This Participant Whom I Will Call Zoe

This participant, whom I will call Zoe,

was 22 years old at the time of the interviews

and she was studying at the University of Athens.

“She had a squint and myasthenia gravis since the age of seven, the ocular type of the disease.[1] This means that, apart from the fact that in the past she had faced considerable difficulty with keeping one of her eyes open, she had none of the other symptoms. She underwent surgery when she was eight. At eighteen, she tried an additional treatment, which, nevertheless, did not help her. She had been under the same medication since the age of eight: six pills every day, which she regulated herself. Her eye problem is not very perceptible today – except for the times when she gets very tired”.

The above excerpt from my fieldwork notebook – a very brief selection from the observations I had jotted down quite some years ago – gives a few basic facts about a young woman’s medical history, but actually tells nothing about her. In my work for that project I divided my material in sections and directed my efforts towards a systematic study. Who was Zoe and what had happened to her? How did she experience the events? What could I learn about the experience of chronic illness through her specific and socially situated account? These were some of the questions I asked back then. Yet, today they don’t feel anymore like relevant questions to ask. What is more, they somehow seem inherently wrong. Like dead-end questions impossible to work your way through. So, today I’m looking at Zoe once more, but from a quite different angle. I ask: What was it like to me, in terms of affects, to have met her and listened to the story she told me? How could I understand her and imagine her through my own life events and medical history? What do we get when Zoe and Pinelopi come together and what kind of partial, unfinished story can we tell about it? It isn’t Zoe or the experience of chronic illness this time that is the “object” of my study. What I now want to see is “how moving forces are immanent in scenes, subjects, and encounters, or in blocked opportunities.”[2]  And I want to do so without aiming “to come to a finish,” but desiring to immerse myself again in the sensibilities of those encounters and watch their “tendrils stretching into things I can barely, or not quite, imagine.”[3]

A Good Pair of Boots is Not Enough

I can tell you what I had to do for my master’s thesis in a short and simple sentence: I had to study illness narratives. Listen to the stories of women with a chronic illness and then write about it. Three women from Greece who had the same illness I had – a neurological condition that can take different forms, a rare disease of the auto-immune system with a half-Greek and half-Latin name: myasthenia gravis. To take this topic was a quite straightforward choice because it was close to my life and to my own experiences. It was, at that point, only obvious to me that illness as a topic and the ways we think about it would not merely define the subject of my thesis – the final stage of a university programme trajectory – but would also constitute what I would care for and try to contribute to further my academic path. Because it simply mattered, in an absolute and urgent way, to give my time to these specific questions which were intertwined with my existence, and, in very palpable ways, with who I have become. Of course, this very likely resonates with the experiences of many other people. People whose own outstanding life encounters have left them with no other choice but to write. As Eve Kosofsky-Sedgwick has put it in connection with her own field of study, “I think many adults (and I am among them) are trying, in our work, to keep faith with vividly remembered promises made to ourselves in childhood: promises to make invisible possibilities and desires visible; to make the tacit things explicit.”[4]

To hear the call or feel the pull is certainly one thing, but to set off and make your move as you begin to go about it is another. Certainly, the level of complexity can be significantly high in a great amount of research done in many different domains today. However, ethnography is a very special activity – the messiness and fuzziness of where you’ve found yourself (in a real-life situation with real people, raw emotions, expectations, hesitations, uncertainties, fears, and confusions) can be, at times, too much. Bud Goodall, giving his reader a taste of it, quotes the answer of the legendary ethnobotanist Charles Schultes when he was asked by a Harvard graduate student, “What is the best preparation for fieldwork?” To which Schultes laconically replied: “Don’t worry about getting a good pair of boots.”[5]Moral: when you are doing ethnography, you are bound to find yourself unprepared. As Goodall, a proponent of creative writing as a method of inquiry and of experimental ethnographic forms, explains:

WRITING ETHNOGRAPHY IS DIFFICULT TO LEARN because no matter how many exemplars you locate, no matter how many hours you devote to editing and rewriting, and no matter how much you love language, are skilled with metaphor, and are aware of representational limitations, what may be truest about writing is this: The tensions that guide the ethnographic writer's hand lie between the felt improbability of what you have lived and the known impossibility of expressing it, which is to say between desire and its unresolvable, often ineffable, end.[6] 

