Lesson 4: Affect and Ambiguity

Isn’t what resists representation exactly what’s worth representing? Consider someone who has experienced a traumatic event—a genocide survivor, for instance. It is impossible for them to share their experience, to convey what exactly they went through, and to relive the trauma in words. Yet not despite but because of this impossibility, they must speak: to testify, to let others know what happened. This is why “the true witness is the one who does not want to witness” (Rancière 2009:91). While testimony can never fully capture reality—“because reality is never entirely soluble” in representation (Rancière 2009:89)—the witness’s words matter precisely because the “intolerability of the event deprives them of the possibility of speaking” (Rancière 2009:91).

Ethnographic writing, too, wrestles with intense experiences—grief, anxiety, confusion, desire, anger, awe—that resist easy representation and interpretation. Affect, as Brian Massumi (2002) argues, is the visceral intensity that escapes language: a shiver down the spine, a shared glance held too long, the way a crowded room suddenly falls silent without explanation. As an ethnographer, you may encounter moments where something powerful happens, but you don’t fully ‘understand’ it—where you can’t parse the “content” of what’s occurring, only feel its effect as an intensity. An informant stops mid-sentence when they recount the events of their border-crossing, hands trembling as they turn away, leaving the air thick with something unsaid; or people gathered at a funeral express emotions that defy neat resolution, and your writing strains to convey what you witnessed. This lesson explores how to write such scenes without flattening their complexity, treating ambiguity not as a failure of analysis but as an invitation to trace what Erin Manning (following Whitehead) calls the “more-than of experience” (Massumi 2015:153). Rather than turning every moment into an object of analysis, we’ll sit with uncertainty, contradiction, and affective tension.

Ethnographic writing grapples with moments that defy clear articulation, not because of flawed observation, but because affect operates beyond language’s grasp. How can we pulse through everyday life without settling into tidy narratives (e.g., Stewart 2007)? Great ethnographers remind us that ambiguity isn’t a failure of analysis; it’s a record of the friction between experience and representation. When an informant’s voice cracks while recounting a memory, or when participating in and observing a political protest leaves you with a sense of awe you can’t logically dissect, you’re encountering those "more-than of experience" aspects. These gaps aren’t voids to fill: they’re ethnographic data in their own right.

How do you write the shiver down the spine, the weight of an unfinished sentence? One way to approach this—to try and share experienced affect without reducing it to explanation—is to experiment with form. Use fragments, for example. Veena Das (2006:5) suggests that fragments are not merely incomplete pieces of a larger, knowable whole—unlike a preliminary sketch that still implies an eventual totality. Instead, the fragment signals the collapse of this very expectation: it marks where the imagination of wholeness fails. In ethnographic writing, such fragments don’t point toward a future synthesis; they testify to the irreparable gaps in representation itself. In shorter descriptions this can take the form of parataxis—juxtaposing sensory fragments without connective logic—to mimic disorientation: “The tea went cold. Ahmad tapped the table. Outside, a dog barked three times.” You may also want to employ punctuation like ellipses or em-dashes to mark silences: “She said, ‘We never expected…’ and then looked at her hands.” Also, using second-person to implicate the reader is another technique: “You notice how fast they change the subject. You don’t exactly understand why. But you are relieved because you vaguely fear what they might share if you followed up.” These techniques don’t resolve ambiguity; they honor its presence in the field. In addition to these techniques, you can also document unresolved actions, let environmental details carry affect, and withhold explanatory verbs.

Ambiguity can be ethical rigor or ethical lapse, depending on how you frame it. Beware of exoticizing unresolved moments (e.g., “the locals’ silence was mysterious”), which risks reproducing colonial tropes. Conversely, don’t overwrite to mask your own discomfort; sometimes, the honest note is, “I still don’t understand why this moment felt so charged.” Clarify your positionality: Is the opacity yours (a lack of cultural context), theirs (a deliberate withholding), or inherent to the phenomenon (e.g., trauma)? Let interlocutors’ contradictions stand—their refusal to conform to a coherent narrative might be the point.

