Abstract
Bodily participation provides insights that mere observation cannot offer. Based on an ethnographic vignette, this article explores how bodily interactions in ethnographic fieldwork raise awareness for non-observational knowledge and hidden social practices. It looks at how such encounters shape all participants, including the ethnographer, and how subtle bodily interactions constitute a social space that remains invisible to outsiders but where intersubjectivity unfolds. It then addresses differences between participation and observation in ethnography and the epistemological problems it leads to: First, bodily social practice is largely non-predicative, but ethnographers are urged to put it in words – which affect their relationship to that practice and how they can engage in it. The second challenge is the habituation of bodily practices. The longer ethnographers engage in such social practices, the more they will develop routines and no longer focus consciously on them. Both can distort the ethnographic account of bodily practices.
Self is everywhere reciprocal to other selves, both behaviourally and experientially. Michael D. Jackson (1998: 10)
Introduction
The body is the existential ground of human sociality. By situating our bodies in social contexts, we learn about others, become accessible and tangible, and engage in interactions that shape our social lives and ourselves. As humans, we act through our bodies and others act on us through theirs. Human encounters are essentially based on bodily co-presence. Indeed, the current Covid-19 pandemic has taught us that ‘social distancing’ and the lack of bodily co-presence can lead to emotional deprivation, psychic disorders or, in more basic words, to loneliness. Mediated interactions – from telephone, skype and zoom calls through WhatsApp messages – look and feel different. They are partial encounters only because they separate voices and pictures from the bodies of friends, partners and contemporaries. 1 If anything, the Corona pandemic shows that human encounters need bodily co-presence and that no social life can, in the long run, persist without it. The body is the way in which humans enter in a relationship with their social lifeworld. 2
All of this is highly relevant to qualitative research. Participatory methodologies are grounded in bodily co-presence, based on the assumption that participation provides a direct if not privileged access to the social (Agassi, 1969). Indeed, ethnographers experience the tension of different habits and sociality through their bodies long before they will be able to reflect on it. Given the centrality of the body in human sociality, it is surprising to see how marginally it is discussed in ethnographic methodological debates. While the anthropology of the body thrives and prospers, bodily ethnography is still nascent and only partially covered by autoethnography in its self-reflexive attitude towards the researcher’s personal experience of the social (Adams et al., 2015; Denzin, 2018). Though the central role of the body for ethnographic fieldwork is sometimes acknowledged (e.g. Denyer Willis, 2020; MacQuarie, 2017; Pierini, 2020, in general Conquergood, 1991), it has not received the same scholarly attention as verbal communication, language and meaning.
This article aims at proving the relevance of bodily ethnography for anthropology and the social sciences more widely. It does not seek to theorise the body or specific bodies in anthropology, but rather takes the body as a methodological starting point to study sociality. I will argue in three steps. First, a vignette will highlight the multifaceted dimensions of bodily participation in ethnographic fieldwork conducted more than three decades ago in the 1980s and 1990s. 3 Based on an analysis of that vignette, I will secondly examine some epistemological dilemmas of bodily participation as ethnographic method. Third, the contours of some basic challenges of bodily ethnography will be discussed.
Bodily participation in ethnographic fieldwork: a vignette
It was an early August morning, the peak of the rainy season in the African savannah where the Senufo live. Women were working in front of the doors of their houses. Most were washing dishes, sipping the spicy mash from last evening and packing other leftovers to take them out to the fields where they would spend the day weeding and harvesting the first yams of the year. The men were preparing their bicycles, pinching their cutlasses in the steel frames and sacks with other gear on the carrier. Only the elder of the lineage was sitting quietly under the porch of his house, watching the busy women and men in the open courtyard. Half an hour later, they would all have left to reach the fields before the rain soaked the red mud of the pathways.
A small stove made of old bicycle spokes was standing at the entrance of my house. I needed charcoal to heat water for my cup of instant coffee and a little sugar for friends who would surely appear when the coffee was ready. There was a small kiosk around the corner, not much more than a tiny shelter where a young man from the neighbourhood sold all things an African household could need. I stood up and crossed the yard. When I walked past the fireplace of one of the four wives of the elder, somebody nudged me from the side. It was Kartcha 4 , his wife who lived in the house behind the fireplace. I had not noticed her, and she burst out in one of the amazing onomatopoetic shouts with which the language of the Senufo is so rich. It expressed surprise and irritation, though not in an angry way – just as if she had hit me by accident. She turned around, and when I apologised, she simultaneously whispered two or three words that I did not understand very well. There was ‘later’ and ‘evening’ in it, but it was not a sentence, just a short sequence of whispered words that nobody around us would hear.
Kartcha was the youngest of four wives of the old man who was well into his 70s. She had been ‘given’ to him by her uncle who thus returned an old ‘gift’, that is, a woman that had been given to his family a long time ago. The two families were linked by an alliance that extended over generations. Kartcha had hardly turned 20 when that happened, and unsurprisingly, she was not happy about the marriage. As her husband was a powerful elder, she had to end her relationship with a young man of the neighbourhood. Her life was not easy, being the yaawolo of the old man, as the others in the courtyard said. Yaawolo meant ‘black thing’ and referred to the smooth beauty of the skin of a young woman. It was a term that was used in romantic relationships. Kartcha’s co-wives were almost her husband’s age and hence 30 or 40 years older than her. They were suspicious of the fact that their husband would give Kartcha generous presents while neglecting them who had older rights to whatever the old man would be able to share with his relatives in the courtyard. But Kartcha had no children, and there were rumours that this had to do with the jealousy of her older co-wives.
