Abstract
In gratitude toward those who have paved the way for a multitude of academic writing genres, we continue to de-stabilize writing conventions to propose, so as to put forward, ways of writing ethnographic research differently. We do this through an exploration of how the poetics of materiality can be written in ethnographic research. By means of Bachelard’s work on material imagination and poetic instants, as well as re-visiting ethnographic clay-and-wood fieldwork, we suggest the subgenre of vertical ethnography. This is a genre that enables a shift from the often taken-for-granted thick description, which focuses on interpretations of meaning of what happened in the field, to deep inscription, a writing that breaks through the surface when our entanglement with materiality is awakening poetic sensibilities, enabling a vertical writing of ethnographic accounts.
Touching rocks, bodily communion with earthly beings. Open to the aliveness of rocks, Lured by curiosity, surprise, and wonders afforded to us. Rocks are now much more than mere rocks, more than ever. Entangled.
Being touched
Imagine the smell of fresh wood. Touching irregular grain texture, imperfect knots, crumbling bark. Try to recall a similar sensual experience at work—maybe the touch of a newly opened book, the smell of new print, fresh flowers on your desk. Touching, smelling, and seeing material objects trigger sensations, thoughts, and emotions otherwise absent. Material objects bring about presence. But there is more: a raging storm, trees bending under the pressure of rain, the touch of a warm rock on a mountain peak, or soft sand under your feet, all of this which can evoke a poetic moment. These materiality-infused moments, when we are touched by the earthy elements, usually provoke a multitude of sensations, such as helplessness and fear, or a feeling of overwhelming happiness and longing, maybe all at the same time.
Not only in our daily life, such moments can also occur during ethnographic fieldwork, and they have occurred to us. One of us, Joanna, conducted some time ago an ethnographic study: qualitative immersive research aimed at observing the interactions of a community (i.e. Pachirat, 2018). During the study, she occasionally experienced strong poetic moments, evoked in encounters with artisans working with natural materials, such as timber, clay, and building materials. Listening to how they spoke about their work and their material at hand, she felt that a special kind of “we-ness” emerged. Whenever they mentioned the material and the deeply sensual aspects of struggles with wood or clay, the course of the fieldwork conversation shifted, including their roles in it. During those moments, she, as a researcher, went from a listener to an active participant: By invoking the materiality of the moment, the interlocutors were sharing with her unusual moments of powerful intersubjective experiences. These moments were transcending time and space and they enabled an interconnected space of the imagined organization. These were poetic moments: events with others, which have important consequences in terms of how we understand the world (Cunliffe, 2018). Having experienced such moments, we—the collective of authors—encountered the dilemma of how to write about our experiences, and it left us wondering: how can these materiality-infused poetic moments enrich ethnographic writing? And, given the special qualities that these moments spur, how can they deepen ethnographic reflexivity?
These two questions provoked and inspired us to write this essay. Like scholars before us, we have been searching for ways of writing the richness of fieldwork impressions assembled during our ethnographic studies. The COVID-19 pandemic made whole societies re-organize their public engagements. Ultimately, it made social practice differently rematerialized, which made us aware of how incarnated our practice indeed is. Like Emmanouela Mandalaki and Ely Daou (2020), we feel that so many efforts of the pre-pandemic past feel insufficient, and realized that we need something beyond linearity, to heal and to create connections “in past, present and future” (p. 228). Likewise, Richard Kearney (2021) is pondering about life after COVID in his book Touch, wondering if the digitally mediated realities that became the new norm after COVID have created crises of touch: My question is: are we losing touch with our senses as our experience becomes ever more mediated? Are we entering an era of “excarnation,” where we obsess about the body in ever more disembodied ways? For if incarnation is the image of becoming flesh, excarnation is flesh becoming image. Incarnation invests flesh: excarnation divests it. So, we ask, are we losing touch with touch itself? (p. 2)
Kearney looks for “incarnate action”: based on the double sensibility of “touching and being touched” (p. 132). This is needed not only for our physical and mental well-being, but also for us to feel that we are part of the world and to break through the serious troubles we are facing when we are out of touch with ourselves, fellow humans, and other-than-human kin. Like Kearney, we are searching for incarnation research practices, and we are locating the rich possibilities in relation to being in touch with particular materialities that speak to us during fieldwork. However, in bringing these material experiences into words, conventional narratives may fail us, as it seems. At the same time, within cultural, social, and organizational anthropology, there is a vibrant tradition of searching for how to express oneself and “we routinely find colleagues publishing ethnographic novels, short stories, creative non-fiction, memoir, or mixed genre work” (Maynard, 2009: 118). As part of this movement, there also are poetic approaches, mainly, because “[e]thnographic poetry alongside other experimental, creative forms, can help anthropologists paint a deeper portrait of social realities that might prove difficult through ethnographic prose” (Maynard and Cahnmann-Taylor, 2010: 10). This sounds promising. Still, if we take the poetic invitation of painting a deeper portrait seriously, what does that entail? What is it that makes this orientation to research special? And, can it be helpful for the development of a reflexive organizational science (Cunliffe, 2003)?
Poetic approaches (including the writing of poetry) are today part of the ethnographers’ “toolbox” (Maynard and Cahnmann-Taylor, 2010). One of the discipline’s founding mothers, Margaret Mead, wrote poetry as a way to make sense of her fieldwork already in the 1960s and 1970s, and she was not the only one among the classical anthropologists to do so. 1 However, at that time, artistic expression was being kept separate from ethnographic publications. Later, the dichotomy between artistic writing and scholarly work became questioned, and today there is more awareness that “there is a potential of poetry in ethnography as it breaks free from the need to follow linear and/or chronological form” (Haripriya, 2018: 129). This is important, because we need to be able to portray organizational life, without excluding ambivalence or ambiguity. Ethnographers often stumble into ambivalence: their role in the field is often defined not by clear verbal or normative boundaries but by the empty space that makes it possible for them to be, in the words of Michael Agar’s (1980), “professional strangers,” temporarily giving up our own world and identity for these of the, not too strange, Others.
Poetry helps to create resonances for it, boldly defying linear thinking and embracing empty spaces, silences (Höpfl, 1995). In short, the elusiveness and indefiniteness of ethnographic engagement and the possibility to express the unspeakable can be articulated poetically: “the imaginary of the poem and the poetic often is not precise but more suggestive, pushing thinking forward” (Rinehart, 2018: 2).
