Ethnographic writing is deeply relational. Scenes of care, obligation, and kinship often sit at the heart of fieldwork, not only as topics of study but as the grounds on which ethnographic knowledge is formed. This lesson explores how you can write about care not as a static norm or ideal, but as something negotiated, contested, and dynamic.
Relationships are never given; they are made, sustained, strained, and sometimes broken. A moment of caregiving may be shaped by love, resentment, duty, exhaustion—or all of these at once. Writing relationality means attending to these shifting dynamics, to the ways in which care is practiced unevenly across roles, generations, or expectations.
Such dynamism requires writing that is sensitive to movement and change. Rather than depicting relationships as fixed roles (e.g., caregiver, dependent), ethnographic prose can trace how roles evolve in response to events, emotions, or social pressures. Techniques such as recursive narration, juxtaposition of past and present, or highlighting discrepancies in accounts can reveal the instability or recalibration of care. Attention to these narrative strategies allows relational complexity to emerge on the page.
Ethnographic writing can render care through gesture, repetition, silence, or even refusal. It can also make visible how economic conditions, migration, gender roles, and historical violence shape what it means to care—and for whom. The craft challenge here is to show both the emotional and structural dimensions of these relationships without reducing one to the other.
Writing itself can be an act of care. How you narrate a scene, whose perspective you foreground, what moments you choose to show or omit—these decisions are not neutral. They reflect ethical commitments and forms of responsibility. To write relationality well is to recognize that representing others is always an intimate, and often asymmetrical, act.
Focus
How care, obligation, and kinship are depicted as layered and contested.
Learning Goals
- Recognize how familial roles and care work are narrated across cultural contexts.
- Write care scenes that foreground emotion and structure simultaneously.
Activities
- Close read a piece of ethnographic writing and chart out how care is expressed, constrained, or transformed over time.
- Write a short vignette where the meaning of care is ambiguous, strained, or negotiated.
- Discuss: How can writing itself be a form of care? What ethical commitments are embedded in narrative choices?