I had not thought about the short incident when I came from the kiosk, but it puzzled me later during the day. Apparently, Kartcha had wanted to attract my attention, though it would have been easy to talk to me as she always did during the day. She spent the day in her kitchen, but the evening, when she usually passed by, would show. It rained cats and dogs. Almost everybody in the yard had gone to bed early while I still sat in my dimly lit house listening to my small shortwave radio, the door wide open to let fresh air in. In the darkness, I saw a shadow approaching the house, and a moment later, Kartcha stepped in. We shared much of our everyday life in the village. She put an enamel plate on the table. It contained pieces of maize pastry curled in fresh leaves. Sometime in the past, she had told me that I should taste all she could cook, and this was a meal I had not known before. She sat down on a stool and waited while I was eating. Time went by before she began to speak in a low, unassertive voice. I had to lean forward to understand her. She asked whether I had noticed her in the morning. ‘Of course’, I said. She shook her head and told me to be more attentive next time. She would show me that there were ways of letting me know that she needed to see me – without others knowing it. Though we both shaped the interactions, Kartcha clearly took the lead in the beginning, which reversed the usual hierarchy in ethnographic fieldwork: To some extent, she taught me how to make use of minute bodily movements to communicate. The little incident had no ‘meaning’ when it happened, it just raised my awareness for the co-presence of her as another person living in the yard. But it became intentional the evening.
Keeping secrets in Senufo villages is difficult to accomplish. They were densely built environments where people lived close to each other. Not to perceive what others in the compound did was almost impossible. All daily activities left traces in the soundscape that enclosed the houses of the courtyard. One could easily discern whether a child in the compound was simply crying or was sick. Even a conversation in a lowered voice that a neighbour could not understand would still tell whether the speakers listened and responded to each other. For example, one knew when a couple quarrelled, and good harmonies were also perceptible. All inhabitants were aware when a husband preferred a particular wife; la femme en rose, as the young literate schoolboys said. Everybody knew whether a neighbour had abundant food in his granary or whether he was just pretending to have enough. And everybody saw if children took care of their old mother when she had become helpless and dependent on them. All these things could happen, but they would not happen unnoticed. They fed into the talk that made up village life (Förster, 1997: 206–220). Living in a neighbourhood meant that one knew the others so well that it was meaningless to speak of private life. The bourgeois distinction of public and private did not make much sense. Emotional bonds were regulated at a middle distance. Neither the intimate romantic ties between couples nor the anonymity of public modern life seemed to exist. Instead, the web of kinship, reciprocal obligations and the alliances that the segmental social order bred were visible.
Nevertheless, there was an unregulated, hidden dimension to social life. It rarely became visible in daily village life, but it could and often did surface at night. The incident and Kartcha’s visit had made me aware of what Ferme (2001), in another context, had called the ‘underneath of things’. The short encounter in the middle of the courtyard was the beginning of an unexpected but more and more intensive exchange with Kartcha. It unfolded over many months and made me aware of how these two spheres – the visible and the hidden – overlapped and interacted. I became attentive to her facial and bodily expressions, but I was not and did not become an ‘observer’ as it is often stipulated in ethnographic textbooks. I would not have known what to observe.
In the beginning, the exchange was still relatively visible to me and I observed her movements as much as I observed my own. When I left the courtyard, she would sit close to her fireplace, and when I walked past her, she would mumble a word or two. Oftentimes, I did not understand exactly what she said, but she accompanied her words with little gestures that could have been related to her kitchen work or the sweeping of the ground in front of the entrance to her small house. A move of the broom would then indicate a direction; the cleaning of her big wooden soup ladle would indicate that she needed to finish her cooking, while I made use of other gestures and movements myself. Most were part of my work as an ethnographer (e.g. the way I often fetched my notebook or my camera when I was in a hurry).
After the initial moment of dislocation, 5 I wanted to become more aware of such subtle modes of bodily communication. I increasingly developed an intentional attitude towards these ephemeral acts. It would be misleading to characterise them as language. They had no stable ‘grammar’. Though there were movements and gestures and even elusive glances that became habitual to us two, there was always a little element of surprise in them. What we developed over time is perhaps best captured as an increased sensory awareness to the subtleties of bodily presence in social life. 6 In my field diary, I made use of metaphors that seemed to come close to the experience that we shared, but they seemed to distort and blur what had been so obvious, so clear and distinct in the interaction itself.
