ABSTRACT

This article presents a series of letters the authors exchanged while conducting ethnographic research in Belize and Ghana. The letters reveal an affinity between feminist ethnographic praxis and a politically attuned epistemology of the senses, what the authors call a sensory feminist orientation to scholarship. Expanding on criticism of the way sensory hierarchies inform Western knowledge-building, the authors reevaluate their own epistolary exchange as a methodological provocation. As stories, the letters detail what the authors orient themselves toward in the field, as well as embodied moments of disorientation: danger, violence and estrangement. Untidy and raw, they offer readers an opportunity to “listen to sense” and, in the process, consider the consequences when ethnographers are encouraged to excise certain field encounters from scholarship. The article includes paintings that Beth Uzwiak created while in the field as a component of the authors’ sensory experiment in epistolary ethnography. Their focus on the affective registers of storytelling contributes to broader efforts to disrupt the androcentric tendencies of ethnographic voice.

摘要

本文介绍了作者在伯利兹和加纳进行民族志研究时交换的一系列信件。这些信件揭示了女权主义民族志实践与政治上协调的感官认识论之间的密切关系，作者称之为感官女权主义取向到奖学金。作者扩展了对感官等级影响西方知识构建方式的批评，重新评估了他们自己的书信交流，作为一种方法论的挑衅。作为故事，这些信件详细说明了作者在该领域的定位，以及迷失方向的具体化时刻：危险、暴力和疏远。它们凌乱而原始，为读者提供了“倾听感觉”的机会，并在此过程中考虑了鼓励民族志学者从学术界中剔除某些领域遭遇的后果。这篇文章包括 Beth Uzwiak 在实地创作的画作，作为作者在书信民族志方面的感官实验的一部分。