EXPERIMENTING WITH ETHNOGRAPHY
A Companion to Analysis
P. 3: As you go through the chapters in this collection, you will see that the contributors operate under the assumption that analysis is an exercise in seeking an unanticipated insight—something that could have not been predicted with existing categories yet nevertheless depends on them. Col- lectively, contributors see analysis as a means to approach something that lies beyond the “predictable and the uncertain” and sits in the “space of excess, of telling us more than we knew to ask” (McGranahan 2018, 7). This does not imply that analysis is always about pursuing the new. It does mean, however, that analysis seeks ways of noticing that which seems to be there in one’s materials and relations but cannot be immediately articu- lated as such. In this sense, ethnographic analysis shares a lot with what the Nigerian poet Ben Okri (1997) refers to as the quickening of the unknown.
P. 3: Jane Guyer (2013) elaborates on Okri’s usage of the notion of quickening by noting how it does not refer to speed but rather to something else, to the enlivening of an unknown, marking its presence by drawing it into recognizable existence.
P.5: Defining Analysis, or actually not defining analysis
"Instead of asking “what is analy- sis,” this book engages with the question of “how is analysis,” and it offers nineteen answers."
P.5: Avoiding linear processes
"Finally, asking “how is analysis” instead of “what is analysis” prevents us from reducing analytic practice to a transitional stage between fieldwork and theory, something to get over quickly, a mere point of passage before settling on an empirical finding or category. That rush to pass through analysis feeds into the desire to produce insights that travel quickly, usu- ally in the form of a concept or argument, so that they can be “applied” to other cases."
P7: Around time-suspension to do analysis work
"The contributions in this book embody this idea of analysis-as-craft and translate it into a series of techniques to generate suspension, to expand the timespace of analysis. Each of the techniques you will encounter is an experiment to wonder, a process that depends on a “certain duration so that doubt and confusion can endure long enough to allow qualitative leaps and contradictions in our sense-making” (Ballestero 2019, 32). Furthermore, we understand these conditions as ways of “staying with the trouble” (Haraway 2016) and directing our an- alytic movement athwart (Helmreich 2009). They are the conditions of possibility for finding companion concepts (Winthereik 2019), embracing unwanted afterlives (Murphy 2017b), and experimenting with kinky forms of empiricism (Rutherford 2012). Each technique offers an opportunity to co-labor (De la Cadena 2015) with what peers and interlocutors share with us.
Chp2. P30-40: Sarah Pink's essay about Ethnographic Hunches
Chp5. P69: Relocating Innovation, Postcards from Three Edges
Creating postcards out of your fieldwork images and evidence.
Chp6, P82: Object Exchange
Sending a colleague an object or artifact from your field research to analyze and decipher. Shifting perspectives, fresh perspectives...possibly fresh insights