How to Do This? – Back Then…

All this was very new to me, but sometimes lack of experience can be an advantage. And it can be that people decide (on how to write) more spontaneously when they are less hindered by great amounts of knowledge, as is the case with any novice. They are, also, perhaps more likely to follow their intuition,[7] a choice that may lead to interesting and unexpected alternatives regarding the way one sees the world. I had always been drawn to literature and art, so when I found out that it was possible to integrate them into my research and use them as a guide, it felt to me like a choice as straightforward as that of my topic. In my readings, I saw that a growing amount of research experimenting with art and literature[8] has shown that the imaginative, the poetic, and the fictional add layers of meaning and intensities to an inquiry and to the account that is finally composed. I also learned that in certain research topics – such as health research –conventional scholarly prose cannot convey experiences that are deeply embedded in the social but are simultaneously very personal and are ingrained in the emotional-bodily being of people in ways that are highly idiosyncratic and subjective. Arts-based research, which moves in between the territories of creativity and intellectual inquiry, seemed to be the best bet in connection with vulnerable social groups. Beginning in the second part of the twentieth century, it coincided with the postmodern movement, as well as social justice movements, which “shattered dualistic, positivist conceptions of truth and science and broadened what was considered acceptable within formal academic research.”[9] During that period the intellectual and academic tendencies and concerns, as well as the historical conjectures, of the time ripened to produce and reintroduce “[t]he idea of art-as-research as a scientific endeavour.”[10] We see, then, the formerly marginalised and delegitimised ways of acquiring insights into the human condition with aesthetic means[11] becoming acknowledged for their value, and openly challenging such pre-given and long-entrenched divides as that of art versus science. Moreover, artistic inquiry values and places at the forefront not one individual, objective truth, but multiple, intersubjective realities that are produced, re-imagined, and embodied in manifold emotional, bodily, cognitive, and social landscapes.[12]

With these in mind, the decision I finally came to felt right in connection to what I’d figured mattered the most: what I perceived as the nature of my inquiry, and my personal inclinations, my ways of relating to the world. I would compose an account that would mix fact with fiction and evoke emotions, draw the reader in, and create a colourful world to accommodate each of the women and their lived experiences. I would look at them, I thought, in a way that would have depth and imagination, a way that would not only pay attention to their words, but would scrutinise details in their expression and voice, in their overall demeanour, that would allow me to discern and capture something essential about them. But it was very difficult to achieve this in a prosaic way. All the more since the question was not merely to compose an insightful and engaging account that would create affect. It was, most crucially, to do justice to the people who trusted me, to the political significance of their experiences, and to their ethical entanglements. The way to do this was through an aesthetic form, a form that could speak of…

when I met Zoe in the waiting room,

Silver and Pretty,

with a movie-star smile

and with one of her eyes

half-closed.

An eye-lid,

like an aspen leaf –

Rhyming with thief,

and grief,

and disbelief –

displaced and probing,

on her shining face;

giving her an ambivalent expression.

Her angels were hanging around,

small and chubby.

And kind of cross,

pissed-off.

Their faces

stern and stubborn.

Shutting me out.

Chin up, little angels!

All of them had one eye

half-closed

and none of them would look me in the face.

Oh, boy! Those angels,

they were hard to get.

For it was a serious matter –

of trust.

Looking for Voices

When I first met Zoe, I really didn’t know what to expect. I never met her in a waiting room, and neither did I meet her in person. The discussions I had with her were on Skype. I had posted a few lines about my research, looking for participants on a Facebook group page for people with myasthenia gravis. She responded to it: she wanted to help. I got many responses from the people there, and had discussions with many of them, but eventually I selected three women who could give more elaborate accounts, or accounts close to what I had imagined an account should be like. I was – perhaps naively – surprised to find that not all people could or would offer a story. For a number of them, it was just the facts, or at least that’s what their responses looked like to me. How they got sick, then were diagnosed, then treated, then continued to live with the disease – without much detail, emotion, or reference to the everyday – with occasional mention of their persisting symptoms. There were emotions, sure enough, and there were difficulties (what in the fictional world they call conflicts). But I had to fish for them, and even then the responses remained at the very surface, never growing into more than a basic sentence. “Yeah,… I didn’t know what it was. Sure, I was concerned.” “I lost my job. Was on the dole for a year…” Maybe they didn’t really believe I cared to know these things. But maybe they hadn’t given it much thought, either. It’s easy to assume that others are like you – dwelling on their hurt, reliving situations in their heads, looking for answers in the same old worn paths, worn and torn themselves under the weight of their own interpretations.