In contributing to these conversations about the poetics of ethnography, we inquire into the writings of the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, and in particular his work around “material imagination” (Bachelard, 1999) and “poetic instant” (Bachelard, 2013), for guidance as to how to capture the poetics of lived experience in relation with materiality. Such experiences open up for particular moments and make space for other temporalities than chronological, linear time (Rhodes, 2019; Steyaert, 2015). Following this line of thinking, we propose that ethnographic writing can flourish in “vertical time” (Helin, 2023) and that there are unrecognized possibilities in focusing on the poetics of ethnographic writing. More particularly, the contribution of this text is a proposed subgenre we label vertical ethnography. The relationships between people and the materials in an ethnographic study are an important topic for learning management and organizing, and, as we noted previously, perhaps increasingly so, after the COVID-19 pandemic: our alienation from the embodied existence rooted in the material context by the sense of touch (Kearney, 2021) calls for an organic and organized reconnection of authors and readers (Pullen, 2018) and of learners and teachers (Strauss et al., 2022). The management project that has been based on sterile reading, writing, and learning needs to be at least balanced by (if not thoroughly reformed through) dynamic engagement integrating “the inner and outer world, to work through the tensions in the here-and-now between the past and the future” (Küpers, 2011: 49). In other words, we need to learn through and with materiality how to reconnect with an embodied world. Poetic approaches can help to communicate the insights gained this way in the form of catharsis—involving the entire contextualized and embodied person, not only her rational capacities to solve abstract problems (Mandalaki, 2022). Our perspective on materiality is that of embodiedness and touch, and the connectedness it evokes.
A rich tradition of exploring writing—to learn from and break with
Even though we have witnessed how organization studies writing at large have been taken over by a formulaic style of writing (Docherty, 2014; Gilmore et al., 2019), there have always been more poetic expressions present in organization and management research (Guillet de Monthoux, 1998; Kostera, 1997; Weick, 2004). Classic ethnographic writing styles include more artful literary tales too (Van Maanen, 1988), and ethnographers try to make their texts open to the often unsaid and unseen, such as underprivileged groups in society (Persson, 2020), the margins (Goodall, 2000), even the researcher’s role itself through reflexive approaches (Cunliffe, 2003). There is a recognized need to pay attention to feelings and affects, to focus on the elusive moods and sensual ambiences, going beyond the conscious dimensions of culture (Stewart, 2007). There is also a movement to put space in the center of narrative focus, involving multiple senses (Jensen and Sandström, 2020). In another sub-tradition, autoethnography uses personal experience to portray cultural and social processes by reflexivity and attention to intersections between the self and social life (Bochner and Ellis, 2006). Alter-ethnography, in contrast, focuses on the encounter with the Other in his or her complex otherness and difference (Ericsson and Kostera, 2020). It is disruptive and opposed to hierarchies and non-conformist, based on an ethical and ontological imperative: the Lévinasian unconditional duty toward the Other, preceding any other considerations. In the context of this study, and the emphasis of encountering the research participants’ sensual work with materials, we envision a kind of synthesis between auto- and alter-ethnography. Importantly, the ethnographies conducted within feminist new materialism have clear connections to our work too, since this is a movement that calls for recognizing that humans co-exist with other earthly inhabitants and materialities. Within this stream of work, Anu Valtonen and Tarja Salmela (2023: 142) develop what they call a “curiography,” an inclusionary ethnographic approach, and an “orientation toward engaging with the lively murmuring of the world in a response-able and polite way.”
We are grateful for the existence of the rich tradition of different ways of writing ethnography. At the same time, the still most widely used, taken-for-granted mode of ethnographic writing, both at large and also within organization studies, is the so-called “thick description.” Picking up the notion of thick description from the philosopher Gilbert Ryle, Clifford Geertz developed the idea of thick description for ethnography in early 1970s. The writing of thick description starts from the practice of having spent an extended period of (chronological) time in the field, because hours lived in the field are supposed to offer “rich data.” Having collected data, the researcher can start to engage in an interpretative analysis leading to the writing of a detailed, contextualized text into which the observed events are interwoven. Geertz emphasized the importance of the interplay of the “particular” and the “microscopic.” A well-known example is his description of the bidding system in the Balinese cockfights (Geertz, 1972).
Most ethnographic writing, including classical, realist tales from the field (Van Maanen, 1988), includes thick description. They differ from reductionist canons of linear social science writing in that they offer better ways of telling complex tales from the field (cf. Średnicka, 2022). With thick description, ethnographers can move from structural approaches made up of “thin” data, toward a conceptualized way of working and writing focusing on detailed accounts to understand culture through the web of meaning. Working within this tradition, the work of the ethnographer is not unlike that of the literary critic, as “the guiding principle is the same: societies, like lives, contain their own interpretations. One has only to learn how to gain access to them” (Geertz, 1972: 29). Geertz was interested in the poetic; nevertheless, he suggested to translate it to narrative through interpretation: A good interpretation of anything—a poem, a person, a history, a ritual, an institution, a society—takes us into the heart of that of which it is the interpretation. (Geertz, 1973: 317)
Here, we propose an alternative to the interpretative-based ethnography. The work of Gaston Bachelard helps us to understand some key differences between interpretative and imaginative approaches to writing research. It fits well with what Paul Willis (2000) calls ethnographic imagination, a special aesthetic and social sensibility; we cherish an imaginative approach, in the hope of being able to understand the experience and creativity, by engaging the senses, and consciousness itself. Ethnographic imagination helps to see them dynamic relationships between presence and the field. We propose that vertical ethnography and a material imagination offer a considerable reflexive opening and a way to “overcome the spatial and territorial approach” common in organization studies (De Vaujany and Introna, 2023: 2). Importantly, one of the promises of vertical ethnography is how it enables a shift from “thick description” to “deep inscription,” which we will get back to. Vertical ethnography is not only a way of writing, but also a way of seeing and feeling, a reflexivity of and toward consciousness and sensuality.
