Ethnographic writing is rooted in encounters with people whose lives unfold in particular social worlds. Yet when translating those encounters to the page, there is always a risk of reduction: the vividness of a person may flatten into a stock role, an analytic function, or a generalized type. This lesson invites you to consider what it means to render presence in writing—not to embellish, but to evoke the irreducible texture of a person as they appear in context.
Rendering presence does not mean reproducing everything about someone. Rather, it involves a set of narrative and stylistic choices that allow a person to emerge as socially positioned, emotionally expressive, and agentive within the world you describe. These choices include decisions about pacing, dialogue, gesture, interiority, and social positioning. Even the rhythms of a sentence can suggest alertness, fatigue, charisma, or guardedness. In this way, form becomes part of the representation.
At the same time, writing presence is not a neutral task. Every detail included or omitted—every metaphor, scene, or quote—shapes how readers understand the person you write about. This work demands not only literary skill but ethical attentiveness: to portray someone in ways they might recognize, resist, or reinterpret. Good ethnographic writing honors that tension.
To write people ethnographically, you should practice using brief but evocative description to bring someone into view; signaling social positioning (gender, race, class, profession, etc.) without turning the person into a stand-in for a category; conveying relationality: how the person moves through their social world, how they are seen by others, how they act on their surroundings; balancing voice and silence—knowing when to let someone speak in their own words and when to allow ambiguity or absence to remain.
Ultimately, rendering presence is not about producing a definitive portrait, but about inviting readers into the lived, situated encounter that is at the heart of ethnographic knowledge.
Focus
Represent individuals in their social, affective, and material contexts.
Learning Goals
- Learn how to evoke individuals as situated presences, not abstract types or disembodied voices.
- Reflect on the ethical and formal dimensions of writing about real people.
- Practice techniques for portraying social actors with nuance, specificity, and care.
Activities
- Choose a person from your fieldnotes whom you found particularly memorable. Write a short vignette (150–250 words) that evokes this person in a specific moment. Avoid generalizations or summary. Focus on gesture, tone, spatial position, clothing, speech, or silence—anything that can render their presence on the page. Share with a partner or group and discuss: What kind of person emerges? What choices shaped that portrayal?
- Select a brief excerpt (your own or a published one) that introduces a person. Annotate it to identify where and how social markers (class, gender, race, age, occupation, etc.) are subtly or explicitly conveyed. Then rewrite the excerpt, experimenting with shifting what is foregrounded or backgrounded. How does the tone or interpretation change?
- Return to a moment in your fieldnotes where you struggled to write about someone, either because of the sensitivity of the situation or your ambivalence. Write a short reflection on the ethical and representational dilemmas you faced. What felt at stake in how you portrayed this person? What did you choose to include or leave out, and why?