“I would have simply not written the book I did had I gone to the field for a year.”
John Hartigan
01 April 2021
Published: 20 May 2021
Image by John Hartigan.
The research that John Hartigan carried out for his book Care of the Species consisted of numerous trips, never more than a few weeks long at a time, over about five years. This was due to funding constraints, institutional expectations, and family considerations. However, this patchwork-like, sequential ethnography was central to the intellectual development of the project, namely in the way he was able to experience a slow turn in this thinking. This slow intellectual turn of coming to realize what he was ignoring (the species themselves) would not have been possible with a single continuous research trip. Often the most powerful ethnographic insights occur at the beginning of a trip, when things are still disorienting, and he was able to preserve some of that disorientation through repeated, dispersed trips.
In other recent work, he’s likewise focused on his own learning process. It’s important not to patch over our ignorance for the sake of ethnographic authority, but see our own learning precisely as a site of some of our most interesting knowledge production. Ultimately, while today there is increasing discussion about precarity for anthropologists, there is less explicit discussion about the corollary of rethinking ethnography itself. Sequential, learning-oriented, and patchwork ethnographies highlight the ways many have already been doing this rethinking.
John Hartigan is a Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. johnhartigan[at]austin.utexas.edu / @aesopsanthro / Tune into this podcast episode to hear him discuss his most recent ethnography of wild horses.