Gaston Bachelard and the materiality of poetic instants
Joanna: Oftentimes in the field, I experienced those unexpected moments when one’s thoughts start wandering, triggered by some specific images recalled in the conversation. This is exactly what happened when Anna, one of my interlocutors, shared a profound poetic moment that she once experienced visiting a producer of ecological paints: 100% natural, no chemicals. And I remember, I remember this delight, how I could take it with my hands, I could paint with anti-corrosion paint with my fingers. Do you understand? And the awareness that this is what I can flush with water after, and that it can go to the ground and that nothing bad will happen. This type of material means that I have no barriers. (Anna)
I began to imagine and almost feel the cold humidity of lime paint on my hands, as if my thoughts and imaginations detached from the situation, started to run free on their own track, triggering very strong, almost physical sensations. I quickly realized that when using natural products I feel exactly the same excitement and that her words could have been my own, even though they were deeply personal. I felt that such experiences, that I still cannot properly name, go far beyond otherwise popular and simplistic narratives such as the concern about the planet and the “eco-friendly” trends. We both seemed to share similar combination of various emotions, feelings, and reflections.
The material bases and enactive character of imagination ignited in this and other encounters bring to mind the musings of Gaston Bachelard. In a series of books on the elements of earth, air, water, and fire, Bachelard explores how our encounters with different forms of “materialities” can awaken particular forms of imaginative capacities (Helin et al., 2022). This approach to materiality emphasizes that “the world is not a backdrop to human action; rather, human action is always part of, and in participation with, matter” (Lundberg, 2008: 3). Connecting material entanglements and time, Silvia Gherardi (2019a) notes that this “entanglement has performative qualities, and the contours of human and material agency are never known in advance . . .” (p. 43). When our body is interacting with the materiality at hand—when we work with the resistance of matter—it does something to us and particular temporalities and energies are created. Astrid Huopalainen and Suvi Satama (2019) write beautifully about child birth, acknowledging “how the material both constructs, performs and matters” (p. 2). Such an acknowledgment of the power of materiality led Bachelard (1999) to a significant distinction, that between “formal” and “material” imagination: “One that gives life to the formal cause and one that gives life to the material cause . . .” (p. 1). Formal and material imaginations activate forces along two different axes, in two different forms. Formal imagination unravels in a horizontal manner and is based on perception where it operates at the surface and reaches completion and standstill. Material imagination, on the other hand, opens up toward the poetic in that it “plumbs the depth of being” and does not cease to move us (Bachelard, 1999). In contemporary life, there is a tendency for formal imagination to take over, thereby reducing our creative capacities to a reproduction of that which is already known. Yet material imagination, which springs from direct contact with materiality, can provoke poetic insight of the new.
Bachelard (2013) refers to these special moments of emergence as “poetic instants.” To him, time and imagination are clearly related, and fundamental, to this understanding of poetics (Helin et al., 2022). One of the characteristics of the poetic instant is that it enables a break from chronological time because time no longer flows, “it shoots up” (Bachelard, 2013: 175). When time shoots up, we can start to explore vertical movements in the present moment, enabling us to “fly high” and “dig deep” to encounter that which is of utmost importance to us (Helin, 2023). According to Bachelard (2013), it is along the vertical axis that we experience our most vital, existential moments; the vertical instant becomes the ground for authentic creation. In emphasizing the verticality, the poetic instant not only offers another direction of time, from horizontality to verticality, but also an embodied experience of a moment that makes it possible to enlarge what is possible for us to even think, see or feel as time no longer moves from a certain past to an uncertain future. (Helin et al., 2022: 4–5)
Of outmost importance for Bachelard (2013) is that instants are alone (separated from each other), and they cannot touch each other or dissolve into one another. Thus, instants do not have duration. This is on this aspect that Bachelard’s philosophy most fundamentally breaks with Bergson, who proposes the importance of duration. Bachelard (2013) even wrote that we “wish to develop a discontinuous Bergsonism” (p. 20). The rejection of duration is of importance for Bachelard (2013), because it is in the singularity of the instant that we experience novelty. He further emphasized that it is in our habits of writing and talking that have contributed to the misconception of time’s “true” character and the focus on duration, since language is littered with words such as “for a long time,” “meanwhile,” and “during.” In this way “[d]uration is ingrained in our grammar” because “words are indeed there before thought, before our efforts renew thought” (Bachelard, 2013: 23). 2
However, the focus on the present moment is not new to ethnography. Symbolic interactionists speak of “epiphanic moments” of ethnographic studies (Denzin, 2002): glimpses of clarity and staggering insight. Suvi Satama (2020: 211) inquires into “aesthetic moments,” which are unique instants of “sensory-based being-in-the-world.” These moments occur in people’s lives and in ethnographic work: breakthroughs or insights. They may be inspired by the most mundane things: anything that touches us and brings understanding beyond the linear and rhetorical. Ann Cunliffe (2002: 20) ponders the importance of such moments in ethnographic work and depicts social poetics as spaces of unknowingness and betweenness where new possibilities, new questions. They help us to get to know ourselves within a complex context. The empty space that is allowed to emerge as a result enables the surfacing of new ideas and actions. Poetic moments direct the mind and make possible the adoption of a dialogical attitude and engagement.
In our study of artisans, such moments occurred during interviews about the everyday work of the research participants, and in particular when they spoke about the materials they use. Anna, Jan, and other research participants were deeply involved in the conversation: touched, inspired, and daydreaming even. They were gesticulating widely, often involving the whole body, as if trying to portray the plasticity, strength, or unpredictability of a specific building material. Encountering these special moments, it is almost impossible not to resonate with the images that are portrayed, not to fully immerse in their stories, and not to feel a damp cold of clay or the noble smell of fresh wood. The objects they spoke about seemed to appear between us, to be present during our conversation and stayed for long. Meetings like these touched and invited to meditate on questions such as beauty, nature, or a carefree childhood in woods.
In a way, this essay is a meditation, or perhaps contemplation of the poetics of materiality, which we understand as a poetics of (re-)embodiment. Unlike the ideas of traditional ethnographic ways of writing or aesthetic explorations of organizing, it is a mode of writing aimed at reconnecting human bodies (Mandalaki and Daou, 2020), one with an intention to learn and to manage beyond linear power. Ghislain Deslandes (2020) speaks of weak management: a mode of managerial engagement which is respectful of the fragility and impossibility to know and to control everything, while keeping the responsibility that the role carries. Weak management is strong humility: “being capable of being in uncertainties” (p. 134). Contextualization and connection help to create a rootedness and to replace the traditional managerial conceit. It depends on a conscious and contextualized presence, which, we believe, can be learned not by invoking textbook certitudes but by venturing into the poetic moment by the sense of touch.
Writing precious leftovers
Joanna: For my PhD, I conducted a longitudinal and immersive ethnographic study of an organization in the ceramics industry. I was curious about the mechanisms of organizational collaboration and wanted to understand the identity and identification processes underling employees willingness to work together.
