35, 123 politics 2–3, 5, 19, 24–7, 30, 34, 38, 40–5, 48–9, 56, 63, 67, 73–4, 78, 92, 94–5, 97–8, 103, 105, 108–9, 124–5, 127–9, 162–4, 167–8, 174, 197, 200, 202, 213–20 Postill, John 4, 13n7, 62–72 Powdermaker, Hortence 205 Praks, Hannes 77–8 Precarias a la Deriva 24, 26–7 publics 35, 42, 103, 162–70 Quack, Sebastian 104 Rabinow, Paul 3, 143, 146, 180, 207 Raffles, Hugh 209 Real Silent Sam Coalition 29 reflexivity 25, 52–3, 57, 74, 107, 109, 140 remediation 8, 172, 180 response 3, 12n3, 18–20, 25, 27–8, 30, 35–6, 65, 74, 83, 110, 118, 126–8, 154, 159, 201, 222, 227 responsibility 44, 76, 139, 159, 180n1, 198, 217, 219–20 responsive ethnography of data, 33, 35, 38, 41 responsiveness 3, 33, 35, 38, 41, 187 Reyes, David 137–9 Ribes, David 34 Riley, Shannon Rose 205 Roberts, Elizabeth 35 Robinson, Jennifer 135 Rocha, Jara 223–4 Rock, Melanie 209 Rosaldo, Michelle 207 Rosaldo, Renato 209 Ruppert, Evelyn 5–6 R-Urban Wick 217 Sahlins, Marshall 204 Salter, Anastasia 104 Sapir, Edward 210 Savransky, Martin 1, 11, 15–22 Sayer, Andrew 163 Schechner, Richard 113

235

Scheper-Hughes, Nancy 208 Schütz, Alfred 16 Science and Technology Studies (STS) 5–6, 33, 35, 174, 176, 182, 225 Senselab 228 Sensory Ethnography Lab 214 sensory probes 182–90, 190 Shange, Savannah 201 Sheikh, Shela 219 Simonetti, Cristián 95, 97 situated knowledges 23, 26 slavery 29, 96, 149 Smith, Cathy 226 Smith, Dorothy 204 Snelting, Femke 223–4 Soans, Hanno 75 sociomaterial assemblages 65, 68–9 Ssewankambo, Margaret 6–8, 154–60, 156 Stavrianakis, Anthony 4, 12n7, 143–51; Designs on the Contemporary 146 Stewart, Kathleen 206 stitch 192–9 Stoler, Ann 207 Stoller, Paul 208 Strathern, Marilyn 10, 106, 131n4, 179 Streule, Monika 8, 12n5, 133–42; entrevistas en movimiento 133–5, 137, 137, 139–41; Ethnography of Urban Territories 134; Recorridos explorativos 133–7, 139–41 Suárez, Maka 4, 33–42, 181n4 Taussig, Michael 59, 209 Taylor, Janelle 187 Tax, Sol 207 Teitelbaum, Rae 215–16 thick description 23, 87 Thomas, Deborah 202 Thomas, Dylan 89 Tierney, Patrick 208 Todd, Zoe 203 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph 203 Tsing, Anna 209 Turner, Victor 64, 113, 152–3, 204 Tylor, E. B. 210 University of North Carolina 10, 24, 26–7, 29 van Vügt, Sophia 105 Varvantakis, Christos 4, 12n4, 162–71

236

Index

Verran, Helen 4, 12n3, 43–51 Viewpoints 114 Wagner, Lauren 184, 186–7 Wagner, Roy 2–4, 8–10, 15–16, 19–20, 184; The Invention of Culture 16 Wakeford, Nina 4, 141, 166, 223 Warburg, Aby 143–5; Dürer and Italian Antiquity 144; Mnemosyne Bilderatlas 145 Wasik, Bill 67 Weigand, Tan 108 Wenneman, Kiane 108 Winter, Judith 95, 97

Winthereik, Brit Ross 3, 177 Wojcik, Andrea 182, 184 Wolf, Eric 207–8 workflow 122–4 writing genres see genre xcol. An Ethnographic Inventory 225 Zallot, Vanessa 105 Zani, Leah 6, 83–91; Bomb Children 83, 86–7 Zibell, John 120 ZK/U-Centre for Art and Urbanistics 107