Ethnographies of Encounter

Abstract

Ethnographies of encounter are one response to calls to decolonize anthropology. These ethnographies explore how culture making occurs through unequal relationships involving two or more groups of people and things that appear to exist in culturally distinct worlds. The term encounter refers to everyday engagements across difference. Ethnographies of encounter focus on the cross-cultural and relational dynamics of these processes. They consider how such engagements bring discrepant stakes and histories together in ways that produce new cultural meanings, categories, objects, and identities. This article examines a transection of the discipline that shares this methodology. We focus on encounter approaches to (a) transnational capitalism, (b) space and place, and (c) human-nonhuman relations. Rather than taking capitalism, space and place, and humanness as contextual frameworks, these ethnographies demonstrate how encounter is the means by which these categories emerge.