Field notes: ethnographic writing reconsidered

Practices of Writing in Ethnographic Work

“…The writing in question can only become an academic product if the researcher renders the observations intersubjectively accessible. However, this rendering process is one of the main challenges of ethnographic work, as scholars like Emerson et al (2011), Hirschauer (2006), or Kalthoff (2013) have shown. Although an iterative quality is widely regarded as one of the main characteristics of qualitative research designs, introductory works on writing—for the sake of clarity—mostly describe it rather like a linear process, from jottings to field notes to publications.…”

“…In this dialogue, two selves of the concrete ethnographer individual interact, namely the observing-ethnographer-in-the-field and the ethnographer-in-the-field-notes. (Kalthoff 2013, 273)…”

Material Practices of Ethnographic Presence

“…Instead, epistemic practices also rely on technical instruments, spatial architectures, and material arrangements that are taken for granted and therefore are ignored in research reports and publications (e. g., Knorr Cetina 1981; Latour 1987; Latour and Woolgar 1986). While the focus of STS was initially limited to the natural sciences, more recent research has begun to investigate the social sciences (Law 2004; Law and Urry 2004) including qualitative and ethnographic methods (Engert and Krey 2013; Kalthoff 2013; Liegl and Wagner 2013; Schindler and Schäfer 2020; Tutt and Hindmarsh 2011). In applying insights from STS, these studies have offered analyses of the materiality of ethnographic knowledge production, focusing particularly on fieldnotes and on writing practices.…”

“…Schindler and Schäfer (2020), for instance, show how writing practices in ethnographic research are simultaneously cognitive, embodied, and material. In reconsidering field notes, Kalthoff (2013) investigates how the material organization of field notes actively contributes to the perception of what has been written down. At the same time, the involvement of material things like note pads in making ethnographic methods present and open for participants has hardly been addressed from this perspective.…”

“… 3 Even if (most) ethnographers do not believe that written or visual records directly mirror the world “out there,” they nevertheless switch between such documentary practices and reflexive practices of data production (Kalthoff 2013). …”