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This book explores what it means and what it takes to write ethnographic texts that resonate with both fieldwork and readers. It approaches writing as a form of embodied thinking and encourages conceptual openness and a willingness to experiment. Drawing on exemplary texts and the authors experiences as teachers and writers, it explores the importance of attentiveness, imagination, and ethical engagement. Grounded in anthropology and phenomenology, and inspired by literature, it weaves conceptual reflection with practical guidance and literary sensibility. Each chapter focuses on a key aspect of the writing process such as time, voice, argument, and composition while throughout the book, ambiguity, affect, and imagination are seen as generative of understanding. More than just a guide to writing, Resonant Ethnography is an invitation to think, feel, and imagine through writing, and to appreciate what ethnography can be in the world today.
List of contents
1. An ethnographic poetics.- Part I: ATTENTION, COMPOSITION, AND IMAGINATION.- 2. Attention.- 3. Composition.- 4. Imagination.- Part II: THE ART OF RESONANT WRITING.- 5. Place,- 6. Person.- 7. Voice.- 8. Time.- 9. On writing poems and stories.- Part III: THE ETHNOGRAPHIC CRAFT.- 10. The writing process.- 11. Ethnographic argumentation.- 12. Editing.
About the author
Helle Bundgaard is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. She has conducted fieldwork in India and Denmark, and her teaching and writing focus on literary ethnographic writing as a form of inquiry and imaginative expression. She is the author of several books, including textbooks and the literary ethnography Painting Stories: Lives and Legacies from an Indian Crafts Village (2021). One of her short stories received the Society for Humanistic Anthropology’s Ethnographic Fiction and Creative Nonfiction Writing Award, (AAA).
Anne Line Dalsgård is a professor in the Department of Anthropology at Aarhus University, Denmark. She has conducted fieldwork in Brazil and Denmark, focusing on motherhood, temporality, and the reading of literature. She has co-edited several volumes and is the author of the monograph Matters of Life and Longing: Female sterilisation in Northeast Brazil (2004), which is also translated into Portuguese. Throughout her career as an anthropologist, she has had a keen interest in ethnographic writing as a medium for embodied critical thinking.