However, having difficulties putting such ethnographic experiences into words does not mean that they do not exist. These difficulties rather point out the specificity of bodily presence in social life – its ephemeral character that defies predication. In the course of time, Kartcha’s bodily movements became more and more subtle. They were as much hers as mine and hence made us a ‘we.’ She would simply look in a way that made me aware that she would not leave for the fields that day or that she had troubles with her three co-wives who would carefully survey what she was doing. The first nod had been an expression of intention for me, but the longer we engaged in such exchanges the more they sedimented as self-evident bodily practices. The more habitual they became; the more they embodied intention in acting – and less the intention of doing something (Anscombe, 1963: §4; Gallagher, 2017). It became non-observational knowledge for both of us. Neither was it necessary to pay consciously attention to the gestures and movements of the other nor did we need to confirm to each other what we were doing. We ‘knew’ how the other would situate him- or herself in the encounter because we had become familiar with the other’s way of moving, of sitting, of looking closely and of looking the other way. 7 As the interactions slowly turned into a habitually shared practice, our habits adapted to each other. We knew intuitively how the other would move and when discrepancies between the familiar and the unfamiliar might hint at an intentional deviation from the everyday. All this was physically visible in the courtyards and the pathways that ran through the village. For others, however, it remained intuitively unclear.
Through this habitual social practice, building on shared intentions, we created an intimate social space that only became visible when we participated in it. Bodily awareness of the other created trust as intersubjective intention. Rarely did it seem necessary to talk, and when it happened, it was not about the practice itself. Sometimes, Kartcha visited me when the others were already asleep. She rarely explained what she had meant at an incidence during the day, but at times, she must have thought that I would not understand if she did not tell me. She often complained about her husband, though she knew well that I was not in a position that would have allowed me to intervene in any way. He was the chief of the neighbourhood and my ‘tutor’ in the village, literally ‘the owner of the stranger’. I was under his protection, and I was expected to follow his advice so that I would not violate any unwritten rules of conduct. But there were also evenings when she was desperately seeking my support. Twice, she asked me to talk to her husband. She was drenched in tears that first evening and told me that she could not stay any longer with a man who was so much older than she was. She would let me know when she would leave and travel to some distant place. Not by telling me – she would do it in a way that would allow me to claim that she did not say a word. She stayed longer that evening, sitting silently at the door, looking across the courtyard at the porch where her husband used to sit during the day. For me, talking to her husband was not easy. He complained about the selfishness of his wives, and his youngest would be a special case in point.
We continued to communicate in ways that the others in the courtyard did not notice. Our familiarity with each other created bonds of trust, and I asked myself whether such practices were common among the villagers. I tried to train my awareness for such interactions: were we an exception, or were there others who practiced such things? Kartcha told me that others did so as well, but there seemed to be little evidence of it. Following qualitative social research textbooks, I consciously began ‘to observe’ others in the compound and in the neighbourhood where I knew everybody well and where I would have a feeling for how such subtleties would stand out from their daily habits. It did not lead very far. I saw lots of apparently insignificant gestures, movements, sounds and many more subtle acts. They were much more frequent than I had thought – but I was rarely sure whether they were intentional or not. 8
From an everyday perspective, the subtle exchanges were ephemeral social practices at the borderline of what could have happened accidentally and what could be an intentional act. If they would become too obvious, it would not have allowed the actors to articulate their hidden transcripts. 9 Such practices had to be situated in the fuzzy space between intentional and unintentional acts, and though they were a deeply social practice, they had to be highly idiosyncratic as well. They were embedded in the personal intersubjectivity of those who created them by performing them. It was impossible to ‘read’ them as language or a system of signs that everybody would understand. Their ephemeral character made them ambiguous – and they had to be so in order to fulfil the purpose. Observing was a dead-end. It situated me outside of the social context that I wanted to understand. Only bodily participation provided an access. 10
Epistemological dilemmas of participation: attention and intention
Moments of dislocation are comparatively easy to conceive but much more difficult to study. My profession as an anthropologist had certainly motivated my interest to observe similar ephemeral interactions of others. It overlapped with the everyday interest that villagers had in what others would ‘stealthily’ do around them. However, I soon felt uneasy about observing my neighbours who trusted that I would respect the little privacy that village life would permit. As an ethnographic method, ‘clandestine’ observation belonged to what Wolcott (1995:122–154) has called the darker arts of fieldwork. It came close to voyeurism, which distanced me from social life as it changed my attitude towards those who were also my friends – besides raising serious ethical problems. 11 Kartcha and I were friends. 12 On the one hand, this participatory, affective dimension nourished my awareness of such social practices. It necessitated my participation in social life. On the other hand, it inhibited observation. One could argue that the ethnographer’s professional wish to observe was the cognitive side and the practice embedded in the long-lasting friendship was the emotional side of the same coin. The two were incompatible. As a mirror of the first dilemma mentioned above, it related to the ‘meaninglessness’ of bodily awareness: bodily practices were elusive and inaccessible to observation from outside. They were distinct only to those who participated in them in an inside mode. The second dilemma related to acts of predication that turn experience into an intentional object of thought and reflection.