It’s not like that. One thing I’ve learned – again – from that fieldwork was that people have different ways of addressing and sustaining whatever it is that’s called interiority or self. But the three women I chose to work with, were more like what I thought I needed. They could talk at length about how they felt, they each had been to a therapist of some sort, or came from an environment that was fairly familiar with this practice. Their feelings/expectations/understandings were well formulated and mattered to them. They had a story to tell: linking things, making causal connections, expressing shame, anger, frustration. And that is why I chose them, I think. For making it easier for me to write it down and for being, in certain ways, like me. I could relate to them more. And maybe I wanted to re-think my own story through theirs. But, and I’m afraid I have to say, it seems I wanted to do this not to explore, but to confirm. The other people, those I’d ruled out, could have offered me a chance to look again, and do this in a new way, perhaps finding new words, new landscapes, imagining different things as the ones that mattered. But when I didn’t see in them what I acknowledged as a valuable account, I thought, “There’s nothing here. Keep looking.” Now I wonder: What would it be like to think less about yourself? To be less concerned with the subtleties of your emotions and with how exactly this or that affects you? What would it be like to dispense less energy in preserving your identity, fortifying it day by day, saying “yes,” saying “no,” saying “this I like, and this I don’t.” Saying “this is me and this is what happened to me.” Of course, I can never be sure that that was the case with them. If I had listened longer, I might have discovered something different altogether. They were speaking to me with their silences, and pauses, and hesitations, with their uncertainty as to what should come next and why, but I wasn’t capable of grasping that then and I couldn’t keep listening. In retrospect, I was looking for the voices of rational, individual, humanist subjects,[13] and in my search for coherent stories, I was conducting very traditional and even biased research, despite my claim that I was using art and having open-ended interviews to let marginalised voices emerge and do justice to people’s experiences. As Mazzei argues,

Conventional approaches to qualitative inquiry often favour the voice of a subject, assuming that voice can speak with the authority of consciousness and experience located in a particular space and time. Voice in humanist qualitative inquiry must be present—spoken, witnessed, recorded, date-stamped, and transcribed into words in an interview transcript. Qualitative researchers in the social sciences have been trained to afford authority to voice, to ‘free’ this authentic voice from whatever restrains it from coming into being so it can relate the truth about the conscious self.[14]

A Creative Critical Writing Practice

What I tried to do back then in terms of understanding Zoe’s experiences did involve an artistic element but did not possess strong critical qualities as to the situation, Zoe’s performance, and my own. As I now think again with literature and through literature – that is, fiction and poetry – I pursue a less conventional path and, again, a form of writing that brings together the aesthetic and the critical, the affect and the concept, as proposed by Ola Ståhl, in his article “Kafka and Deleuze/Guattari: Towards a Creative Critical Writing Practice.”[15] I pursue a writing that addresses such dual preoccupations through a (for me, renewed) opening up to hybrid forms of composing and knowing – a writing less burdened by looking for the right voice and the right story. And “[i]t is as if an entire writing practice comes out of the encounter with impossibility; one which doesn’t recognise literary genres or formats but proceeds through assemblages of fragments, false starts, botched becomings, and the proliferation of interminable lines of flight.”[16] Territorial forms of writing, the preservation of boundaries, the familiar and the habitual are questioned here and undermined. This is an ethico-political project combined with an aesthetic utterance, a telling of an experience not for the sake of the biographical interest of it, not following the content that is ready, not representing the experience, but starting from the affect and writing in a way that allows becoming-minor in your own language and in your own life. Then I can think of who Zoe is, and ask, as she asked…

Who is this Pinelopi?

And what is she

gonna do

with the stuff

she does?

Then I can re-member her saying (but not exactly)…

I lift my fear and go on with my fingers.

I hid the mirror and I know

My body with my fingers

My face.

Cross eyes

Front of the mirror

… endless hours at my eye, to hide my photos,

And anything either

(her myself and life. Nothin

“I’ve always had scared

; I have the children of the disease

My memories begin mainly from seven,

so I don’t talk about my fear or worse.”

was paying attention

in order to cover something’s gone

My memories begin mainly from my parents,

I remember myself tearing more…

so opens up your life

You settle this and go on with your life.

