Minor Field: Multimodal Ethnography

While the two major fields (“Political Anthropology” and “Religion, Science, and Critical Secular Studies”) focus on theoretical engagements with the anthropology of science, technology, and religion, this minor field concentrates on an emerging ethnographic method. Multimodal ethnography—materializing from visual ethnographic methods—evokes the heterogeneities of anthropological research across multiple platforms and collaborative sites, including film, photography, soundscapes, dialogue, performance, installations, social media, kinesis, and practice.

While recognizing that ethnographic methods have always incorporated a certain level of multimodal approaches, this field aims to (i) trace the historic genealogy of multimodality and political ethnography within the landscape of so-called “postcolonial anthropology,” (ii) grapple with the ways in which multimodality interfaces with ethnography as a (set of) technique(s), and (iii) further conceptualize my own (modest) contributions to multimodal ethnography by way of “ethnographic texture” (Genovese 2018; Powis 2019, personal communication) and “gonzo ethnography/phronetics” (Genovese 2019).

This field is centered on a tripartite organization of multimodality and its relationship to the history, technique, and future of ethnography as an anthropological method:

1. A micro-genealogy around the politics of ethnography focusing on the legacy of postcolonial and symbolic anthropology in trying to answer the question of how ethnographic methods are complicit within our own disciplinal history and in what ways are we attempting to supersede our inherent coloniality—multimodality and the politics of truth.
2. The ways in which multimodality is mobilized in ethnographic research and how empiricism re-emerges or is re-contextualized within the process—multimodality and ethnographic technique.
3. Focusing on how the development of affectively tactile photography, sonically immersive soundscapes, and gonzo phronetic performance can lead to the blurring of normative emic/etic practices in ethnographic research. The ethnographic subject can become ruptured or occluded as a result of the fabrication of empirical fidelity through a re-contextualization process, thereby providing small previously concealed cues about the communities and spaces ethnographers and interlocutors inhabit—multimodality and the conceptualization of ethnographic texture & gonzo ethnography.

References.

Genovese, Taylor R. 2018. “The decadence and depravity of Biosphere 2.” Footnotes. May 30. https://footnotesblog.com/2018/05/30/the-decadence-and-depravity-of-biosphere-2/.

———. 2019. “Going Gonzo: Toward a Performative Practice in Multimodal Ethnography.” entanglements 2 (1): 97–110.

Reading List.

1. Multimodality and the Politics of Truth

Behar, Ruth. 2007. “Ethnography in a Time of Blurred Genres.” Anthropology and Humanism 32 (2): 145–55. https://doi.org/10.1525/ahu.2007.32.2.145.

Bernes, Jasper. 2017. The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus, eds. 2010. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Clough, Patricia Ticineto. 2009. “The New Empiricism: Affect and Sociological Method.” European Journal of Social Theory 12 (1): 43–61. https://doi.org/10.1177/1368431008099643.

Descola, Philippe. 2013. Beyond Nature and Culture. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press.

Fabian, Johannes. 2014. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press.

Gane, Nicholas. 2009. “Concepts and ‘New’ Empiricism.” European Journal of Social Theory 12 (1): 83–97. https://doi.org/10.1177/1368431008099645.

Gershon, Ilana. 2019. “Porous Social Orders.” American Ethnologist. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12829.

Graeber, David. 2001. Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams. New York: Palgrave.

———. 2004. Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

Klingensmith, Kelly. 2016. In Appropriate Distance: The Ethics of the Photographic Essay. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Kropotkin, Peter. 1902. Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. New York: McClure Phillips & Co.

———. 1912. Fields, Factories and Workshops: Or Industry Combined with Agriculture and Brain Work with Manual Work. London: Thomas Nelson & Sons.

Mazzarella, William. 2017. “Sense out of Sense: Notes on the Affect/Ethics Impasse.” Cultural Anthropology 32 (2): 199–208. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca32.2.04.

McLean, Stuart. 2017. Fictionalizing Anthropology: Encounters and Fabulations at the Edges of the Human. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1995. “The Primacy of the Ethical: Propositions for a Militant Anthropology.” Current Anthropology 36 (3): 409–40. https://doi.org/10.1086/204378.

Serres, Michel. 2008. The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies. Translated by Margaret Sankey and Peter Cowley. New York: Continuum.

Turner, Victor. 1982. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: PAJ Publications.

2. Multimodality and Ethnographic Technique

Benjamin, Walter. 1999. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Bourgois, Philippe, and Jeff Schonberg. 2009. Righteous Dopefiend. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Chin, Elizabeth. 2017. “On Multimodal Anthropologies from the Space of Design: Toward Participant Making.” American Anthropologist 119 (3): 541–43. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.12908.