An ethnography that insists on total clarity may flatten the very intensities it seeks to document. Instead, treat your text as a map of thresholds—places where language strains against experience. This doesn’t mean romanticizing confusion; it means recognizing that some truths emerge only in the stutter, the hesitation, the unresolved. The challenge is to sit with the discomfort of not-knowing while still offering readers enough scaffolding to feel the stakes. As Rancière suggests (2009), the witness’s impossibility of speaking is itself a testament. Your writing can hold space for that paradox.

Despite the challenges of representation, affect and ambiguity are analytically rich. They offer insight into how people relate, how power circulates, and how fieldwork itself feels. These are not “just feelings”—they tell you something about your own position as an ethnographer, your attachments, your discomforts, and the structures that produce them. Affects are data, and affective moments in the field often demand close attention rather than avoidance.

A common and generative affect in fieldwork is the initial anxiety of entering the field. This can happen whether you are a cultural outsider or returning to a familiar setting in a new role. That nervousness—about belonging, about how to act, about being seen—contains valuable information about your assumptions, your relational stance, and the broader dynamics shaping the field. Writing this kind of affective disorientation can reveal more than confident observation ever could.

Learning from Creatives

Creative:Sofia Coppola

Creation: The Whispered Goodbye in Lost in Translation (2003)

In the final moments of the film, Bob (Bill Murray) and Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) part ways after an ambiguous, intimate connection forged during their coincidental stay at a Tokyo hotel. After a series of quiet emotional exchanges, Bob sees Charlotte walking down the street. He jumps out of his car, runs to her, they embrace. Then Bob leans in and whispers something inaudible in her ear. The viewer cannot hear it. Charlotte reacts emotionally. They say goodbye.

What does this scene reveal about affect?

The whispered words are never revealed. That silence isn’t an omission or narrative failure; it’s a deliberate refusal of clarity. Ambiguity makes space for affect to settle. The scene is powerful precisely because we feel the emotional weight of the moment without access to its content. We don’t know what’s said, but we sense its intensity.

Just as ethnographic writing must sometimes resist interpretive closure, this scene refuses exposition. It privileges affect over explanation. This sensibility runs throughout the film: Charlotte and Bob drift through Tokyo in a haze of jetlag, cultural dislocation, and personal uncertainty. What forms between them is difficult to categorize—neither quite romantic nor entirely platonic. Their bond is rendered not through confession or plot, but through glances, gestures, silences, and shared atmospheres. The whispered goodbye crystallizes this ambiguity. There’s no analytical payoff, no narrative resolution—only an emotional contour.

As in ethnographic writing, “an insistence on total clarity may flatten the very intensities it seeks to document.”

Form as a Vehicle of Affect

Form informs. Coppola’s directorial choices intensify the affective ambiguity. Long takes, sparse dialogue, ambient sound, and wide shots of the Tokyo cityscape create a sense of drift and disconnection. Emotions emerge in the spaces between words—in pacing, framing, and rhythm—rather than through explicit content. In Lost in Translation, affect resides in elevator silences, neon lights, karaoke performances. The whispered goodbye is the most distilled version of this aesthetic: a moment of raw feeling without verbal clarity.

Representation and Its Limits

The film’s title—Lost in Translation—speaks not only to cross-cultural miscommunication but to the broader condition of representation itself. Characters routinely mishear, deflect, or remain silent. These gaps aren’t treated as problems to solve but as expressive in their own right. Who is “lost,” and what is being “translated”? The film doesn’t answer—it lingers in that uncertainty.

The goodbye scene, rather than offering narrative closure, withholds explanation and invites the viewer into the space of affective ambiguity. This refusal to translate feeling into content doesn’t weaken the moment—it deepens it. Opacity becomes not a flaw in representation, but an aesthetic and ethical stance. The scene testifies to what cannot be fully known or shared—and insists that this, too, is meaning.

Focus

Write affective intensities without flattening them into resolution or analysis.

Learning Goals

Activities

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