Abstract
Transformative ethnography is a method of learning to cross cultures through an embodied, experiential, and reflective practice. I have developed this method over fifteen years of anthropological fieldwork and reflection. This methodology requires the practitioner to embody a foreign practice, generally through art, music, or a specialized skill or technique. She moves through four phases that overlap and intertwine as she goes about the ethnographic process: sensorial observation, embodying practice, emptying and reflecting, and embodying representation. The purpose of Transformative Ethnography is to become explicitly aware of the process of loosening ones own, and adopting to another cultural way of thinking and acting. The overarching research question to this methodology asks How can we re-make ourselves, consciously, in order to fit new (multi-) cultural realities? It is controversial in that it incorporates mindfulness training - something not yet broadly accepted in our discipline. It is creative in that it draws on art-based techniques of observation and embodiment in ways that select few anthropologists are using in the field today.
Highlights
Transformative Ethnography is a method of learning to cross cultures through an embodied, experiential, and reflective practice, meant for anthropology students or any students practicing to be cross-culturally literate
I developed this method over fifteen years of anthropological fieldwork and reflection in the Kayapo indigenous area in Brazil, and with the Manding community in West Africa and New York
This methodology requires the practitioner to embody a foreign practice, generally through art, music, or a specialized skill or technique. She moves through four phases that overlap and intertwine as she goes about the ethnographic process:
Summary
Transformative Ethnography is a method of learning to cross cultures through an embodied, experiential, and reflective practice, meant for anthropology students or any students practicing to be cross-culturally literate. She is ‘emplaced’ in a fieldsite (Pink 2015: 30), in which she shares in a collaborative construction of meaning based on conversations but a whole sensorial experience that include movements, rhythms, colors, smells, tastes, and more, each sense of which makes up ‘different facets of the same activity” (Ingold 2000: 261) It builds on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and Bourdieu’s theory of practice (see Csordas 1990 and Downey 2010), explores sensorial hierarchies (Howe 2003, Howes and Classen 2014) and explores how the researchers body and mind change throughout the learning process as cultural immersion increases. Transformative Ethnography is a malleable, flexible approach with specific guiding questions and a structure with four phases and sub-phases, of which are described in detail, below
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