I was entering, then leaving and returning to the field many times during a period of, all in all, 5 years, with the most intense phase of a frequent presence in the field lasting for 2 years from October 2012 to February 2014. During that time, I was involved in a range of fieldwork activities including open interviews (38), simulation game-based workshops (12), and direct and participant observations during company events, such as: informal meetings, a senior management away day, or few company picnics, and Christmas Eve. Most of the interviews were recorded and transcribed. In a few cases, due to the more informal context, notes were taken instead of recording. I also made notes in my journal during the entire period. Having finalized the fieldwork, I worked on the interpretation of the material. I categorized and analyzed it and finally the ethnographic study was published. However, as I did this, I also noted that the material contained some extraordinary fragments, transcending the categories emerging from the main study and bursting out of the standard ethnographic narrative plots. This was the case of only some odd brief fragments of the complete material. The rest was categorized and interpreted in a more traditional ethnographic way, and presented them elsewhere in the convention that Jon Van Maanen (1988) calls realist tales. I aimed for thick descriptions by utilizing an interpretative way of approaching my material and a narrative mode of writing.
Later, I returned to the material, trying to understand the relationships between the people and the materials they worked with. The odd moments stood out and seemed to lack a chronology, they evaded categorization, and they jumped out at me. It struck me that they did have an orientation of their own, not linear, not horizontal. In 2019, I returned to an intensive collection of stories in the field, by meeting three small artisanal business owners who were using similar material in their work: Jan, a medium-sized garden timber producer, Anna who is a self-employed builder that specializes in green building, and Tomek, a handyman, a stove fitter. 3 I also ran an exploratory game-based workshop for a team of a timber producer followed by an in-depth interview with Jan; I observed Tomek and Anna many times at work: Tomek, who was fitting stoves, and Anna during her unusual work with clay walls. I visited Anna’s enclave: a little house, completely self-made of clay and straw in the middle of the fields of Eastern Poland and conducted an in-depth interview with her (October 2020). I also re-visited the original big corporation, where I conducted an interview, as a follow-up on previous encounters (September 2020). Then I came across Jenny Helin’s (2023) text about verticality and it all started to make sense!
Ethnography is sensemaking of borderland experiences; it allows for going back to the field, expanding, to decode and recode; and it tells “the grounds of collective order and diversity, inclusion and exclusion” (Clifford, 1986: 2). Timothy Pachirat (2018) captures this so well when he points out that ethnographers travel into the field and back, as many times as it takes, adapting themselves and not trying to fit the “objects of study” into the needs for a representation. The research design follows life itself and is not about strict ordering—something that John Law (1994) warns against, arguing that hideous purity, a sterile and deadening approach, is the result of attempts at reductionist ordering of complex realities, and removing all the inconsistency characteristic of social processes. It may look like an attractive idea, promising that things are “properly ordered,” but it makes us unable to deal with complexity: when we encounter it, “we tend to treat it as a distraction” (Law, 1994: 5). Every order is temporary. Ethnographers, just like novelists, are immersed in processes of attention, in which the writing is only a stage (Watson, 2012: 20). The processes of “doing” and “writing” ethnography are intertwined: hence ethno–graphy.
I discussed my “left-out” moments in the light of this iterative ethnographic process with Monika and Jenny and we concluded that my story, as many other similar stories, calls for a subgenre. The “left-out” material that had not fitted into the first analysis was fieldwork material from special occasions, from what we, in our conversations, called “poetic moments.” These moments had long-lasting effects on me, and they touched me deeply. When I engage with this material today, it immediately brings me back. Jenny and Monika felt drawn in too. So, “I” became “we”: and we decided to follow their dynamics. Poetry and poetics readily came to our minds, when discussing the “left-out” fragments. They might have been difficult to tell; they concerned dirty, material things, not anything “poetical” in the traditional sense of something ethereal, but with poetical qualities, as described in the work of Gaston Bachelard. We came to name this narrative mode vertical ethnography. Somewhat paradoxically, we discovered how well this genre fits to express something solid yet rarely present in ethnographies: the poetics of materiality.
The forces of materiality
Gaston Bachelard (1999) argues that matter directly influences our capacity to imagine, where different kinds of matter have different kinds of power: “a material element must provide its own substance, its particular rules and poetics” (p. 3). Touching soil, clay, or paper invokes different experiences: [I]f poetry is to reanimate the power of creation in the soul or help us relive our natural dreams in all their intensity and all their meaning, we must come to understand that the hand as well as the eye has its reveries and poetry. We must discover the poetry of touch, the poet of kneading hands. (Bachelard, 2002: 60)
When the hand touches material, a dynamic force, preceding perception, is awakened. This brings forth a deepening experience where “matter and material imagination invite us to seek for the depth of the world and ourselves” (Gao, 2019: 78). This is a concentrated and dynamic experience: material imagination giving birth to a poetic instant which is endowed with a vibrant feeling. Of course, not all field material is vibrant. Most of it is pretty mundane. Most of the conversations in the initial research field were devoted to typical managerial challenges: business efficiency, achieving goals, and building organizational structures. People told stories about planning and execution, goals, effects, or overcoming obstacles. But, when natural materials appeared in a conversation, certainty was giving way to humility, the habit of control would took a back seat when faced with unpredictability. In a way, for a few seconds, the research participant and the researcher felt united in human helplessness, in the face of nature; they were no longer roles, they were humans. This is what we mean by claiming that materiality is a teacher of weak management (Deslandes, 2020). The liminal, indefinite position of the ethnographer, bridging worlds, creating an elusive and emergent link between human realities, makes it a powerful learning experience.
It has traditionally been claimed that ethnography is neither subjective nor objective. It is interpretive, mediating two worlds through a third. (Agar, 1986: 19)
The introduction of natural materials brought a fourth world into this equation. Clay, ceramics, and wood are subject to natural processes that could only to a certain extent be managed by humans, interestingly, most often with the use of advanced technologies.
The clay Tomek used to build the stove turned out to be too sandy, with too many stones in it: “I did not foresee it,” he admits while sadly crushing the compact lump in his hands, after several days of trying to work with the material. He humbly sets out to look for a better building material, leaving the pile of clay for other purposes: “it will be a good substrate, mixed with the soil, for flowers and trees,” he comforts himself. Then I, Joanna, somehow start to think about my work, imagining it as a sand-filled lump of clay cracking in my hands. What is worth leaving for another occasion, what is it not worth trying to roll up the mountain?