The people around me also tried to observe potentially hidden interactions of others. Sometimes, they discussed what they saw. When such issues surfaced, they were often framed as guesses about possible interpretations of what they had seen, for example, whether a particular movement of the body could have been a gesture to somebody or whether it was a merely accidental reaction to some obstacle in the way of a walking person: ‘Perhaps, they are together’, a neighbour said about a man and a woman who seemed to stumble over something. Another added, ‘they know each other so well’, which meant that they seemed to be familiar with each other when they were walking together. A third claimed, ‘they know how to avoid each other’. Such statements were common. The latter expression related to a strategy of young couples to keep their relationship secret. ‘They try not to encounter each other’, I was told, ‘because others might find out about their relationship if they are often seen together’. 13 Whether it was the mere fact of being visible in the same place or whether the spectators also deduced their suspicions from how the movements of the two persons related to each other remained open. Young men and women would not want to show that they were lovers. They passed by each other as if they did not know the other – yet, they seemed to engage in bodily movements and tiny gestures that communicated what the people around them should not notice. The ambivalence was inextricable.
When such things became part of discursive formations, they turned into predicative statements. Post-factum, apparently ephemeral observations acquired distinctness and clearness and were increasingly articulated as factual claims: ‘They are together – can’t you see?’ Bystanders would eventually support such statements: ‘Yes, everybody could see it’. Others would question them: ‘Oh no, not every man who walks the pathways of the village and meets a yaawolo will follow her when it will be dark’. The interpretation of what others had seen was often called into question: ‘No, there was nothing. You’re insanely jealous – you only want to talk. That’s all’. Talking meant to criticise, and most often, claims about such observations were situated in the context of village politics. As in any discourse, the enunciations reflected the interests of the speakers and of the social groups to which they belonged.
Village talk was not a hidden spiel. Most people did not only know about the fact that others talked about them – they often participated actively in such conversations, trying to influence the general opinion about themselves. Such discursive formations do not necessarily qualify as gossip, which is best understood as a discreet indiscretion about an absent third person (Bergmann, 1987). As discourse, village talk had a double effect. On the one side, it reinforced the existence of groups of shared descent such as lineages (Gluckman, 1963). On the other, it generated bonds as well as conflicts between individuals (Paine, 1967). However, gossip may also have disintegrative effects when the actors are neither absent nor excluded from such conversations. And the focus on individuals and their networks does not consider that the actors may emancipate from discursive constraints and create independent social spaces. Tiny as these spaces may be – they often have an enormous significance for the actors. A pre-condition for this emancipation is the non-observational character of intersubjective intentions in bodily practices. Without participating in such exchanges, these social spaces remain invisible for observers – for the other villagers as well as the anthropologist.
Villagers and anthropologists face similar problems when they talk or write about the intentions of others. Participation distinguishes experience from merely knowing about experience. By raising attentiveness, it may turn into awareness of specific social practices, which, in turn, generates experience and intentions. But the epistemological dilemma persists: The moment anthropologists recognise such experience as significant societal practice, it loses its tacit, embodied character. By focussing on such practices, ethnographers increasingly turn into observers who construct these practices as intentional objects of study and no longer as something embedded and created through their own social practice as subjects endowed with agency. By this shift, the specificity of embodied practice is overruled by cognitive objectification. However, anthropologists are urged to engage in predication, which undermines the implicit, unspoken, performative and intersubjective bodily presence of others. The moment the ethnographer’s awareness transcends the sphere of practice and bodily senses, it loses its spontaneous performative character and becomes an object of thought – of ethnographic or sociological imagination of society (Mills, 1959; Willis, 2000). This move is usually identified as the moment where ethnography begins to differ from naïve participation. 14
One the one hand, participation in bodily practices is a necessity in order to become aware of its societal significance. My ethnographic imagination of Senufo village society would have been fragmentary without having participated in hidden practices as an ordinary social actor. It would have been impossible to get an idea of the underneath of things without experiencing empathy and indeed sympathy in its literal sense. There is no way to get around bodily participation as an ethnographic method. In this case, the subtle forms of exchange had an impact on the entire village as they enabled the actors to emancipate from the usual constraints of social life. Unsurprisingly, they were part of many premarital romantic relationships. Good friendships, such as the one between me Kartcha, also engaged in such practices.
The actors’ awareness of this hidden social sphere was uneven. Some, among them people that were known as rogue, seemed to be unaware of it, and they also did not seem to engage in such practices. There were others who practiced such subtleties in more obvious ways that, at times, allowed me to observe, and still others who were very calm so that I was unsure whether they engaged in these practices or not. With regard to others, I was never as certain as in the encounters with Kartcha who, nonetheless, would not comment on it until she felt a need to do so. These moments of predication became less and less frequent: the more habitual our interaction became, the less we would talk about it. Participation is the only way to approach such subtle webs of sociality. Participation is needed whenever ethnographers approach the habitual and non-predicative dimensions of social life.
One the other hand, ethnographers are urged to render social practices comprehensible to outsiders – to make their writing ‘readable’. Ethnographers are expected to transform implicit social practices into explicit statements about the social at large, preferably cast into a narrative. Besides the constraints related to the genre of ethnographic writing, the need for predication influences how they relate to the social and hence their ethnographic experience (Jackson, 1996: 42; Throop, 2003). Anthropologists thus adopt another intentionality to others and the social when they adopt a predicative, observational attitude that will allow them to construct a narrative later. From a phenomenological perspective, intentions are neither conscious plans nor separate mental activities; they rather stand for how actors refer to and share in the life-world (Husserl, 1960; Schütz and Luckmann, 1979, 89–150), involving a specific form of awareness that can become habitual in itself (Waldenfels, 2004).
