The representation of difference in human encounters has presented challenges for ethnography. The urge to explain the 'culture' of the 'other' seems to demand a homogenisation and simplification of experience which leads to a shoring-up of inequitable relations of power. Encounters beyond the boundaries of what is shared, where diverse ideological beliefs and backgrounds come into contact, may provoke researchers to simplify difference by constructing essentialising categories.
One of the ways in which ethnographers have responded to this apparent crisis of representation in ethnography has been to add the poem to their repertoire. The poem offers a language that retains the complexity of the human encounter when other modes of representation may not be fit for purpose. Ethnographic poems enable researchers to paint social realities in ways that may prove difficult through ethnographic prose. They have the potential to embody the rhythms, time, and space of observed practice. In this paper I consider the potential of the poem in ethnography in the context of a large, team research project which examined communicative encounters in superdiverse settings.
Ethnographic researchers have used poetry as a medium for expressing their sense of connection to their field and their subjects. The poet and social scientist share commonalities in approach: both ground their work in meticulous observation of the empirical world, and are reflexive about their experience. But the poem reaches for something more. It is in the enhancement of, and elaboration upon, social research outcomes that the ethnographic poem has rich potential. The poem in ethnography offers a creative response to questions of representation. It has potential to offer analytical and reflexive approaches, as well as a representational form. It is a means of inquiry which challenges notions of authenticity, acknowledges complexity, and contests the single, unimpeachable account of events. Ethnographic poems rely on a belief in the ability of poetry to speak to something universal, or to clarify some part of the human condition. They come into their own as a means to enrich ethnography when researchers want to explore knowledge claims, and write with greater engagement and connection, to mediate understandings, and to reach diverse audiences.
When we allow ourselves to venture outside conventional approaches to writing ethnography, poetry can push us to be self-conscious about what we are saying, who we are including or omitting from the picture, and how we are describing or explaining what is going on. It helps us take less for granted. Ethnographic poetry can be powerful in the represention of social practice. In this paper I demonstrate that poems can reveal what is happening, and propose that in the ethnographic poem the noise of time can be re-experienced as the music of what happens (Burnside 2019). The paper concludes that the poem has the potential to offer a way of seeing, and a way of saying, in the artistic representation of encountering the other.
Burnside, J. (2019) The Music of Time: Poetry in the Twentieth Century. London: Profile Books.
