1st Edition
The Creative Ethnographer's Notebook
The Creative Ethnographer's Notebook offers emerging and trained ethnographers exercises to spark creativity to increase the impact and beauty of ethnographic study.
With contributions by emerging scholars as well as leading creative ethnographers working in various social science fields (e.g., anthropologists, educators, ethnomusicologists, political scientists, geographers, and others), this volume offers readers a variety of creative prompts that ethnographers have used in their own work and university classrooms to deepen their ethnographic and artistic practice. The contributions foreground different approaches in creative practice, broadening the tools of multimodal ethnography as one designs a study, works with collaborators and landscapes, and renders ethnographic findings through a variety of mediums. Instructors will find dozens of creative prompts to use in a wide variety of classroom settings including early beginners to experienced ethnographers and artists. The book includes numerous pop-up definitions to key ethnographic terms, eBook links to creative ethnographic examples, possibilities to extend prompts for more advanced anthropologists, and helpful tips across all phases of an inquiry project.
This resource can be used by anthropology and other social science instructors to teach students how to engage with creative approaches as well as how to do better public and engaged anthropology. Artists and arts faculty will also benefit from using this book to inspire culturally attuned art making that engages in research as well as research-based art. Readers learn how creative ethnography draws on aspects of the literary, visual, sonic and/or performing arts. Information is provided about how scholars and artists, or scholartists, document culture in ways that serve more diverse, public and academic audiences.
Chapter 1: Introduction to Creative Ethnography as a field
Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor & Kristina Jacobsen
Chapter 2: Creative Engagements with Social Theory: Writing Through The Abstract to Arrive at the Concrete
Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor: Giving Meaning and Voice to Objects
Alder Keleman Saxena: The Taste of Theory: Understanding Discursive, Materialist, and Phenomenological Approaches with Food
Bernard C. Perley: Comic Relief: Making a World of Difference in Anthropology
Chapter 3: Reading Ethnographies with Creative Attention to the Senses
Anthony Kwame Harrison: Scoring the Ethnographic Episode
Kristina Jacobsen, Making the Familiar Strange: Writing a Song from a Newspaper Article
Sienna Craig: Mine the Gap: Writing into a Poem’s Expanse
Chapter 4: Creative Approaches to What Matters & Paying Attention to What Makes You Curious
Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor: Working in Non-Western Literary & Linguistic Forms
Peter Sutoris: Slowing Down the Ethnographic Gaze through Observational Videomaking
Fiona Murphy and Evropi Chatzipanagiotidou: Writing Silence through Ethnography, Intimate and Otherwise
Chapter 5: Designing Ways to Make Data Sing
Kristina Jacobsen: Writing Someone Else’s Life Story
Jess Falcone: Writing Along the Faction Spectrum
Adrie Kusserow: Inside The Prose Poem: Using Fresh Metaphors And Similes To Open Up Fieldwork
Chapter 6: Entering the Fieldsite: Space and the non human–seeing the field, landscape, and nonhuman life in places of inquiry
Kristina Jacobsen: Creating Empathy and Writing from a Picture
Paul Stoller: Writing Space and Place
David Syring: Attending to Animal Stories, Listening for Lines
Chapter 7: Language: We Are What We Speak
Melisa (Misha) Cahnmann-Taylor: Translingual Poetry & Scholarship
Sara Snyder Hopkins: Writing a Song in an Endangered Language
Steven Alvarez: Lyrical Storytelling and Finding Voice
Chapter 8: Our Bodies, Our Selves: Interrogating the Ethnographic Body, Kinship and Food during Fieldwork
Nomi Stone: Linebreak: Temporality and Embodied Experience
Kristina Jacobsen: Cultivating Appetite: Food, Travel, and Communing Through Food
Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor: Artful Scholarship with Interview Data
Chapter 9: People, Places and Performance: Ritual, Religion and Visualities
William Lempert: Production Values in Practice
Naomi Sunderland: Creative Sensory Ethnography through Group Songwriting
Ather Zia: War & Witness*
Chapter 10: Creative Approaches to Social Science Data
Debra Vidali: Representing Ethnographic Insights through Mural Sketches
Kael Reid: Using a three-step coding process to co-compose song lyrics from qualitative interviews: A lesson for intermediate-level researchers
Sally Campbell Pirie: For those who would wear the whale mask: Using mask-making to perform and transform the ethnographic monologue
Chapter 11: Writing it Up: Multimodality, Genre, and How to Translate Creative Activity for an Academic Audience
Jay Hammond: Recording an Ethnographic Soundscape
Nicoletta Demetriou: Write to discover what you truly want to say
Kwame Phillips & Debra Vidali, Creating an Ethnographic Exhibit
Cristina Moretti: After the fieldsite: writing about the unexplained
Chapter 12, Creative Ethnographic Fieldstarters
Ruth Behar, Digging Deep into the Essentials of Ethnographic Writing
Renato Rosaldo, Trauma and Turning Around the Ethnographic Gaze
Chapter 13: Looking Back and Moving Forward
Kristina Jacobsen Ethnographic Songwriting, Deep Hanging Out, and Keeping Our Practice Alive: Intention, Showing Up, and Feeding our Inner ‘Scholartist’
Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor: When Poetry Became Ethnography and Other Flying Pig Tales: An Ode to Dell Hymes as well as Creative Ethnographic Mentors Past, Present and Future
Biography
Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor, Professor of Language and Literacy Education at the University of Georgia, has authored six books including a book of poems, Imperfect Tense. Kristina Jacobsen, an Associate Professor of Songwriting and Anthropology (Sociocultural & Linguistic) at the University of New Mexico, is a touring singer-songwriter and Fulbright Scholar (US-Italy, 2019-2020).
"A diverse assemblage of well-documented, accessible tools and exercises that challenge and embolden aspiring ethnographers toward “scholartistry": integrating artistic practices into their lives and ways of doing research, presenting that work in media and forms more resonant and congruent with the communities they study, and to broader academic and public audiences."
Mark Simos, Professor, Songwriting Dept, Berklee College of Music