Entering a production plant, modern and filled with technologies, I am not sure what I am expecting. Certainly much more control over the process than what Tomek, a craftsman, was experiencing. More predictability brought by all sophisticated processes, technologies, and good management. Yet the meeting with head of the pattern department is liberating and surprising. For him each new project is a challenge, a puzzle or struggle with the matter over which he did not have a total control. Despite the high specialization of the production, ceramics is still ceramics. A “capricious” material that “behaves” in its own way. It gains three question and exclamation marks in my field diary: “a conscious lack of control???!!!.” Firing a ceramic sink or a toilet bowl of a certain size requires complicated calculations: the material will shrink during firing, in an uneven way, which must be taken into account in the design process.
The modeler is trained throughout his life and so that we can say that someone is already somewhat understanding this is a period of around three years, and he will not know everything. Because even when making such a single washbasin by hand, if he were to do everything from scratch, it would be [. . .] say six months, all trials, analyzes, corrections, analysis trials and corrections, then the model form and matrix. To get to know all these products, yes, such a washbasin will behave in a completely different way in the oven than the other one, which is [. . .] a completely different product, different experience, different view of the model. The washbasin behaves completely differently than the compact, the compact completely different from the standing bowl than the hanging bowl. (Head of Production)
Sometimes technology conquers the capriciousness of the raw material. The firing furnace is in the very center, the heart of the ceramic production. It is here that moisture and the mass undergo a transmutation, becoming firm, hard, and ready for glazing. Operating the stove is a sophisticated process in itself. In ceramic production the fire is always on, the stove never goes out and works continuously. In the old days, extinguishing and re-lighting a stove were a huge and costly venture, undertaken only in exceptional circumstances. The head of a technical team excitedly told me once about the turning point in which the unbearable timelessness of the fire was crossed. The leap happened in the 1990s and was brought by an advanced technology, which now makes it possible to overcome the need to have the furnace perpetually working, and to switch it off easier, if necessary: About then was the construction of a new furnace, the new furnace was erected, because that was an old furnace, fireplace, this stove is made of artificial fibers, a modern stove that can inflame and extinguish, also there after three to four days to do a review, make renovation and you can light the stove again. (Head of the Technical Team)
Echoes of an old story about Man thanks to Technology overcoming the limitations of Nature reverberate in this tale. For Jan, the encounter with a new technology, embodying the best features of a Western technical thought, reliability and high quality, became a true game changer, liberating him from the limitations of capricious material. He recalls when, in the 1990s, he discovered this possibility, what paved the way for his commercial success: I was the only recipient of this unwanted raw material. There was a huge amount of it in Poland. And it was possible to remake it thanks to a German company that invented the so-called milling machine, very efficient, which as if swallowed these small pines with a small diameter and spewed out beautifully surrounded round rolls and pieces on the other side, it was the raw material for further processing, which was used for garden products. Because once they were, of course, they were not suitable for use in the garden until someone invented the so-called pressure impregnation, i.e. the one that penetrates inside caused that this young pine, which was very quickly destroyed in the garden, suddenly became extremely durable. (Jan)
But even though some of the interlocutors were so grateful to technology, they nonetheless quickened to extol the invincible forces of the natural material. From technical narrative they turn back to poetic hymn. You simply cannot do anything you want with clay or wood. Due to their specific characteristics they require specialist knowledge, they “demand respect for their uniqueness,” Jan acknowledges.
You have thousands of species of wood and each species has its application, it is appropriate to make a roof of alder or cedar wood, and construction of spruce wood, and ship decks of such wood. Each of them has its beauty and completely different properties for something else. (Jan)
The flow of the interview is disrupted: there is a pause in the recording. Both interviewer and interviewee fall silent. The silence marks a poetic moment which concentrates ambivalence, undoes chronological time, and creates a verticality of experience which releases dreams and reverie (Bachelard, 1961). It is emptiness but it is not empty. Being an archetype, in the Jungian sense, it is like a symbolic space ready to hold a flow of images, attracted by an own force of symbolic gravity (Jung, 1968). It is full of meaning, like the flame of a candle: ambivalent, dynamic, and at the same time fragile and robust. Bachelard (2013) wrote about vertical time: a complex moment consisting of many simultaneities.
I pause and reflect. My thoughts run completely arbitrarily toward the 19th-century industrial revolution: steam engine, railroads, factory chimneys, and the paradoxical force of “the machine: both liberating and unleashing. And they do not stop there, evolving into hopeful thoughts on sustainability. Wood coming from the interviewees is essentially waste, which, thanks to a special machine, is transformed into high-quality wood, ‘beautiful round rolls.’” Again my thoughts escape the field and walk toward ideas that occupied my mind. I start to dream about the future and new technologies transmuting waste into valuable goods.
There is more. It seems that even the most advanced technology does not release from the limitations imposed by time: The time it takes to process the wet clay into the hard building block of the furnace, the time a fleshy, ceramic bowl needs to become a permanent sink, but also the naturally limited life span of the wooden product. The time of creating and the time of dying of natural products run with its own rhythm, it escapes human control. But it offers something it return. Contrary to a popular view of time as a valuable and limited resource that one should use wisely and efficiently, these stories reminded me that the long, unpredictable hours are sometimes a true blessing, a chance to experience life, liberating thoughts, and calming the mind. Tomek, owner and driver of an old car, composed of several parts, moderately matching each other, becomes esthetically adamant while working on the furnace. When it turns out that not all tiles match perfectly, he keeps trying and trying, solemnly arranging the tile, by tiles in rows, with dimensions to the millimeter. It just cannot be crooked, he says. “The lines must be even, perfectly fitted.” This focus on detail seems, in this moment, more important than everything else, including purpose. Maybe natural materials simply trigger an archetypical human experience?
Anna describes the hours of laying clay as priceless, a pure form of meditation, in which she focuses solely on the operation, with her thoughts focused on the clay and nothing else. That was the moment of our conversation when I kind of jumped into her story imagining how I am clutching the wet clay, or even more: I returned to my childhood standing in front of the easel and waiting with a long-forgotten patience for the paint to dry. This fragment of the interview is quite chatty, but there is a silence at its heart as the images of the interviewer’s childhood come up—images of what is not present in the encounter itself.
