Materialities and materialization processes of ethnographyas academic writing

Abstract

Due to the predominance of a semiotic and representationalist perspective in writing and ethnography, the materialities and materialization processes of ethnography are just beginning to be studied by anthropologists and ethnographers themselves. In this text, after defining ethnography as academic writing and differentiating it from anthropology, a practice that Tim Ingold defines as correspondent observation, I review three cases of research that have taken the materialities of ethnography seriously. Subsequently, referring to my research with brickmakers and electronic engineers in Mexico, I reflect on the materialization process of my own ethnography and ask myself what writing with the laptop actually means. To do this, I return to the concept of mediation proposed by Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska, as well as the notion of apparatus presented by Karen Barad. I suggest that writing an ethnography is a material-discursive practice involving human and non-human. And I also suggest that, as an apparatus, the computer produces two bodies: the ethnography and the ethnographer.