Putting habitual practices into words comes with a biased perception and understanding of the actors’ agency. The ethnographers’ attention will focus more on judgement, planning and strategies instead of sedimented habits. 15 The former are elements of agency that already have or can easily adopt a predicative character while habitual social practice is usually taken for granted and not articulated in words. It is an articulation in itself – but not less intentional than a conscious plan. In other words, the moment anthropologists begin to narrate, they endow that social practice with another property.
My ethnographic vignette illustrates the difference between participation and predication. Transformed into an anthropological narrative, the web of hidden transcripts that course through Senufo villages would become a way of emancipating from male dominance, in this case the old husband’s jealousy and suspicion. It means to escape social control and to bypass the open, visible public sphere of village society. From a systemic, functionalist understanding, such social practice would be conceived as a sphere of communication that underpins social order as it allows the individual to maintain some sort of autonomy to counterbalance societal constraints. Such constructs comply with genres of scholarly writing with an underpinning claim of objectivity (Pels, 2014). From the ethnographers’ perspective, they may be an attempt to make sense of their experience. However, the intersubjective encounters themselves are badly captured: in my vignette, it was the ‘we,’ the feeling of belonging to the same place, knowing the same people and knowing that the other did so as well – the awareness for the bodily presence of others and other I’s, as Merleau-Ponty (1962) had stated. That shared experience had shaped our identities.
The experience of long-term bodily presence and shared practices refers to the longue durée of thorough fieldwork. Metaphors as ‘thick participation’ (Spittler, 2001) recognise the necessity of intensive participation and remain central to anthropology as an epistemological project (Csordas, 1990; Duranti, 2010; Toren, 2009). Duranti defines intersubjectivity as the ‘mere awareness of others who see the world, nature included, from their standpoint but, by manifesting behaviours that resemble our own, contribute to the making of one objective – shared or shareable – world possible’ (2010: 10). He rightly states that intersubjective encounters shape all participants, but the question of how people see the world in a similar way – the overlapping of perspectives – and the emerging awareness is largely left unanswered. How participation works, how ethnographers engage in intersubjective encounters and how they acquire tacit and eventually cognitive knowledge of social practices calls for a bodily ethnography. Further, it must address the additional epistemological dilemmas linked to the longue durée of participation.
Neither words nor symbols but the seemingly accidental touches and tangencies, the subtle gestures and movements, the glances, onomatopoetic sounds and utterances served as backbone of intersubjective encounters in my vignette. Speaking was a social practice that Kartcha and I rarely engaged in. In order to endow the seemingly insignificant bodily expressions with meaning, two conditions have to be fulfilled.
First, one needs to be familiar with the other’s habitual ways of bodily presence in a specific social space. Otherwise, one would be unable to notice the difference in the other’s acts as an intentional practice and would take them as mere ‘behaviour.’ A particular gesture may be generally human or widely spread in a certain social setting, but it might be unusual for a particular person. The more familiar one gets with the bodily presence of a companion, the more one can tell such subtle intentional acts apart from mere accidental movements and gestures as well as from propositional expressions of third persons. Such knowledge has a cultural and an idiosyncratic dimension. The better one knows the other, the more discreet the encounters become and the more a ‘we’-intention emerges. The unfolding of such an interaction takes time as the actors need to learn about the habits of the other: how he or she usually looks, how the other moves, walks and even sleeps. Once we notice such subtle bodily movements or gestures, we recognise them as relevant to us. This little something – as insignificant as it may seem to be – makes a difference in the everyday routines that both actors are familiar with (Waldenfels, 2004:115). From a phenomenological perspective, the actors shift from mere perception to apperception. They assimilate and morph bodily routines as an element of their life-world and thus to possible past and future experiences.
Second, to notice something as intentional requires awareness and attention. When ethnographers as social actors become familiar with others, they are supposed to be sensitive to moments of dislocation, of sensory ruptures in the durée of everyday experience to raise their attention. The more familiar we are with the others’ bodily presence, the more we can engage in subtle intersubjective practices, and the less disruptive such moments of sensory dislocation need to be. Bodily presence is a pre-condition for the emergence of awareness and eventually of shared intentions. But by the same token, it leads into a dilemma: The refinement of such practices requires an attitude that keeps us aware of these moments but simultaneously allows us to forget about them. Intersubjectivity is, in its bodily dimension, a practice that requires an attitude of forgetting one’s place, of not reflecting, of living receptively and spontaneously. This second element of bodily intersubjectivity thus seems to encumber ethnography, let alone ethnographic enquiry. The moment anthropologists participate as ordinary actors in the social life of others; they seem to inhibit their work as ethnographers. It is an epistemological challenge with no easy answer.