Now I don’t talk about my eye

“I was paying

my paying was pareful

to with my eyes, from back that…

a large-eyed carention

what I look atterriblem with that so much

The Making of a Portrait

Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, who has pioneered the method of portraiture in the social sciences,[17] pays a lot of attention to the voice of the people she studies as she tries to create an aesthetically informed but also, as much as possible, a more faithful and reliable portrayal. Inspired by Clifford Geertz, she employs many descriptive details from the actual context and physical settings of her fieldwork in order to compose a vivid account that succeeds in bringing to life the entire situation and the people involved. Elaborating on her intentions guiding the development of portraiture as a method of inquiry, she states,

I wanted to develop a document, a text that came as close as possible to painting with words. I wanted to create a narrative that bridged the realms of science and art, merging the systematic and careful description of good ethnography with the evocative resonance of fine literature. I wanted the written pieces to convey the authority, wisdom, and perspective of the “subjects”; but I wanted them (the subjects) to … be introduced to a perspective that they had not considered before.[18]

I find this type of ethnographic engagement particularly attractive. Nevertheless, while I knew that I wanted to follow in Lawrence-Lightfoot’s direction, it was clear to me that my practice would have to proceed with a different goal in mind. But then what did I want to do differently? The differentiation between my practice and Lawrence-Lightfoot’s manifests itself exactly at the point where the ways we imagine ethnography, the ethnographer, and the ethnographic “other” do not allow for questioning and transgressing the limitations of our own thought models, our conceptualisations of what counts as valid knowledge acquired through reliable procedures, and our own position of power. For while “[p]ortraiture admits the central and creative role of the self of the portraitist”[19] in all the different steps of the process, Lawrence-Lightfoot warns against “those who misunderstand, misuse, and abuse the frontiers of innovation … (and) those who will use boundary crossing as a way to avoid the rigours and standards of both art and science.”[20] She suggests that “[t]hrough rigorous procedures and methodological tools, the researcher tries to rid the work of personal bias that might distort or obscure the reality that he or she is recording.”[21] She concludes that “at the centre of all research, the investigator needs to manage the tension between personal predisposition […] and rigorous scepticism.”[22]. And this is a position I would like to think about.

To come to a certain conclusion about things – whatever the issue in question – one has to start from a given set of principles, or what one takes to be the case. In the brief excerpt cited above, we see that art and science are taken to be two distinct areas of human activity, each with its own codes and rigours to be necessarily followed by those who practice either the first or the second. Those who practice a mixture of both are expected to adhere to the rules of both fields in order to produce legitimate offspring. Furthermore, the (pre-existing?) reality should not be distorted or obscured by the self of the researcher – only enhanced by the creative means she uses in the telling of the story. Lawrence-Lightfoot admits the handling and shaping of the presentation of this reality on the part of the researcher and the different points at which her subjectivity (tastes, style, personality) show up. However, there are always borders that should never be crossed and that are defined by scientific rigour, a word we see repeated multiple times in those few lines above that describe good research. Wanting to make sure I know the correct definition, I looked it up. The Cambridge English Dictionary[23] defines rigorous as follows: “careful to look at or consider every part of something to make certain it is correct or safe”; “controlling behaviour in a severe way”; “severe or difficult, esp. because at a high level”; “detailed and careful”; “strict or severe”. Thesaurus.com[24] gives, among others, the following synonyms for rigorous: “exact”; “harsh”; “rigid”; “stringent”; “austere”; “uncompromising”. This is illuminating, right? Now, science is supposed to lead us to knowledge. But is it an effort doomed to fail if it is not always done this way? Can it be that if we “control behaviour in a severe way” we miss the chance to explore possibilities for other types of knowledges that may not be “rigorous” but might nevertheless be legitimate, and valid, and worthy of our trust? Ways that can open up directions to imagine differently both the personal and the social?

Lawrence-Lightfoot realises that she stands between two binary poles – art and science; aestheticism and empiricism. In the final part of her “Reflections on Portraiture: A Dialogue Between Art and Science,” she writes, “In closing, I want to blur the art/science contrasts that have dominated my analysis thus far,”[25] and proceeds to soften the positivist tones of her approach. To this end, she asserts that such boundaries produce distortions,[26] while it is the same intellect, the same imagination working in similar ways in each of the two domains. This final turn she takes in her description of portraiture, her conclusion, summarises the point of my article and announces what I would like myself to pursue. This stance, that we see more confidently express towards the end in Lawrence-Lightfoot’s text, is, I believe, what could lead to “community building,” “acts of intimacy and connection,”[27] and to a real “people’s scholarship.”[28] In a like manner, Ståhl, coming across Deleuze and Guattari’s hesitation about a creative-critical writing practice and their persistence in making a distinction between the two, argues, as I have discussed, for an erasure of this line. I, too, search for a hybrid practice that does away with such categorisations and which, instead of striving to adhere to a specific set of pre-determined rules of doing science and of conducting a rigorous inquiry, is more concerned with asserting its identity as an experimental, affect-driven, chance-taking and chance-following, excess-and-transgression-favouring ethico-political-and-aesthetic project.

So that I can speak

of Zoe’s angels again,

and how I saw them getting

agitated and tearful

as she was tearing the school photos –

in pieces.