Yet ethnographic research derives its authority from being there: the researcher’s immersion in the field and his or her presence needed to establish a sense of verisimilitude (Pachirat, 2018). Doing ethnography means putting oneself in the Other’s shoes, or, in John Van Maanen’s (1998) words, a “cultural picturing of how it is to be someone else” (p. xx).
The images of childhood surfacing from beyond physical presence are powerful ways of finding more about oneself. Likewise, we were drawn into this presence beyond presence. No worries: ethnographers do not believe in objective representation, but many agree with Barbara Czarniawska (1997) that they “take upon themselves to represent other people and even nature” (p. 27). We seek to represent some of the aspects of lived experience of people (and sometimes nature) who are often radically outside of ourselves, as well as the understandings and ideas that people bring into their world (Pachirat, 2018). Something important and real emerged in our conversations and readings of field notes, and it was a presence albeit not a realist one. Discussing what it was, we came up with names for the poetic presences: awe and fate. We believe that both house vertical experiences. As Dacher Keltner proposes, we view the human capacity for awe as fundamental to the strength and development of our species. This transcendent and powerful emotion is typically evoked by something immense, whether in a literal sense, and initiates processes of accommodation, “in which existing mental schemas are revised to make sense of the awe-inspiring stimuli” (Gottlieb, 2018: 1). Awe challenges our understanding of the world, such as standing at the edge of the turbulent sea, gazing at the star-filled sky, listening to Chopin, or embracing the ancient sequoia. While traditional Western culture tends to emphasize individual agency and free will, in everyday personal and professional experiences, we can readily find instances of a search for deeper meaning or a concealed pattern of events. When contemplating our lives, haven’t we, at least once, sought signs of a destiny or fate?
Awe
Jan loves wood; he would make everything of wood if he could. When he evokes an image of wood, our imagination does not stop there roaming between trees, forests, and all kind of greenery. The image of timber triggers what Bachelard calls “an unimaginable depth,” when memory and imagination are combined and mixed, touching many strings at the same time. The tree is like a house: vertical (Bachelard, 2014: 39) full of dimensions and contradictions. It can lead our thoughts in different directions with its spreading branches that hide from the rain, giving shade to the wanderers, and roots guiding our imagination toward the mysterious underground worlds. Their unstoppable periodicity, as in AE Housman’s (1896) poem “Loveliest of Trees,” also reminds us of the inevitability of passing.
Trees have been, and remain, universal symbols, totems, and icons. Trees are creatures of admiration, reverence, fear, romance, mysticism, and worship to the people around them. Trees are more than their component wood, leaves, and bark. Trees occupy the physical world, but in addition, occupy special psychological place in human consciousness. (Gottlieb, 2018: 1)
Touch wood, look at it, and look at a tree. The texture and jars, the fragrance, contain a vertical depth of associations, memories, and imaginations. Imagine seeing and touching it, we enter the poetics of space: Of course, it’s just beautiful, well, wood. That’s beautiful, at least so aesthetically and mentally it gives you such a great rest and a sense of relaxation. Not only when you are in the forest, you look at the growing forest, it is just such an incredible energy load for me, but also when you look at wooden products, I can’t use plastic or metal or any other materials that are a bit artificial for me. For me wood is just like the call of nature, wood is everything, everything should be made of wood, in fact, if you could make cars, I would also make them from wood. Bicycles, cars . . . . (Jan)
Anna is convinced that a loving attitude toward wood is an intersubjective experience, that wood and clay are materials that everyone likes because these materials have always been with us, humans. We were lingering on these words for a long while. Why do we like wood so much? Strangely, we never asked ourselves this question before. Trees are present in many cultures and religions, and we need them to breathe, to touch, to be able to hide behind them, and to take shelter under them: Unlike animals systems, which outlived their “giant” period with the fall of the large reptiles millions of years ago, trees remain some of the last biological experiments in size. For our time, even now within the decline of this structural plant-form, we are awed by our association with this immense creature. (Coder, 2011: 1)
That is probably why natural, ecological, and close to nature products evoke a lot of exultation. Anna confesses the pleasure she felt the first time she used 100% natural, ecological paints, Jan recalls a mystical experience he once had in front of a 2000-year-old sequoia: I had such a moment, you know what, such a mystical experience at the Natural History Museum in London. There is a cross-section of this, it is probably a sequoia that is 2000 years old, and historical events are marked on the rings of this wood, you know, the reign of Julius Caesar, or the fall of Constantinople, etc. It was absolutely incredible. (Jan)
Being there, seeing, touching, or even imagining that ancient sequoia makes one feel like getting in touch with something bigger and more powerful than just the particular tree. Likewise, the natural origin of the materials like wood or clay provokes the specific mix of emotions: admiration, joy, combined with the feeling of humility.
This material is probably the only natural material currently available that has zero impact, and its consumption has zero negative impact on the environment. Because of course CO
2
binds as much as it adds. So it’s absolutely renewable zero emissions. Fantastic material and this is its incredible advantage. (Jan)
Utopian, sometimes even naive and exaggerated, though genuine delight with natural products, it causes an emotional stir. Frustration, for tons of plastic flooding the world, is mixed with admiration and a multitude of other feelings: It is said about the fact that people have a greener attitude, it becomes popular. I can’t see it, I absolutely can’t see it. Plastic dominates and more and more plastics are conquering the world. I do not see this increase in the feeling that wood is the most important material. I’m sorry to say that, but I don’t think it is. There are still people who absolutely in love with wood, and treat them as material both noble and very important, but there is no increase in their numbers. (Jan)
We feel Jan’s deep frustration. His words stay with us, and we share his hopes: “There are still people who are absolutely in love with wood.” They are somewhere, following ecological dreams often requires travels beyond what is known, in search of inspiration and technology that allow a full use of the natural materials. So Jan, Anna, Tomek, the ethnographers, and we all travel, and bring back ideas or technologies that we touch, admire, take in, and narrate as harmony, connection with nature, artistic inspiration. The ceramic furnace, as well as the whole new technology for the ceramic production, came from Germany. So did Anna’s ecstatic eco-paints. To find the way to turn waste into wooden gold, as Jan calls it, he traveled to Hamburg, Tomek goes to a neighboring village in search for better clay. They (or maybe “we”) seem to become a specific international, cross-border community. We write this text, meeting across national and disciplinary borders. Is it not a more universal story about breaking through the traditional borders of the community and limitations imposed by territoriality in following one’s identity?