Attentiveness and awareness are different attitudes. Having engaged in a particular intersubjective practice in the past constitutes the actors’ attentiveness; a general disposition for possible sensory dislocations (Kesselring, 2016:174f.). One knows and keeps in mind that such things can happen – in my case, the subtle ways of bodily presence that a third person would and should not notice. The tiny bodily movements that became habitual to me made me aware of my physical limitations as well as my cultural background. Awareness is what is raised by bodily social practice. It emerges when social actors make the others pay attention to something that, again, can be the subtlest expression possible. Unlike attentiveness, awareness is focused and may bring forth semantic modes of seeing – but it is not pre-conceived, as observation would be. Because the actors cannot know what will happen, awareness is produced by their interaction the very moment it occurs. This awareness again turns into an unreflected and largely habitual attitude that builds on shared bodily routines and habits. Intersubjective social practice hence affects the actors’ relationship to each other and in extension to the social at large, and it inevitably does so on both sides. It was a practice that modified my relationship to the village society of the Senufo. Not only as an anthropologist, I experienced social life in a different way, to some extent adopting Kartcha’s view of sociality as something that may have a hidden dimension and that others may practice as well. In that sense, intersubjective encounters allow us to experience the co-presence of others, and by accepting to be shaped by this participation in the life of others, a shared life-world is created.
Still more fundamental is that shared bodily practices bring something into being. As demonstrated in this article’s vignette, it was a social space of discreet communication that remained to a large extent in the realm of the non-predicative. That intimate social space became only visible when participating in it. Engaging in such social practice means to share awareness for and become attentive to possible, unobvious bodily movements that require spontaneous acts on both sides. Some of them may later sediment as everyday habits, but not all do as the interaction continuously unfolds, sometimes shrinks and re-surfaces again according to the imponderability of life. This social practice creates its own object anew whenever the actors perform it. Intersubjectivity and by extension bodily ethnography have a creative dimension. It creates shared intentions towards social life – or certain spheres thereof – and thus the basis for ethnography.
Contours of an unfinished debate
The vignette and its interpretation highlight the relevance of bodily participation for ethnographic research. They also show that bodily ethnography produces other kinds of knowledge than the propositional knowledge that interviews generate. The difference is based on the epistemological specificities of bodily experience. Our body is simultaneously our nature as well as the site and produce of our engagement with culture (Böhme 2019: 38). Bodies undercut basic dichotomies of occidental thinking as being oneself is both body and mind, nature and culture, individual and social. As nature and culture, bodies bridge the gap between us and others. They are so central to human existence that sociality would be void and hollow without bodily encounters.
Basically, the body as nature as well as culture has been recognized by anthropologists since Marcel Mauss pioneering essay on ‘Les techniques du corps’ of 1936. The article gave birth to the anthropology of the body as an newly emerging field of the discipline, which predominantly studied ‘…the human body as a social and cultural phenomenon in time and space’ (Soukup and Dvořáková, 2016:514). It made the body an object of study but largely ignored that the body is also the subject of ethnographic inquiry. Ethnographers who practiced participant observation, modern anthropology’s foundational set of methodologies, inevitably made use of their bodies whenever they participated in social life. While the anthropology of the body grew and influenced many interdisciplinary fields of the social sciences – prominently gender studies and sociology, to name but two – a potential anthropology with the body tended to be sidelined. This neglect is, I argue, due to anthropology’s tendency to deduce its disciplinary identity from its core method ‘participant observation’. In order to defend its main methodology against possible criticisms, anthropology did not look carefully enough at the diverging epistemological foundations of participation and observation.
Participant observation is used as a summary term for ‘fieldwork, participation in everyday life, working in the native language and observing events in their everyday context’ (Barnard and Spencer, 2002: 616). It contains two dimensions: immediate participatory involvement in social life, and the scrutiny of science through detachment, that is, the indifferent judgement of what the ethnographer has observed (Powdermaker, 1966:9). Thick participation and distanced observation are an oxymoron (DeWalt and DeWalt, 2011: 27–29; Behar, 1996; Spittler, 2001). Participant observation thus bears epistemological problems, which are rarely thought through in anthropology (Okely, 2012: 76–78). How the two dimensions work together remains one of the enigmas of the anthropologist (Stocking, 1983). Conventional ethnographic theories relegate this process largely to the personal experience of ethnographers and their idiosyncrasies and respective cultural backgrounds: ‘More than any other discipline, the truths of anthropology are grounded in the experience of the participant observer’ (Gupta and Ferguson, 1997:15; Stocking, 1983; in general Okely, 2012: 107). Only by practicing it will anthropologists be able to reconcile the two, passing through fieldwork as a sort of initiation into the discipline (Kohl, 1979; DeWalt and DeWalt, 2011: 19f.; Okely, 2012: 75).
This vague understanding of anthropology’s foundational methodology leaves epistemological key problems unanswered: First, participation is often misunderstood as a strategy to gain better access to cognitive ‘data’ and thus ignores the existential dimension of bodily life-worldly presence. As my vignette showed, bodily presence and bodily senses make anthropologists aware of other forms of sociality long before they can attribute meaning to them and reflect on them. Participation must build on broad and unfocused bodily awareness to remain open to new experiences of the social. Its purpose as a methodology is not to serve as an instrument to access hidden dimensions of social life but much more to overcome the legacies of occidental thinking, namely the mind-body dichotomy.