The children’s voices

ringing far away –

“Cross-eyed!”

“Captain Hook!”

The angels covering

their faces with their hands.

Oh! Fuck all that!

I am a circus queen.

An expert contortionist

with a rubber-like body;

and no one has seen

my glittery-flickery costume,

underneath my clothes.

One of the people I was thinking of is Laurel Richardson, who gestures towards writing as a mode of inquiry, a method that “coheres with the development of ethical selves engaged in social action and social reform.”[29]Richardson, inspired by postmodernism and poststructuralism,[30] points to a kind of scholarly writing that does away with academic conventions and allows the researcher to nurture her own writing voice and learn about her project and about herself. Moreover, she introduces what she calls CAP ethnographies (CAP: Creative Analytical Processes), which, taking into account feminist, queer, and critical race theory critiques, open up the field and its possibilities for the sprouting of new species. These processes, she says, lead to an ethnography that “displays the writing process and the writing product as deeply intertwined; both are privileged. The product cannot be separated from the producer, the mode of production, or the method of knowing.”[31] This practice, at the same time creative and analytical, offers a situated and partial account and “frees us to write material in a variety of ways—to tell and retell. There is no such thing as “getting it right,” only “getting it” differently contoured and nuanced.”[32] Richardson compares this mode of investigation to that of triangulation, which is typically employed in more conventional or positivist research paradigms,[33] and suggests that the crystal is more suitable to describe what is at work in writing as inquiry:

I propose that the central imaginary for “validity” for postmodernist texts is not the triangle—a rigid, fixed, two-dimensional object. Rather, the central imaginary is the crystal, which combines symmetry and substance with an infinite variety of shapes, substances, transmutations, multi-dimensionalities, and angles of approach. Crystals grow, change, and are altered, but they are not amorphous. Crystals are prisms that reflect externalities and refract within themselves, creating different colours, patterns, and arrays casting off in different directions.[34]

Still, I kept bumping into study after study discouraging the kind of take I had in mind. Indeed, a significant amount of work I had consulted about the relationship and crossings between anthropology and literature seemed to consider this mating in predominantly realist terms, some of it more implicitly and some of it quite explicitly. For example, Craith and Kockel,[35] in their article, “Blurring the Boundaries Between Literature and Anthropology: A British Perspective”, only examine what is called social realist literature in connection to the different ways that literature can be like, or be inspired by, anthropology, and vice versa. In this article, they highlight the connections between specific literary narratives and anthropology/ethnography. To this end, they examine these narratives as final products: detailed realistic descriptions of relations, situations, and settings. They consider the way they were composed: after careful observation of the social and often consulting materials such as letters and diaries. And they elaborate on the intention of the author: to convey an as much as possible closer to reality depiction of the world around her. In all these points they find that realist literature[36] is very similar to ethnography and the other way round, and they conclude that since the methodology of anthropologists and realist writers “has much in common, there is much to gain from cross-disciplinary perspectives and intercultural interactions.”[37]

In a similar vein, Maynard and Cahnmann-Taylor make a case for ethnographic poetry and demonstrate “how poetry may help anthropologists to write insightfully about how we and other people live,”[38] but underscore that anthropologists have a lot to learn from social realist poetry, and such is the poetry that they should also write themselves. So, “like the author of historical fiction, the ethnographic poet must try to be faithful to external historical experience, while reaching beyond or through it to an equally true, artful reality, a sense of aesthetics that enhances literal ‘facts’ rather than diminishes them.”[39] So, while we have long realised all the problematic aspects of ethnography[40] and undertake to expand our understanding and our practice in the hope of creating something less oppressive and more authentic, what still seems to be a preferred path in our opening up to the employment of fiction in ethnography is to stick with social realist narratives. But such an insistence (as we see it above, and as we saw it also with Lawrence-Lightfoot) on a form of storytelling that is particularly similar to ethnography as we used to know it, precisely for this reason – for being similar – does not seem to really break new ground. What realist narratives are known to do and part of how they function is to take the pieces together, tie up all the loose ends, and create a neat story, a story that makes sense and that explains what the point of it all is.