Fate
What is identity, when an ethnographer tries to make sense of it? Are our life and career choices a meaningful and determined sequence of events, or a chaotic movement along an always open path? In the stories we collected there is a certain sense of a poetic inevitability recurring in the experiences, breaking the goal-rational style of typical business narratives. Listening to Jan or Anna we rather enter a Seamus Heaney (1966) poem “Personal Helicon” in which he narrates his childhood: As a child, they could not keep me from wells And old pumps with buckets and windlasses. I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
As the poem continues, the poet describes, with attention to detail, a series of sensual, mythological like events and formative experiences, feelings, and thoughts from his early years. He ends with twist, leaving the childhood behind, and finding strength as an adult rather in art and poetry: I rhyme To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
When Jan and Anna talk about their professional lives, they arrange their stories into a related sequence of events, the beginning of which is located in childhood. It is surprising, since childhood rarely appears in managerial conversations as an important determinant of professional career. Asked about the beginnings of his work with wood, Jan suddenly jumps into memories from his early years: I really liked these wood plants. I spent a lot of time in the forest and researched their methods of obtaining the raw material. I have talked to technicians with such small plants that produce these fairly simple wooden pieces. These were usually plants located, as you imagine, in the depths of the forest and in natural conditions, and contact with this environment—being in the forest, which I have always loved because we spent all my youth with my parents on hiking camps in nature. My parents taught me that. I have always liked mountains, forests etc. I just found myself in heaven. (Jan)
Anna describes, even more candidly, her childhood as immersed in nature. She is convinced of a strong connection between what she is doing today and the years of her youth and childhood spent in the countryside, among fields and forests, in nature. Childhood memories are full of sensory experiences: sounds, textures, tastes, and smells. Thinking and talking about the first years of life forcefully activate what Bachelard (2014) calls “the solidarity of memory and imagination” (p. 28). And this is exactly what Anna’s stories triggered: the images from the childhood forests we have encountered, nature, carefree moments spent in the countryside . . . Trees. Huge walnut in the garden, full of secrets, shady, filled with anticipation for autumn harvest. We all “have” a tree like this. We began to wonder what our stories would be like, do they all start in the garden?
At times, their stories make us recall less pleasant moments, something like mismatch, being outside of the bigger streams. Anna abandoned over-modernized Warsaw to live in eastern Poland, in a remote area, yet, there too, she is obsessing with detecting toxins that surround us. Joanna is aware that her artistic “eccentricities” are tolerated, and that is the most she can hope for. She loves art, feels like a dreamer thrown into the marketing department of a company producing bathroom ceramics. She feeds her senses by introducing art into her work, something small yet utterly significant: The sale of the toilets itself is nothing exciting, I think, there is no point in hiding that [. . .] but you can do some other elements around it. I wish I could be a librarian and you know that [. . .] here, when doing something nice in your own small circle yes, I hope it is useful to someone, if it doesn’t make sense then there is nothing to do. (Joanna)
Coda
Ethnography is much more than a method—it is an approach to research, an epistemological and methodological tradition, and a way of understanding the world. Hugo Gaggiotti et al. (2017) argue that it combines all these three qualities because it is first and foremost a way of learning that both uses and creates sociological and organizational imagination. These qualities make ethnography unique and powerful as a social science methodology: it informs, brings knowledge and insights and precisely by doing so it emancipates, revealing the processes that create and support social structures, presenting alternatives, and supporting critical reflection. In other words, ethnography actually shows the world differently. Likewise, yet in other ways, Gaston Bachelard’s (1999) philosophy also teaches us how to see and express the world differently in epistemologically sound ways. Importantly, Bachelard wanted to do away with the dogma of duration—which to him involve horizontal forces—and rather emphasize the vertical instant. To Bachelard, “instants are no mere abstractions of formal ‘cuts’ in time’s implacable flow; they are instead powerlike sparks that have their own creative force” (Casey, 2008: 31). In this text, we established a meeting between ethnographic writing and Bachelard’s work on material imagination and the poetic instant, which have enabled us to propose the subgenre of vertical ethnography: a shift from thick descriptions to deep inscriptions. Let us end with some reflections on what this can entail.
When Geertz (1973) wrote about thick description he was attracted to the possibility of breaking the surface of “thin” data, because he had recognized “how much goes into ethnographic description of even the most elemental sort—how extraordinary ‘thick’ it is” (p. 314). He did this with a focus on interpretative practices in ethnography. However, sometimes interpretation is not enough and at the same time too much. Through the illustration of writing “leftover material,” we had to, instead of interpreting them, tell these stories in vertical movements where we started with the gap of silence, then moving with the poetic presences of awe and fate.
In vertical ethnography, and our suggested move from “thick” to “deep,” we emphasize another movement: from the covering of something that spreads out horizontally to going into depth in verticality. The “thick” is grounded on the idea of having spent long, chronological time in the field, thereby collecting fieldwork material that “covers” what’s going on. The thickness is established as the fieldwork material is interpreted and articulated. However, turning to the “depth” implies that we leave the interpretative stance and move toward something more immediate, embodied, and raw. Etymologically, “deep” and “thick” are related (Online Etymology Dictionary, 2023): significantly, they meet at the root, in the old English word “deop,” meaning “having considerable extension downward,” especially as measured from the top or surface, also figuratively, “profound, awful, mysterious; serious, solemn,” (Online Etymology Dictionary, 2023). This points to a possible encounter of the two ways of doing ethnography: ethnographic experience and description can be both thick and deep; we can both learn from Geertz and from poetics how to make sense of embodied and lived movement. Coming together this way, ethnographic fieldwork and sensemaking touch the truly archetypical: being there in the moment, but also being connected to something much bigger than the individual temporality.
Grounded in the recognition of the poetic moment, this means that the “aim is verticality as depth or height [. . .] and it is this vertical time that the poet discovers when he rejects horizontal time—namely the becoming of others, the becoming of life, the becoming of the world” (Bachelard, 2013: 30). The encouragement to move beyond the surface and go deeper can be a force propelling the subject, and the tale, through ascent or descent. In contrast to thick descriptions that is founded on the capacity of the research to explain and tell what a certain behavior means, through an analysis of the web of meaning, deep inscriptions means that we are opening up for writing ambivalence, and the not so sure.
