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Abstract

Anthropologist Michael Taussig calls it a “polymorphous magical substance.” This is how he “prefers to think of color, something more than a spot of red or blue on a page. It affects all the senses, not just sight. It moves. It has depth and motion, and it connects such that it changes whatever it comes into contact with.” Color is elusive. The ethno/graphic then must reflect the elusive as it falls into the unavoidable trappings of social research. Color may not be route out of a long series of inescapable research traps, but this ‘polymorphous magical substance’ brings us into the montage of the everyday to reveal meanings otherwise left concealed. The purpose of this reflective essay is to demonstrate color’s necessity within the trappings of social research that often remove color, and, as a result remove the soul, substance, and meaning, from the ethnographic.

Keywords

ethnography qualitative methodology

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The Color of the Ethno/Graphic

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