However, when ethnographers begin to focus on something, they have become aware of, they morph them into intentional objects. Hence the second epistemological problem: Awareness stimulates attention and is the root of an intentional relationship toward that experience. More often than not, intentions turn experience into an object of thought and reflection, depriving experience of its embodied properties. In such cases, it undercuts what it seeks to study and implicitly reproduces the binary distinction that it simulatenously tries to avoid. Bodily acts may have no cognitive meaning, as my vignette has shown. Bodily knowledge does not need predicative acts of sensory attention, as Anscombe had argued: ‘…movements of the body … are known without observation’ (Anscombe, 1963: 15). Humans (and many animals as well) do not need to reflect on or observe where their bodies are and how they are situated in space and in relation to other bodies or things. Nonetheless, bodily acts can and often do instigate awareness of others, but these intentions are issued in bodily practice. Such bodily knowledge has no other source than the body itself, embedded in its history and life-worldly experience.
This specificity of bodily knowledge is, I argue, the epistemological ground of bodily ethnography and its relevance for anthropology more widely. Ethnographers do not have a body as a sort of instrument to participate in the lives of others – as human actors, they are bodies that interact with others without necessarily engaging in observations or even being able to do so. Intentions in bodily practices call for other arts of noticing than predicative observations imply (Tsing, 2015). Observational acts may surface under specific conditions, but they are not an inevitable part of intentions issued in bodily practices. Furthermore, when bodily practices have become the focus of predicative attention, they may turn again into habits, and the actors’ cognitive attention may fade while their bodily senses remain aware of them.
Juxtaposing unfocused seeing to observing, the second element of participant observation, illustrates this epistemological problem further: How do unfocused, unintentional ways of seeing, turn into intentional acts that constitute an object? Observation mainly covers pragmatic modes of seeing, presuming a particular interest of the observer, framing the seen as an object that can be studied separately from other interests. Although its Latin roots were larger and covered more modes of seeing 16 , observing is understood since the 18th century in a Newtonian way as an instrument of mechanical objectivity. In this sense, observing became part of the methodological toolkit of the social sciences in the late 19th century (Kurt, 2008). Its pre-condition is the detached observer who can later testify to an anonymous audience. Observation constitutes an object, and so does it as anthropological method: ‘[il] constitue l’activité pratique en objet d’observation et d’analyse’ (Bourdieu, 1972: 160, his emphasis; also Fabian, 1983: 131–141; Förster, 2001). Bourdieu argues that observation transforms actors and practices into detached objects (Bourdieu, 1972:157–162). While the positivist pragmatics of scientific observation were deconstructed, other, unfocused and non-predicative ways of seeing (Schürmann, 2008: 69–75) that neither presume a particular interest nor a semantic content remain undertheorised in anthropology – although they are of central importance to fieldwork because new interests and insights rise precisely where the anthropologists’ views are not pre-defined but rather induced by that sensory experience (Förster, 2001). Seeing in this sense builds on bodily participation as the anthropologist has to give up detached perspectives in favour of emotional, subjective involvement to become aware of the views of others.
In unfamiliar environments, seeing is by necessity largely unfocused as the actors cannot build on pre-conceived experiential sediments. The sensory and emotional irritation that such unfamiliar environments may cause is the subject of many autoethnographic accounts (e.g. Stoller, 1997). Standard methodologies frame this process as adaptation: Over time, unfocused ways of seeing adapt to the environment, and by making it part of their lifeworld, ethnographers gradually turn their acts or seeing into attentive observations. The conventional, positivist hypothesis is that the anthropologists’ emerging acts of focused seeing mirror the world as it is, eventually allowing them to ask ‘more informative questions’ (Davies, 1999: 73, Tedlock, 1991). Participation would thus complement observation as a tool informed by the same pragmatic attitudes and objectifying interests (Bourdieu, 2003), implicitly reproducing positivist understandings to legitimize ethnographic fieldwork as scientific methodology. However, by making unseen things visible, ethnographers create them as intentional objects – not as a mirror of the world (Jackson, 1998, 2005).
If participant observation were one coherent set of methodologies, the answer to these epistemological problems would be self-evident: participation would work hand in hand with observation and, in interaction with the life-worldly environment, ‘somehow’ generate the focus that observation needs – and the ‘somehow’ would be the enigma of the anthropologist. Although participation and observation are sometimes practiced at the same time, they refer, from an epistemological point of view, to two different experiential strands, each based on a distinct sensory access to the life-world. Detached observation is largely incompatible with the tangible and affective dimensions that bodily senses have. In a brilliant passage of her book on Anthropological Practice, Okely asserts that participation and observation are no continuum: observing ‘…does not include the multi-sensual act of “seeing”’ (2012:80). The two may happen at the same time, but from an epistemic and analytical point of view, they are distinct ways of accessing the lifeworld, of perceiving and conceiving as two epistemological practices.
