Ethnographic Poetry Research Articles

Two Row Repair: A trilogy

AbstractThe Two Row Repair trilogy refuses erasure as it tracks a journey of attempted recovery and repair, using the Two Row Wampum (Kaswenta) as inspiration, model, and directive. The Two Row Wampum, a foundational agreement made between Haudenosaunee and Dutch in 1613, extends into the present as a promise between Haudenosaunee and people of European descent to co‐exist in peace, respect, and friendship, and in common stewardship for all orders of life. The author, a tenth‐generation Dutch descendant settler, received first place in the 2023 Society for Humanistic Anthropology's 37th Annual Ethnographic Poetry Competition for Parts II and III of this trilogy.

Making meanings out of me: Reading researchers’ and participants’ bodies through poetry

This article offers autoethnographic reflections on the experience of qualitative research that account for the embodied subjectivity of interviewing as a research practice and the embodied practice of research outside of a traditional ‘field’. The article reflects on the ways in which the author was underprepared for the shifting power relations and shared vulnerabilities within research interactions to be experienced in an embodied way. This article then reflects on the process of experiencing research in the body during the writing-up process. The article draws on data collection experiences and fieldwork notes from a research project on trans and intersex activist relationships undertaken by a trans researcher with a history of LGBTI+ and trans activism. Furthermore, this research project was undertaken by a disabled scholar who had to negotiate a complex web of access needs and decisions over in/visibilising disabilities in order to complete the research. This early career scholar experienced a lack of research methods teaching and training on the complexities of in-community/insider research for those who may be members of communities made vulnerable by society and a lack of training on the expectations of embodied fieldwork practice. This article does not offer teaching or support suggestions to fill this gap although those are illustrated in detail by Pearce’s (2020) ‘methodology for the marginalised’. Instead, the article invites early career scholars, and those teaching research methods, to imagine research and imagine fieldwork with embodied researchers in mind. The article uses poetry to take readers on a journey of the embodied research of one trans and disabled scholar in the hopes it may speak to other scholars with a range of diverse identities and experiences who may be made vulnerable by society and those who have the privilege of teaching them. The article uses poetry as a means to express these embodied reflections drawing on Richardson’s (1999, 2002) creative analytic practice of ethnographic poetry and Anderson’s (2001) embodied writing. The poetic reflections are offered as an interruption to the body of the text with an embodied poetry to touch the reader in a different way. Although these poems deliberately interrupt the body of the text, they can be read in their locations as reflections on their closest sections or a collection of poetic reflections after reading the article.

Chinese Ethnic Minorities and their Oral Poetry: A Perspective from Ethnopoetics

Ethnopoetics involves in the conducting of translation experiments on oral poems of native ethnic groups, converting its relevant oral texts into written forms. The theory of ethnographic poetry begins in the 1970s and was translated and introduced to China in the early 21st century. However, most ethnic minorities in China do not have textual writings. Their oral creations from primitive society to modern society such as epics, long poems, narrative poems, ballads, and folk songs are mostly in form of oral poetry. The collection and translation of oral poems of ethnic minorities in China began in the late 1950s, that demarcated the beginning of ethnopoetics in China. In this article, the reasons behind the collection and translation of Chinese ethnic minority oral poems will be analysed. The restoration process of ethnopoetics and the connections between the collections and the translations, and the issues on whether translation is consistent to Chinese ethnic minority oral poems will also be further elaborated. The history of Chinese ethnic minorities oral poetry traces back to a long history and consists of a variety of themes and contents. Therefore, the restoration process of ethnopoetic research on the relationship between oral culture and written culture not only have gained the attention from the Chinese academic community, but also shown strong interests by the Western academic research community and worldwide.

Opening Up Fieldwork with Ethnographic Poetry

Four ethnographic poems are used to explore, elucidate and complexify four ethnographic encounters in the field. Each poem is accompanied by a brief explanation as to the ethnographic context in which the poem was written, as well as the reasons why an ethnographic poem was chosen as a tool to illuminate, complexify and do justice to these varying fieldwork experiences. The strengths of ethnographic poetry as a rigorous and subtle tool for cross-cultural understanding is addressed.

Elucidating ethnographic expressions

Purpose Narrative accounts of subjective consumer experience are, in one form or another, an essential of qualitative market research. Ethnographic research and ethnographic poetry have obvious connections with the literary form, yet this form has had limited application. Based on the assumption that poetry as a craft is a somewhat limited narrative in ethnographic studies and specifically in studies that attend a consumer vulnerability agenda, this paper aims to contribute to a literary-based perspective. This paper advocates for ethnographic poetry as a consideration of disseminating qualitative data for those researchers immersed in ethnographic research with diverse and vulnerable populations. Design/methodology/approach The paper draws on a range of extant literature to draw out the distinguishing features of ethnographic poetry, in which to situate ethnographic narratives of two studies of consumer vulnerability. To assist in this, scholarly discussion in the paper is interposed with a series of interludes written in the ethnographic poetic style. These interludes are intended to epitomise merits of such an interpretive research approach. Findings This is a research paper seeking to draw attention to, and develop a relatively neglected research approach, ethnographic poetry. Researcher reflections, drawn from two ethnographic studies, suggest some tangible consequences of this research to generate further discussion of consumer vulnerability. Research limitations/implications The overall aim is to extend discussion of the particular qualities of ethnographic poetry that might contribute to better serve qualitative research approaches, when conducting ethnographic research. Practical implications The paper advocates a stronger focus on ethnographic poetry to liberate the imagination of researchers and readers alike to enrich and compliment the analysis of narrative forms of qualitative data drawn from an ethnographic approach. Originality/value This paper addresses the concept of ethnographic poetry, stemming from narrative-based qualitative research, which will be entirely new to many researchers and practitioners. It suggests tangible benefits that this new perception could bring to ethnographic research.

