1st Edition
The Creative Ethnographer's Notebook
Chapter 1: Introduction to Creative Ethnography as a Field
Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor & Kristina Jacobsen
SECTION 1 Preparing for the Field
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
SECTION II In the Field
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 Non-Human 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 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
SECTION III After the Field
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 Academic Audiences
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, Meigs Professor of Language and Literacy Education at the University of Georgia, has authored six books, including a book of poems, Imperfect Tense. She became a Fulbright Ambassador (Mexico) in 2022.
Kristina Jacobsen, 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