Collins, Samuel Gerald, Matthew Durington, and Harjant Gill. 2017. “Multimodality: An Invitation.” American Anthropologist 119 (1): 142–46. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.12826.

Collins, Samuel Gerald, and Matthew Slover Durington. 2015. Networked Anthropology: A Primer for Ethnographers. New York: Routledge.

Denzin, Norman K. 2003. Performance Ethnography: Critical Pedagogy and the Politics of Culture. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications.

Dicks, Bella, Bambo Soyinka, and Amanda Coffey. 2006. “Multimodal Ethnography.” Qualitative Research 6 (1): 77–96. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794106058876.

Gill, Harjant. 2019. “Multimodality and the Future of Anthropological Research and Scholarship.” Arts and International Affairs (blog). March 28, 2019. https://theartsjournal.net/2019/03/28/multimodality-anthropology/.

Heider, Karl G. 1976. Ethnographic Film. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Lynteris, Christos, and Rupert Stasch. 2019. “Photography and the Unseen.” Visual Anthropology Review 35 (1): 5–9. https://doi.org/10.1111/var.12174.

Pink, Sarah. 2011. “Multimodality, Multisensoriality and Ethnographic Knowing: Social Semiotics and the Phenomenology of Perception.” Qualitative Research 11 (3): 261–76. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794111399835.

———. 2015. Doing Sensory Ethnography. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications.

Smith, Shawn Michelle. 2013. At the Edge of Sight: Photography and the Unseen. Durham: Duke University Press.

Spufford, Francis. 2012. Red Plenty. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press.

Stewart, Kathleen. 2007. Ordinary Affects. Durham: Duke University Press.

Taussig, Michael. 2006. Walter Benjamin’s Grave. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press.

———. 2011. I Swear I Saw This: Drawings in Fieldwork Notebooks, Namely My Own. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press.

Yusoff, Kathryn. 2007. “Antarctic Exposure: Archives of the Feeling Body.” Cultural Geographies 14 (2): 211–33. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474007075355.

3. Multimodality and the Conceptualization of Ethnographic Texture & Gonzo Ethnography

Chandras, Jessica. 2018. “Our Ethnographic Ear: Using Sound as an Ethnographic Tool and Product.” Footnotes (blog). June 18, 2018. https://footnotesblog.com/2018/06/18/our-ethnographic-ear-using-sound-as-an-ethnographic-tool-and-product/.

Cole, Teju. 2017. Blind Spot. New York: Penguin Random House.

Connolly, Cliff. 2019. “Culture Beyond Capital: Art, Authenticity, and the 21st Century Workers’ Movement.” Cosmonaut Magazine (blog). July 10, 2019. https://cosmonaut.blog/2019/07/10/culture-beyond-capital-art-authenticity-and-the-21st-century-workers-movement/.

Dubrovsky, Nika, and David Graeber. Forthcoming. “Another Art World, Part II: Utopia of Freedom as a Market Value.” E-Flux Journal.

———. 2019. “Another Art World, Part I: Art Communism and Artificial Scarcity.” E-Flux Journal 102 (September). https://www.e-flux.com/journal/102/284624/another-art-world-part-i-art-communism-and-artificial-scarcity/.

Fedorowicz, Steven C. 2013. “Towards Gonzo Anthropology : Ethnography as Cultural Performance.” The Review of Inquiry and Research, no. 98 (September): 55–70.

Hatherley, Owen. 2018. The Adventures of Owen Hatherley in the Post-Soviet Space. London: Repeater Books.

O’Brien, Tim. 1990. The Things They Carried. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Sefcovic, E.M.I. 1995. “Toward a Conception Of ‘Gonzo’ Ethnography.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 19 (1): 20–37. https://doi.org/10.1177/019685999501900102.

Thompson, Hunter S. 1996. Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga. New York: Ballantine Books.

Wood, Brian Kuan, Hito Steyerl, Anton Vidokle, Elena Shaposhnikova, Arseny Zhilyaev, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Boris Groys, Marina Simakova, Bart De Baere, and Esther Zonsheim. 2017. Art without Death: Conversations on Russian Cosmism. Edited by e-flux journal. Berlin: Sternberg Press.

Wozniak, Jesse S. G. 2014. “When the Going Gets Weird: An Invitation to Gonzo Sociology.” The American Sociologist 45 (4): 453–73. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-014-9242-9.