When I was thinking of creating portraits of the women I encountered, I didn’t have in mind the realist type. Realist portraits, like those advocated by Lawrence-Lightfoot, resemble the subject while still managing to surprise with details that are not exactly the same as in the original, thus offering insights about the person portrayed, projecting aspects never thought of before, and spelling out unrealised dynamics and inner tensions.[41] However, there are also portraits of another kind, abstract ones that can bring to our attention aspects of the person in her life-world in other ways, following different paths of aesthetics and perception. These portraits can create, perhaps, a much stronger affect too, in their transgressive character, and do so in far more profound and jarring ways, with bold juxtapositions and manipulations of the form, as they are less (or not at all) restricted by the norms of a realist approach. They can be more confronting, more arresting, shocking even, and make a more lasting impression on us, while they simultaneously do not claim to be a translation of the real but openly expose their constructedness. Similarly, the portraits I was imagining would not attempt a faithful rending of features, physical and emotional, nor would they communicate a truth of accuracy. They would distort the encounter in certain ways, deform the subject and the story, make use of props, masks, costumes, and communicate to the reader what I understood as an important element of theatricality.

Right here lies a paradox of my position and of my intentions as a portraitist-ethnographer: On the one hand, I wanted to honour the women and their experiences, their confessions, their interpretations, their own insights, and their identities. On the other hand, I wanted to break their identities and mine, to shatter them, to crack them open and see what else was inside.[42] My need to give a creative-critical response that would avoid the realist path stemmed precisely from a keen awareness of my own power over the text, the power to fix the women in specific roles, to limit their landscape in a frame of my choosing. A realist exposition wouldn’t do justice to what we shared; it would be dull and dead. For these reasons, I wanted to look at their narratives and their identities as fluid and rhizomatic,[43] to pay attention to power relations and individual traits, the situatedness of the accounts, but also to regard their stories (and mine, too) as performances responding to life, instead of as representations of life. But still, I was hesitating and started feeling suspicious of myself. By creating my poetic/anti-realist/anti-rational portraits, wasn’t I, again, the one deciding on all the things they’d be comprised of? The props, the masks, the costumes, the frame? Did I, perchance, merely want to add more drama? Make the women look more exotic than they were?

The Magical Realist Way

Looking further, I came across Darlene Juschka[44] and her article “The Writing of Ethnography: Magical Realism and Michael Taussig,” in which she asks a very relevant question: “If writing is a potential act of colonialisation, how can it be reclaimed as a challenge to colonialisation?”[45] As the title suggests, Juschka examines the possibility of doing so through the employment of magical realism in ethnography, and takes as an exemplary work done this way that of Michael Taussig.[46] Juschka shares the realisation of many: that we cannot escape narrativisation (to always put things in the form of a story). However, she points out, “it is precisely this narrativisation laying claim to the other. How then should one engage narrativisation in such a way as to resist colonialisation?”[47]Among other studies, the author looks at Hayden White’s book The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation, the subject of which is the writing of history – always performed in current genres “meaningful to the historical period of the interpreter”[48] that not only offer a structure for the telling of events but also determine their meaning. The same is the case with ethnography, where events are assimilated into a story. The form then, the generic type of the story, furnishes it with meaning. What is more, the ethnographer, even the self-reflexive kind, does not cease to be at the centre of the narrative as “the authentic knower,” the mediator who “translates and interprets for the reader.”[49] As a potential solution to this predicament of ethnography, Juschka proposes magical realism, a mode of writing that “blurs the line between the ‘real’ and the fantastic”[50] and complicates our understandings of time, reality, and space.[51] Magical realist narratives, examined as a postcolonial response to colonial ways of thinking[52] and linked to the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze,[53] challenge the relations of centre and periphery, as well as those of cause and effect. Furthermore,

In magical realism, irony and tragedy operate as the face behind the mask of the comedy that underscores tragic futility. In this equation, the real is the colonialist overlay that imperils life and culture, while the fantastic is that which operates in direct antithesis to the European super-civilisation in an attempt to negotiate the persistence of colonial memory, in the hope of creating a future that neither represses the past nor is permanently mutilated by it.[54]

That was more like it. With magical realism, I had a feeling of recognition. For in a sense, here all the threads could be brought together: a creative-critical practice advocated by Ståhl, by the portraiture of Lawrence-Lightfoot, and by Richardson’s invitation to a creative practice as we look multiple times at our subject through a crystal. Further inspired, this time by a work of conceptual art, Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions and Drawings,[55] I composed three exercises/conceptual tasks motivated by my encounter with Zoe. These, as well as the short poems that appear in this text, I perceive more as exercises in creative-critical writing or exercises in hybridity and in looking again. I do not consider them as examples of magical realism or anything of the sort. They form part of this article because – whatever their level of correspondence – they are part of the same thinking process that slowly matured through my readings, as I was grappling with the question of writing in a creative-critical mode and with what the best way is for an ethnographer to do this. Their value does not lie in how fine they are, but rather in what I have learned by doing them and what others can learn by trying similar directions. As Richardson says, there is no “getting it right”[56]“only ‘getting it’ differently contoured and nuanced.”[57]

To be executed by Zoe and her angels.