The second part of the notion, from “description” to “inscription,” allows for a move from writing as a process of describing how something is or have been toward a material-poetic inscription, taking place in a “vertical instant” (Bachelard, 2013). Geertz (1973), too, wrote about inscriptions, but he never pushed this forward, focusing as he was, on the importance of describing the field. However, being able to inscribe, we open up for other ways of writing ethnographies. In Anu Valtonen and Alison Pullen’s (2021) piece on “Writing with rocks,” they note how a particular kind of spontaneous and vulnerable writing unfolded as they wrote with rocks: Rocks—and writing with rocks—has taught us about the beauty and power of silence, and the failure of words. Silence opens-up a particular relation to the world. One in which our voices, our words, no longer matter. Appreciating the geo-social relations of rocks, writing beyond our own ego. (Valtonen and Pullen, 2021: 518)
Historically, we have inscribed text and figures on different kinds of materiality, like rocks, or on animal or human skin. Inscriptions also relate to the tools we use, and how it matters for what we express if we are writing by hand, writing with a stick, or writing on a laptop (Brewis and Williams, 2019).
In bringing these threads together, we see how a shift from “thick descriptions” to “deep inscriptions” is grounded in what Bachelard (2013) calls a “concrete aesthetic, one not belaboured by philosophical polemics or rationalized through facile generalizations” (p. 3), but a poetic orientation that adds to the richness among many vibrant styles of ethnographic genres.
The second main question we asked ourselves when writing this text concerned if and how vertical writing can be helpful for the development of a reflexive social and organizational science. In vertical ethnography, sensibility meets the senses, form meets the material, and the moment meets a symbolic depth in that it creates a rupture from our everyday that enables us to acknowledge “. . . the becoming of others, the becoming of life, the becoming of the world” (Bachelard, 2013: 59). Thereby, experiencing and writing these moments can bring forth a form of reflexivity connected with the archetype of consciousness itself. If ethnography is about being present in the field, then vertical ethnography is about being consciously present, aware of both presence and absence. We do this, through entering into conversation, “not only with participants and bystanders, but also with non-human subjects and the environment around us” (Boncori, 2023: 99). And, at the same time, it’s a particular form of presencing because, as noted by Siliva Gherardi (2019b: 753), ethnography involves an “epistemology of ‘being with,’ ‘being in-between,’ and ‘becoming-with,’ leaving behind any pretension to a fixed truth, authority, or legitimacy.” In this process of becoming, it has been acknowledged that novelty does not necessarily need to be a movement forward, it can also be process of cultivating depth (de Vaujany, 2022). To further our understanding of reflexivity, from this viewpoint, it can be useful to make a distinction between “resonance” and “reverberation.” Bachelard (2014) spells out the differences between these two notions in relation to reading poetry. He notes that to engage with resonance is to read as from a distance, like a literary critic would do. Interestingly, to read like a literary critic corresponds with Geertz’s view on how to read fieldwork material in creating thick descriptions. To read with reverberation, on the other hand, is to engage with the poetic text in another way: In the resonance we hear the poem, in the reverberations we speak it, it is our own. The reverberations bring about a change of being. It is as though the poet’s being were our being. (Bachelard, 2014: 7)
In reading with reverberation a special kind of energy is released, because “the poem possesses us entirely” (Bachelard, 2014: 7). This is in line with what Joanna experienced during these special moments—as if she became the co-author of the conversations during these fieldwork encounters. That is how “[p]oetic writing propels language into these depths that otherwise would be inaccessible” (Mazis, 2017: 132). In this way, learning through verticality, and the special form of reflexivity that it can enable, helps to address the “leftovers” from linear narrating and managing, which is important for those who wish to learn the wisdom of weak theorizing, involving a form of imaginative theorizing that “lies in the context of discovery rather than justification” (Cunliffe, 2022: 13). Furthermore, weak theorizing enables us as researchers to make use of our imagination, in an explorative process where “[w]e CAN be human, we CAN theorize with sensitivity and sensibility, with our bodies, our hearts and our emotions in ways that resonate with others” (Cunliffe, 2022: 22, emphasis in original).
This way of thinking, talking, and reading ethnographic material gave us an exhilarating sense of transgression, transcendence, and transmutation. Yet vertical ethnography is no infinity machine. It has its boundaries and limitations. These are connected to method: How difficult is it to produce material poetics? First of all, it is difficult to study these kinds of special instants; they cannot be taken for granted, managed, nor called forth to occur. We need a rupture from the “mundane ongoingness,” in a symbolic form that can offer shelter: it can be a space offering sanctuary (Helin et al., 2020), or, as in this text, the physical material with which the worker is working. A poetic epistemology based on Bachelard has been intensely useful to us to keep our reflection both alive and rigorous. However, this is not an experimental procedure, nor an effect that can be taken for granted to occur. Perhaps it is wisest to accept that these moments may not appear at all during the research situation. If that happens, the ethnographer should be prepared to write a more linear story or include linear elements into the vertical narratives, as we have in this text—in the instances where we link the poetic moments to arguments belonging in other ethnographic genres. This relates to the question of when is a text “vertical?” To us, it is foremost about making an attempt, trying out, and looking for inspiration and guidance that can take our writing in other directions than what we usually think of, rather than claiming that this is a vertical account. Vertically is about movement, not an end state.
Finally, vertical ethnography is a way of learning from others and otherness through “showering of words” that reverberate (Dahl and Helin, 2022). Poetic lines start to emerge under the right circumstances; reverberation cannot be planned or controlled. We think that this limitation is a good limitation. It teaches humility in research and in social settings. Living presence needs boundaries, otherwise it would dissipate and dissolve into a fast stream of entropy.
Finally, this means that we propose to do good ethnography by letting horizontal and vertical modes interplay. We can combine them like some writers are able to combine prose of action with poetic descriptions of significant moments. Doing this, we take up the call of Haridimos Tsoukas and Mary Jo Hatch (2001) to theorize about organizations in a way that not only respects complexity, but to apply modes of writing that use the full narrative spectrum, drawing attention to reflexivity, sensitivity, and contextuality. This may help us to understand “indeterminacy, unpredictability, and emergence of complex systems” (Tsoukas and Hatch, 2001: 1007), where both “clock time” and “humanly relevant time” find their expression.
In closing, we would like to invite our readers to an exploration of the manifold writing capacities, grasping the potential of poetic sensibilities and ways of expressing ourselves, within ethnography.
Mind, atoms
Motes of dust set in motion by sunlight, streaming into a room, several thousand years ago. Leucippus saw and was transported across many dreams, and generations. The warm silence - the Earth’s iotas - became wrapped up in a shell of a story.
