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In Death without Weeping, anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes reminds us that fieldwork “has a way of drawing the ethnographer into spaces of human life where she or he might really prefer not to go at all and once there doesn’t know how to go about getting out except through writing, which draws others there as well, making them party to the act of witnessing”.
Her words, and particularly the twin rationales of drawing others in and getting ourselves out, sum up much of the rationale for Ethnographic Marginalia.
Ethnographic writing affords us the capacity to document and demonstrate how broader social, political, and economic forces play out in the minutiae of daily social life, and to provide the context and meaning of people’s actions and words. We firmly believe that what makes ethnographic research persuasive, powerful, and perspicacious is that it allows us to draw the reader into fascinating social worlds. Ethnography makes us tell a story.
In the process of ethnographic immersion and doing fieldwork, we become archives of facts and feelings, myths and memories, reports and rumors. However, all too often when we come back from the field, we sit at our drawing boards and try to remind ourselves that we are sociologists. Well-disciplined by our disciplines, we cast our experiences as data with value only insofar as they help us theorize XYZ. We turn reams of experiences into bite-sized, digestible, but rarely delicious chunks of strategic information. And thus, the most interesting and provocative parts of ethnographic writing are discarded in service to academic journals that demand a clear intervention filling a stated gap within the literature or the creation of neat typologies. Instead, we want to provide a space for the building blocks that make ethnographic mansions: the notes, stories, photographs, and conversations that come out of fieldwork.
Through this endeavor, we also hope to build community through dialogue and the sharing of knowledge, techniques, and experiences. After all, ethnographic work is an exercise in getting comfortable with solitude and the field can be a lonely place, even after you return. In this website, we are interested in the raw material of ethnography and we aim to provide space for critical, compassionate, and collective, reflection on what it means to do ethnography, and the travails, the perils, and the joys of this craft.
Latest Posts
DISPATCHES FROM THE FIELD
What is Lost Still Follows You
Casey Golomski
20 February 2025
An excerpt from God’s Waiting Room (Rutgers University Press 2024) which is a work of creative, narrative nonfiction based on seven years of immersive, ethnographic research in a small-town old age home I call Grace. Amid the daily goings-on, I met several individuals whose stories showed me—and can show all of us, perhaps—how the end of life reconditions the way we might face our past, or dimensions of it that still hauntingly linger in the present…
Challenging borders from a pair of pedals: Ethnographic insights of the bicycle riding migrant diaspora in Chiapas, Mexico
Rogelio Ramos Torres
13 January 2025
A misty moon shines at midnight over a rushing crowd in a sports park on the coast of Chiapas, Mexico. More than three thousand people, members of one of the last caravans that for some years have been crossing the country heading north, are preparing their departure. The pastors leading the group give instructions, the tents and tarpaulins that have served as shelter are dismantled, the stray dogs sniff for waste, the mothers pack clothes and water bottles, the children wake up, young people put on their shoes, old people stretch their backs to alleviate the pain, the backpacks go to the shoulders, the soles strike the ground and the march begins. It is essential to go ahead of the sun. Some make their last purchases from soda or food vendors who, even at that hour of the night, come to the road…
CAMERA ETHNOGRAPHICA
(Un)Knowing The Sea
Indu Poornima
17 August 2025
The photo series is taken from my fieldwork in central Kerala, as I try to learn, unlearn and relearn the sea, as an outsider. I use the images to contrast the space, colours and noise of two fishing harbours. The first at Thoppumbady, run by the Cochin Port Trust, is modernised, strictly monitored, and one of the largest harbours in the country in terms of area. A few kilometres away lies Chellanam, bustling with locals, openly accessible for anybody fancying a visit. Unlike at Thoppumbody, where a good share of the catch is sent to export processing units, Chellanam caters to its local buyers…
Methodological Appendix
Crossing Borders to Do Fieldwork: Towards an Honest Conversation
Marcos Emilio Pérez
13 March 2026
Doing transnational qualitative fieldwork as a graduate student can be an incredible experience. The opportunity to learn about other people’s lives, explore a topic you care about, and hone your skills make ethnography both personally and professionally rewarding. However, it is also a very demanding endeavor, especially for early-career scholars.
Part of the problem is the lack of opportunities to discuss the nitty-gritty, logistical aspects of the work. While many students benefit from supportive departments, advisors and peers, others have to face the challenges of our trade more or less by themselves. Fortunately, in recent years, there has been a push to debate these issues more openly…
THE PODCAST
Episode 22: The Political as a Feminist Question: In Conversation with Dr. Roxani Krystalli
11 November 2024
In the latest edition of Ethnographic Marginalia, we talk with Roxani Krystalli about her new book Good Victims: The Political as a Feminist Question (Oxford UP, 2024). Roxani describes the dilemmas she faced in her research on encounters between those recognized as victims of the Colombian conflict and the state agencies that attend them. She also explains what makes this a feminist book—not because of a focus on gender, but a feminist sensibility that questions categories like politics and victimhood and how they influence each other. Finally, she ends by describing the books that inspired her and telling us about her new project focused on love.
Disclaimer: Perhaps it is a function of disciplinary blinders, but it has been brought to our attention that our website shares its name with a series curated by the Society of Cultural Anthropology on their official website. We would like to clarify that this website is not affiliated with Cultural Anthropology but we do share with our accidental namesake a commitment toward making ethnographic writing accessible to a wider public. We see this serendipitous syncing of names as a dovetailing of our vision – one that exceeds disciplinary boundaries.
Ethnographic Marginalia 