Abstract
Writing is ethnographic method-in-practice (Law, 2004) and arguably the most powerful of its world-making tools, shaping and creating the representation of social relations to influence what is known and believed to be true. By translating everyday life from lived experience to words on a page, ethnographers reduce and simplify the world about them to create narrative. Through this process, we necessarily have to make choices about overlooking or editing out particular actors, events, mistakes or even entire species, and such choices inform the worlds and truths we make and live within (Latour & Woolgar, 1978). Whether or not we do so reflectively, editorial power puts participants at risk of being constructed in specific ways, inscribing and thereby limiting accounts of their lives, their social function and their (so-called) place in society. Writing, then, can lead us into the imperialist trap of underlining rather than questioning hegemonic norms about particular groups. It may inadvertently reproduce myths and create “master statuses” (Becker, 1963)—such as young people are dangerous or problematic (Cohen, 1972)—by “fetishizing” and “exoticising” these individuals as Others.
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Hamilton, L., Taylor, N. (2017). People Writing for Animals. In: Ethnography after Humanism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53933-5_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53933-5_9
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