Exercise I

Theatre Piece for a Choir

Go from room to room in your apartment making a lot of noise

and scream

1.     in front of a small mirror,

2.     in front of a big mirror,

3.     in front of any other reflecting surface.

Exercise II

Sound Piece

Record the sound of the pills as they jump in their bottle.

Record the sound of coffee as you pour it in your cup.

Record the sound of boiling water until it all evaporates.

Exercise III

Collecting Piece

Go to a hospital waiting room and record the discussions of patients.

Learn them by heart.

Mix them with your own story.

Repeat them in your mind in different orders one afternoon.

[1] Myasthenia gravis comes in different types with different symptoms. One of them is generalized weakness of the muscles (extreme weakness in different muscle groups) that can affect the whole body. Another is double vision. Yet another is what Zoe had – the falling of an eyelid. Typically, the surgical removal of the thymus gland is what western medicine prescribes as a treatment, but not as a cure. There is no known cure for this condition. 

[2] Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007), 128.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Eve Kosofsky-Sedgwick, Tendencies (London: Routledge, 1994), 3.

[5] Harold Lloyd Goodall, Writing the New Ethnography (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2000), 7

[6] Ibid., capitals in the original

[7] See Bergson’s philosophy on intuition as a method of knowing in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bergson/#MethIntu. Erin Manning, in Minor Gesture, draws from Bergson’s work and makes a case for intuition as knowledge and as a research-creation process: “I argue that intuition is as key to a process as any other building- block and that through intuition, as allied to the creation of a problem, the artful comes to expression” (2016: 14).

[8] See Poindexter, “Research as Poetry”; Prendergast et al., Poetic Enquiry; Faulkner, Poetry as Method; Banks & Banks, Fiction and Social Research; Angrosino, Opportunity House; Saldaña, “Playwriting with Data”; Denzin, Performance Ethnography; Valle & Connor, “Becoming Theatrical”.

[9] Gioia Chilton and Patricia Leavy. “Arts-Based Research Practice: Merging Social Research and the Creative Arts.” In The Oxford Handbook of Qualitative Research, edited by Patricia Leavy (New York and Oxford: University Press, 2014), 3.

[10] Ibid., italics in the original; see also: Leavy, Method Meets Art; Sullivan, Art Practice as Research.

[11] See: Finley, “Critical Arts-Based Inquiry”; Kapitan et al., “Creative Art Therapy in a Community’s Participatory Research and Social Transformation”.

[12] Barbara Bickel, “From Artist to A/r/tographer: An Autoethnographic Ritual Inquiry into Writing on the Body.” Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 2, no. 2 (2005): 8–17. 

[13] Lisa A. Mazzei, “Voice Without a Subject.” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 16, no 2 (2016),152.

[14] Ibid, italics in the original. In her article, Mazzei explores the ways traditional qualitative inquiry looks for a “[v]oice burdened with authenticity and self-reflexivity” which “obliges the interpreter to ‘center’ and stabilize, to fix that subject to produce a supposedly coherent narrative that represents an accumulation of a coagulated and sedimented truth” (title, 153-154).

[15] Ola Ståhl, “Kafka and Deleuze/Guattari: Towards a Creative Critical Writing Practice.” Theory, Culture, and Society, 33, no 7–8 (2016): 221–35. 

[16] Ibid., 222; see also Kathleen Stewart’s Ordinary Affects.

[17] Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot and Jessica Davis Hoffmann. The Art and Science of Portraiture (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997)

[18] Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, “Reflections on Portraiture: A Dialogue Between Art and Science.” Qualitative Inquiry, 11, no. 3 (2005), 6.

[19] Ibid., 9.

[20] Ibid., my italics.

[21] Ibid., 11, my italics.

[22] Ibid., my italics.

[23] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/rigorous

[24] https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/rigorous

[25] Ibid., 13.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Ibid., 12.

[28] Featherstone, quoted in Lawrence-Lightfoot, “Reflections on Portraiture,” 12.

[29] Laurel Richardson and Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre. “Writing: A Method of Inquiry.” In The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research, edited by Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln (London: Sage Publications, 2018) 1410.

[30] See Davies, Poststructuralist Theory and Classroom Practice.

[31] Richardson and St. Pierre, “Writing: A Method of Inquiry,” 1415.

[32] Ibid.

