Ethnographic writing often wrestles with strong feelings—grief, anxiety, confusion, desire, anger, awe—that resist easy interpretation. As a writer, you may encounter moments where something powerful happens but you don’t fully understand it, or where people in the field express emotions that cannot be neatly resolved. This lesson explores how to write such scenes without flattening their complexity. Rather than turning every emotional moment into an object of analysis, this lesson invites you to sit with uncertainty, contradiction, and affective tension.
Strong feeling is often experienced not as clarity but as confusion or disorientation. The same moment can contain laughter and unease, grief and beauty, rage and silence. Rather than explaining these tensions away, ethnographic vignettes can be a space to hold them open. In fact, ambiguity can be an analytic strength. It invites your reader to engage emotionally and intellectually, to interpret and question rather than simply absorb a conclusion. This kind of writing requires trust in the power of suggestion—and in your reader’s capacity to dwell in the unresolved.
Affects are often characterized by their resistance to clear representation. They defy the kind of neat logic that seeks internal consistency and resolution. Think of love, for example: when you love someone, you experience a sense of freedom, although you willingly limit yourself in reference to another. These are the tensions that make affect compelling and difficult to write. The challenge, then, is how to represent something that resists both simple logic and stable language.
Despite these challenges, 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.
Focus
Write strong feeling without flattening it into resolution or analysis.
Learning Goals
- Explore how ethnographic writing communicates tension, grief, or confusion without over-interpretation.
- Consider how ambiguity can be an analytic strength.
Activities
- Select a piece of ethnographic writing and identify how affect is conveyed—through language, pacing, repetition, or omission.
- Write a brief fieldnote-style scene where something feels emotionally intense but unresolved. Then reflect: what does that feeling reveal about the ethnographic relationship?
- Small group discussion: When is ambiguity productive? When does it feel evasive?