Life with oil palm

Abstract

Ethnography is a research practice that opens epistemological and theoretical possibilities for critical resource geographies. This chapter offers a framework of “ethnographic sensibilities”—a mode of engagement with people, place, and knowledge-making informed by feminist critique, which is based on the researcher's embodied exposure to the material, social, and epistemological relations on the field. For critical resource geographies, ethnographic sensibilities offer a methodological disposition to studying the ways in which ordinary life and resources intersect in spaces of resource extraction and open avenues for engaging the ordinary as an epistemological register. First, the chapter presents an overview of ethnography's critical trajectories in geography, highlighting the contributions of feminist geographers and situating the concept of ethnographic sensibilities therein. Next, it draws on my fieldwork on palm oil in Colombia to discuss how ethnographic sensibilities become part of knowledge production in the field. I discuss three ways of incorporating ethnographic sensibilities into field research on resources: a sensitive openness to the broader dynamics of life-with-resources (beyond the “resource” itself), an embodied exposure to place and relations, and a reflexive and multilevel writing practice. In the final section, I illustrate how these elements come together to elaborate the entanglements between the geographies of palm oil and the geographies of community life.