[33] The triangle is seen as offering three points of reference/analytical perspectives, thus enabling a well-rounded analysis (see Denzin and Lincoln, SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research, 777-799). Interestingly, triangulation is used also by Lawrence-Lightfoot and Davis Hoffmann (204) and trusted as a method “through which emergent themes in research portraits gain their authenticity” (ibid., 233).

[34] Ibid., 1416. This quotation comes from the chapter “Writing: A Method of Inquiry” (in The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research) co-authored by Richardson and St. Pierre and divided in two parts, each part written by each of the two authors. The quotation comes from Part I: Qualitative Writing, which is authored by Richardson.

[35] Máiréad Craith and Ullrich Nic and Kockel, “Blurring the Boundaries Between Literature and Anthropology: A British Perspective.” Ethnologie française, 44, no. 4 (2014): 689-697.

[36] They mention among others Charles Dickens, George Eliot, William Makepeace Thackeray, Jane Austen, Joseph Conrad, and E.M. Forster.

[37] Craith & Kockel, “Blurring the Boundaries Between Literature and Anthropology: A British Perspective”, 695.

[38]  Kent Maynard and Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor. “Anthropology at the Edge of Words: Where Poetry and Ethnography Meet.” Anthropology and Humanism, 35, no. 1 (2010), 2.

[39] Ibid., 12.

[40] Objectification and colonization of the “other” through writing, production of knowledge that privileges western notions of causality and linearity and negates the messiness and the untamable of existence, placing the ethnographer in the center as a master narrator.

[41] This is linked to Haraway’s discussion of reflection and diffraction: “Diffraction does not produce ‘the same’ displaced, as reflection and refraction do. Diffraction is a mapping of interference, not of replication, reflection, or reproduction … the first (reflection) invites the illusion of essential, fixed position, while the second (diffraction) trains us to more subtle vision” (The Haraway Reader, 70).

[42] I don’t mean to say here that identity is something like a shell to break open and bring into the light whatever it hides – an essence/truth of sorts. Rather I wonder about the more that is there, the multiple, the plurality, the refracting angles of the crystal Richardson has proposed, the “what else” as sought after by Van Goidsenhoven and De Schauwer (“Listening Beyond Words,” 335), who cite an excerpt from Manning’s Minor Gesture, quite pertinent for me here, too: “The unquantifiable within experience can only be taken into account if we begin with a mode of inquiry that refutes initial categorization. Positing the terms of the account before the exploration of what the account can do only results in stultifying its potential and relegating it to that which already fits within preexisting schemata of knowledge” (Manning, quoted in Van Goidsenhoven and De Schauwer, ibid.).

[43] A different approach to narrative research is inspired by rhizomatic understandings of selfhood (Loots et al., “Practising a Rhizomatic Perspective in Narrative Research”). The psychologist Jasmina Sermijn and colleagues used the rhizome as an open form of thinking to “search for an alternative story notion” and “an alternative view on narrative selfhood” (Sermijn, Devlieger, and Loots, “The Narrative Construction of the Self: Selfhood as a Rhizomatic Story”, 634). This rhizomatic approach originates from French poststructuralist, postmodern, and deconstructionist takes on narrative (Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of The Prison; Barthes, Image Music Text). These were taken up by feminist theorists (Davies and Gannon, “Feminism/post-structuralism”; Davies et al., “Constituting the Feminist Subject in Poststructuralist Discourse”; Richardson and St Pierre, “Writing: A Method of Inquiry”) and had great influence in social research. In this tradition, narrative and selfhood are seen as multiple, performative, situated and contextualized (Davies and Harre, “Positioning: The Discursive Production of Selves”).

[44] Darlene M. Juschka,  “The Writing of Ethnography: Magical Realism and Michael Taussig.” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, 5, no. 1 (2003): 84-105.

[45] Ibid., 90.

[46] This is Taussig’s book: The Magic of the State.

[47] Juschka, “The Writing of Ethnography: Magical Realism and Michael Taussig”, 90.

[48]ibid, 91.

[49] Ibid.

[50] Ibid., 92.

[51] Ibid.

[52] Christopher Warnes, Magical Realism and the Postcolonial Novel: Between Faith and Irreverence (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

[53] Eva Aldea, Magical Realism and Deleuze: The Indiscernibility of Difference in Postcolonial Literature (London and New York: Continuum Literary Studies, 2011).

[54]Juschka, “The Writing of Ethnography: Magical Realism and Michael Taussig”, 92. 

[55] Yoko Ono, Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions and Drawings (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970)..

[56] Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln, eds. The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research. 5th ed (London: Sage, 2018), 1415.

[57] Ibid.