Patchwork ethnography “doesn’t just have to be a story of life circumstances.”
Ramah McKay
20 May 2021
Published: 04 February 2022
Image by Ramah McKay
Critiques of ethnography and its tacit assumptions of a lone, unconstrained, amply supported fieldworker are not new. But for Ramah McKay, the Patchwork Ethnography Manifesto felt different precisely because of this genre: the manifesto. This was not a personal and individualized critique of ethnography based on one author’s own constraints (often figured as the intrusion of the personal into the public domain of work). Patchwork ethnography is not simply a story about life circumstances, but rather an encouragement to let go of the notion that life or circumstance could be bracketed in the first place. Patchwork is how ethnography, and life, always is. The manifesto captures this sense of the provisional-as-structural and says this outloud, with gusto and enthusiasm. Since even though we feel and know this, we still feel anxiety
saying it.
This anxiety can carry over into the writing of ethnography too, where tacit norms about ethnographic temporality become especially clear. Divergence, provisionality, and nonlinearity were crucial to Ramah’s thinking, yet we’re taught all these tricks to hide the seams and present a smooth, bounded narrative. What would happen if we let the seams be visible? What would it look like to capture ethnography’s nonlinear temporalities in ethnographic writing? In fieldwork, the ideal of long-term immersement reflects an important prioritization of deep historicization and contextualization. But maybe deep is the wrong word. Patchwork addresses such priorities through repetition and return instead. Patchwork ethnography perceives through these different temporalities, allowing one to follow the specific temporalities of the field. Patchwork writing, too, allows for particular temporalities that are appropriate for particular research objects. It’s not a matter of personal provisionality, but recognizing how writing conventions (‘hide the seams!’) on a broad level can be analytically stifling.
Ramah McKay is Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. rmckay[at]sas.upenn.edu / @ramahmckay