The emergence of focused attention is rooted in the performativity of the body and the sensory affects that it instigates. They are often acknowledged but still a blind spot of ethnographic theory. Such statements may seem ungrounded, given that scholars have worked on the body, the senses and their roles as fieldworkers since decades. However, the anthropology of the body rather sought to explain how meaning is inscribed on and in the body and how social norms govern bodies (Lennon, 2014). ‘Inscription’, ‘body as text’, ‘body language’ and other metaphors build on this semantic understanding but rarely address the epistemology of non-predicative bodily experience in ethnographic fieldwork and how it raises awareness, in particular intersubjective awareness in social life. 17
Duranti (2010) and Jackson (2005) already claimed that the emergence of intersubjective understanding in everyday social interactions should be the foundation of ethnography. Although anthropologists have studied interactions in lived situations for decades (Csordas, 1990, 1993; Desjarlais and Throop, 2011; Howes, 2003; Ingold, 2000; Stoller, 1997; Wikan, 1991), they rarely did so as part of their methodologies. 18 The difference between the everyday and ethnography is, however, that anthropologists should become aware of intersubjective moments and then pay attention to them. They are expected to be attentive without knowing what will affect their bodily senses when and where (Stewart, 2017). A dilemma and a remarkable epistemological challenge.
Being attentive, becoming aware and paying attention require participation in social practices. Only when participating in social life will anthropologists experience moments of ‘aspect change’. 19 Aspect changes have an immediate affective dimension that ethnographers, as all other humans, experience through their bodily senses. Having no ready-made patterns of interpretation at hand, such moments are not about ‘…what they might mean in an order of representations, … but where they might go and what potential modes of knowing, relating, and attending to things are already somehow present in them in a state of potentiality and resonance’. (Stewart, 2007: pos.124) Such moments may not only make ethnographers aware of their own culture-bound perspectives, but also of their individuality and that of their contemporaries. Furthermore, they hint at other forms of sociality.
Because of their disruptive character, I call them ‘moments of dislocation’. Crucial to such moments when awareness of diverging views and difference arises is bodily participation (Norval, 2006:230, 248). Both bodily participation and aspect change are central to anthropological enquiry, especially when participant observation is taken as what it is: as two methods cast in one. Observation is ‘seeing-as’ and constitutes an object. It emerges when non-predicative ways of seeing are faced with and irritated by bodily awareness of otherness, bringing new forms of (inter)subjectivity and community into being. The predominance of language in ethnography leaves little space for the subtleties of human encounters in daily life, in particular for the bodily realities of the social and its sensory dimensions. Understanding ethnography as the production of texts neglects the bodily and sensory experience of the ethnographer as participant in social life. 20 Accordingly, theoretically informed accounts of how intersubjective understanding emerges in social interactions are still rare. 21 Bodily ethnography can counterbalance such one-sided approaches. It is not about identities of researchers and how they affect social relations, but rather on the epistemology of participation and how participation generates shared intentions that constitute a collective life-world, including the researcher (Clough, 2010; Toren, 2009).
Bodily ethnography as anthropological project
Bodily ethnography entails an engagement with people of different societal milieus and societies as well as bodily co-presence. Its existential ground is bodily knowledge that eludes observation. As anthropological methodology, bodily ethnography focuses on the societal aspects of bodily co-presence, interactions and encounters. It is not a one-way road to more clarity and precision in social analysis, but rather an approach that puts the non-predicative qualities of human intersubjectivity first, making the researcher’s body a central methodological tool in ethnographic fieldwork. Its epistemology is based on the experiential insight that bodily knowledge emerges in shared practices with others. Bodily knowledge may instigate acts of cognitive predication but does not require them. Bodily ethnography thus avoids the Cartesian mind-body dualism as well as the dichotomy of subject and object.
Bodily ethnography is intrinsically linked to epistemological problems – problems that are rooted in the human condition. A key problem is the tension between the bodily senses and the tacit quality of the knowledge that they induce on the one side and acts of predication in discursive formations on the other. By making such knowledge legible, it morphs into objectifiable figures of thought and eventually loses its character. Another problem is that moments of dislocation when ethnographers become aware of the specificities of their own embodied knowledge in contrast to that of others are easy to identify in retrospect but impossible to predict. Being attentive and becoming aware of their emergence is central to bodily ethnography but by the same token eludes all projective planning. As anthropological methodology, bodily ethnography focuses on aspect change through participation in social life but is unable to say when it happens. Finally, the sedimentation of bodily knowledge as routines and habits means that it again escapes focused attention while it still maintains its intentional character. Bodily ethnography deals with attention and intention but does not situate itself on one or the other side.
Yet, there is no other way of engaging with social life in all its dimensions. Bodily participation in social life is our human nature and our culture. Our bodies constantly make us aware of our nature and how others and the social at large become part of us; embodied in our selves. Putting participation first, ethnographers create societal knowledge in interactions with others. As participants, they will need to allow these others to engage in bodily encounters with them, granting them power over them (Behar, 1996). As scholars, they will have to reflect and perhaps question that bodily co-presence, making possible existential conflicts their own without vilifying those who became their partners. Their position seems to be untenable – but precisely through this dilemma, we all learn about social life, researchers and all others.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Correction (June 2025):
Anonymized reference citations (self quotation) have been updated on pages 4 and 13 since original publication of the article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