How We Review and Support the Art of Ethnographic Poetry in Anthropology and Humanism

How We Review and Support the Art of Ethnographic Poetry in <i>Anthropology and Humanism</i>

Poetics in the Ethnographic

ARTIST’S BIO: Nomi Stone is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University. She has recently published articles in Cultural Anthropology and American Ethnologist, and her poetry appears in The New Republic, The Best American Poetry, POETRY Magazine, American Poetry Review, Tin House, and widely elsewhere. Nomi Stone has won a Pushcart Prize and was a Fulbright scholar in creative writing in Tunisia. She has recently served as a judge for the Society of Humanistic Anthropology’s Ethnographic Poetry Competition. Her first poetry collection, entitled Stranger’s Notebook (TriQuarterly Books), was published in 2008, and her forthcoming collection, Kill Class, will be published in 2019 by Tupelo Press.&#x0D;

Crank up the Feminism: Poetic Inquiry as Feminist Methodology

In this autoethnographic essay, the author argues for the use of poetic inquiry as a feminist methodology by showing her use of poetry as research method during the past 13 years. Through examples of her poetic inquiry work, the author details how poetry as research offers Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies scholars a means of doing, showing, and teaching embodiment and reflexivity, a way to refuse the mind-body dialectic, a form of feminist ethnography, and a catalyst for social agitation and change. The author uses examples of her ethnographic poetry that critique middle-class White motherhood, address the problems of White feminism, and reflects the nuances of identity negotiation in research and personal life to show the breadth of topics and approaches of poetic inquiry as feminist research practice and feminist pedagogy.

Introducing the 2017 Poetry Prizes: A Good Year for “Good” Ethnographic Poetry

Introducing the 2017 Poetry Prizes: A Good Year for “Good” Ethnographic Poetry

Ethnographic Poetry and Social Research: Problematizing the Poetics/Poethics of Empathy in Transnational Cross-Cultural Collaborations

Ethnographic poetry as a form of creative nonfiction has much to offer applied social research in general and geohumanities and sociocultural geography in particular as a refined, nuanced, and useful critical-creative communicative form of scholarship and research method. Two transnational cross-cultural collaborative research projects are used as cases to illustrate the potentials of the use of the creative arts, particularly (auto)ethnographic poetry, in disciplinal cross-fertilization, community engagement, and the researchers’ own identity integration as a reflexive practitioner. Although recognizing their importance, the article also problematizes the concept of empathy and the use of (auto)ethnographic poetry in articulating the doubts, dissonance, displacements, and disjuncture produced from inter- and intracultural differences generated from (dis)embodied and (dis)emplaced (dis)locations emerging out of the applied research experience of transnational émigré and migrant practitioners who identify with decolonization projects and (post)colonial subjects.

The memory of Pringle as Prospero, or the cannibal that faked Caliban: issues of authority and representation in Thomas Pringle’s ethnographic poetry

This article argues that, with the benefit of hindsight, Thomas Pringle’s poetry demands of his twenty-first-century readers that they measure its commitment to manumission by the balance between the syllables of his ethnographic poetry and force of his advocacy for manumission. The two measures, though, necessitate interdisciplinary forages into his work, albeit that the risk of either full leverage or attenuation may result from any interdisciplinary exercise that straddles history, anthropology, and literature. This paper ascribes primacy to that risk. It proceeds to point out a trajectory of earlier over-simplistic ethnographic poetry from a white colonist that, upon reflection, gives way to the later scripts of manumission of his work. It disavows an ahistorical reading of Pringle’s poetry that imposes his anti-slavery sentiment as informing his poetry in general and ethnographic poetry in particular, and so demonstrates that Pringle’s ethnographic poetry – unlike his celebrated manumission epistolary archive – does not support a singular reading of a humanizing intention. Pringle’s poetic sensibility – however much laudable – remains at odds with his political convictions: he inaugurates a Calibanesques axis through which Southern Africans in the settler colony vacillate between ‘Othering’ silence and colonized ‘voicing’. All told, Pringle’s ethnography poetry is shown to render the indigenous subjects as Calibanesque and, by that very fact, ‘cannibalizes’ him as he devours and usurps their right to self-representation.

The American Dental Dream

The American Dental Dream—the cultural desire for straight, white teeth—is difficult, if not impossible, for poor and working-class people to achieve. Using ethnographic fiction, autoethnography, poetry, and qualitative interviewing, I brush away the taken-for-granted assumptions about teeth. I explore the personal, relational, and structural consequences of this cultural desire, and show how social class writes itself on our bodies. I write these culture-centered teeth tales to show how one might cope with their teeth.

Anthropology at the Edge of Words: Where Poetry and Ethnography Meet

SUMMARYAnthropology has seen major challenges regarding methods, epistemologies, and how one writes ethnographically. As practicing ethnographers and poets, we focus on one among many vibrant new styles of anthropological scholarship: ethnographic poetry. As poetry appears more regularly in scholarly venues, anthropologists may wonder how to create ethnographic poetry and toward what end. To address this, we begin with definitions of ethnographic poetry in relation to ethnography and ethnopoetics. We then consider how poetry may help anthropologists to write insightfully about how we and other people live. Drawing on our own poetry, and that of others, we explore how form affects meaning and ethnographic insight.