Time in ethnographic writing is rarely linear. It pulses through memory, leaps between past and present, and often lingers in moments of anticipation or repetition. This lesson invites you to consider how time is created, narrated, stretched, layered, and experienced in ethnographic accounts. Ethnographers frequently rely on narrative pacing—slowing down, pausing, or looping back—to reflect how events are lived, remembered, and felt.
In everyday life, too, time is seldom experienced as a smooth, chronological flow. Walking through a familiar neighborhood might suddenly collapse years, bringing back the sensations of childhood. The past is not always behind us, and the present is often saturated with what came before. Temporality is also deeply entangled with space: where something happens—on a bus, in a kitchen, at a border—shapes how time is perceived and unfolds. To remain faithful to lived experience, ethnographic writing must mimic this intertwining of memory, duration, and spatial context.
Linear narratives can obscure the very phenomena ethnographers seek to understand: how trauma lingers in a gesture, how ritual merges past and present, or how borderlands fracture time into 'before' and 'after.' For instance, a refugee’s story might shift between a childhood home and a detention center—not to confuse, but to convey how displacement feels. In Indigenous thought, time is not split into strict past, present, and future. As Leanne Betasamosake Simpson writes, “The future is here in the form of the practices of the present, in which the past is also here influencing” (2017:213; also see p. 193). Likewise, the stillness (Seremetakis 2019[1994]) embedded in everyday objects can resist the forward march of historical time, allowing time to gather and thicken.
This kind of writing, however, is not easy. Dominant narrative conventions—especially in academic prose—tend to favor linearity and clarity over nonlinearity and ambiguity. Here, ethnographic writing can take cues from literary traditions that have long experimented with time. Writers use tools like flashbacks, ellipses, nonlinear sequencing, recursive loops, and abrupt temporal shifts to reflect how time is felt, not just measured. As you read and write vignettes, consider what techniques from fiction or memoir might help you capture the uneven rhythms of lived experience. To show how the past intrudes on the present, an abrupt shift might work: “The smell of rain on dry soil—the same smell from the day the war reached her village—now made her freeze in the grocery store.” Or a sudden leap forward might highlight what’s unspoken: “He said the funeral was ‘fine.’ The next morning, he washed the same dish for thirty minutes.”
Despite its challenges, attending to temporal texture in ethnographic writing is profoundly worthwhile—not only for its aesthetic impact, but for its analytic power. It reveals how time is not simply a neutral container for events, but a dynamic, culturally constructed force that shapes meaning, memory, and power. By disrupting linear chronology—through flashbacks, pauses, or recursive loops—ethnographers can illuminate the fissures and folds of lived experience. Take the examples above: a refugee’s fragmented narrative, leaping between childhood and displacement, offers a more powerful account of rupture than any tidy timeline could. A repeated gesture—like washing a dish for thirty minutes—becomes an embodied expression of grief, a form of analysis in its own right. These techniques do more than illustrate nonlinearity; they enact it, allowing readers to feel time’s weight, its echoes, its absences. In this way, temporal texture transforms description into argument: how people narrate time reflects how they endure it, resist it, or reclaim it. To write time ethnographically is to question the very frameworks—colonial, capitalist, or otherwise—that attempt to impose order on the messiness of lived experience.
Seremetakis, C. Nadia. 2019[1994]. The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity. New York: Routledge
Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. 2017. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance. University of Minnesota Press.
Learning from Creatives
Creative:Ryan Coogler
Creation: Sammie's performance at the juke-joint in Sinners (2025)
The scene takes place in the opening night at the new juke-joint in Mississippi that Sammie’s cousins (the twins Smoke and Stack) have established. Sammie is the preacher’s son and carries a guitar (a resonator guitar) despite his father’s reservations. The joint is packed, the mood is electric, with dance, music, and an audience ready to revel. Sammie plays his guitar and begins to sing a song that is introduced as being about his father—his preacher father who warned him about the world of blues, sin, and the obligations of faith. As he plays, the performance becomes more than just a musical number. It becomes a transcendent moment. As the song builds, the scene transitions: people from different eras: early blues players, African drummers, modern DJs, rock guitarists, even future-stylised dancers appear. The camera winds through the crowd in a single flowing shot (or appears so) and the roof of the juke joint seems to literally catch fire in the build-up of ecstasy. Sammie’s music breaks through time: past, present and future are present in the room in one continuous surge. The scene is a turning point: Sammie’s music, both powerful and consequential, risky and transcendent, unites heritage (blues roots) and future (the many musical genres and generations) in one moment, suggesting that this music carries ancestral memory and forward-looking life.
What does this scene reveal about time?
The scene treats time as an experiential field rather than a linear sequence. Past, present, and future appear simultaneously through sound, movement, and imagery. This demonstrates how creators use sensory layering to convey temporal depth: ancestral rhythms, contemporary sounds, and imagined futures overlap within the same moment. Ethnographers can adopt a similar strategy by drawing attention to how different temporalities coexist in everyday situations, allowing readers to feel how past experiences, present actions, and anticipated futures interpenetrate.
the scene moreover shows how formal techniques generate temporal expansion. Continuous camera movement, shifts in lighting, and changes in sonic texture allow the moment to dilate. These choices communicate duration as lived experience instead of measured time. In writing, an analogous effect emerges through controlled pacing. Slowing down the description of a moment, attending to gestures or atmospheres, or briefly widening the frame to include historical or anticipatory elements can allow readers to inhabit a temporally thickened scene.
Creativity of Real Time
Sammie’s performance illustrates how creativity emerges through the interplay of memory and novelty. His song draws on inherited musical traditions while producing something new in the present. This invites ethnographers to consider how to write moments in which actors mobilize the past without being determined by it. Tracing how people engage remembered practices, stories, or affects in unfolding situations can communicate a sense of lived temporal continuity.
Finally, the scene models how to depict environments as temporally dynamic rather than static containers. The juke joint shifts from a physical venue into a space animated by accumulated histories and unfolding possibilities. Ethnographic writing can do the same by showing how places carry temporal residues—rituals, habits, traces of previous events—and how those residues shape current action.
The creative techniques used in the scene highlight ways to render time as textured, layered, and felt. They offer concrete approaches for ethnographers aiming to move beyond chronological narration toward accounts that convey duration and the temporal complexity of social life.
Focus
Explore memory, pacing, and temporal layering in writing.
Learning Goals
- Understand how time is represented and felt in field narratives.
- Analyze flashbacks, anticipatory moments, and non-linear storytelling.
Activities
- Write about an event or scene based on your memory of that event or scene. Now try to write about it as experienced in that moment.
- Discuss: How do changes in pacing affect meaning?