Ethnography, like life, unfolds in places: alleyways, kitchens, clinics, forests, checkpoints, offices, sidewalks. These places condition the ways that we interact, move, observe, and parse different experiences and are thus integral to ethnographic accounts. The way you write about space and place gives ethnographic accounts dimension; it brings data to life and shapes how the account is perceived and interpreted. This lesson explores how places become meaningful through social life and how writing can evoke not just the appearance of a location, but its textures, rhythms, silences, and embedded histories. Rather than treating setting as passive backdrop, ethnographic writing can animate place as an active force in shaping experience and relation.
According to Doreen Massey (2005:10), understanding place as constituted through interrelations allows us to see it not as a static container but as a dynamic participant in the formation of identities and practices. This view resists treating identities-or places-as fixed or self-contained. Instead, it foregrounds the ongoing, contested processes through which both are made. Resistance to bounded fixed notions of a place or site opens ethnographic accounts to the making of identities, significance, and histories in relation to space. This lends a more dynamic impression of how places are continually socially, culturally, and politically, historically produced and negotiated.
From this perspective, place is not merely where social life happens; it is co-constitutive of it. For ethnography this means place can never just be a backdrop to events or encounters—it is an active medium that shapes meaning, experience, and participates in the constitution of subjectivities. Just as subjectivities are produced through situated and negotiated practices, so too are places—never complete, always in flux, and deeply entangled in the spatiality of collective life. If we take social life and place to be inseparable then our interpretations and analysis should consider our presence as ontologically implicated in the place. Our narrating and reading of a place is never separate from who we are, just as who we are is never separate from the places that mark, construct, and sustain us. This approach troubles any conventional notion of a fieldsite for which it might be incumbent upon an author to give an account of. It asks ethnographers instead to detail the place from within it, wrapped-up in its construction and significations. Insisting that narratives make places is to highlight the responsibility inherent in writing and reading a place with attention to the worlds they help to produce and sustain.
The notion of the field is central to ethnography, and by extension, to anthropology. It has come to function, as Dua writes, as “property” in anthropological discourse (2023). This rendering of place as property—even intellectual property—through imaginative and discursive techniques is inextricable from deeply colonial extractive modes of understanding. Conveying an impression of a “field” takes part in processes of identification and isolation that are integral to broader structures of empowerment and disempowerment, all the while maintaining a safe distance for the author and reader alike. This ensnares ethnographic accounts in ongoing forms of dispossession that begin with freezing space and time. To extricate itself from these habits of thought and ongoing historical processes, ethnography struggles with the task of refusing and rearticulating the field. This begins with a radical reconsideration of space and place.
In everyday discourse—and in much academic writing—there is a tendency to collapse place into space. As Yi-Fu Tuan (1977) explains, place is space made meaningful through lived experience. Space, by contrast, is abstract and undifferentiated. Space is “transformed into place as it acquires definition and meaning.” (Tuan 1977:136). Yet in writing, even meaningful places are often rendered as coordinates or surface-level description. Think of how a city appears on a map: it provides data—elevation, proximity, infrastructure—but cannot evoke the feel of walking its streets, the smells of its markets, or the ambient tensions of its neighborhoods. Ethnographic writing must resist this flattening these visceral multi-dimensional characteristics and instead aims to recreate the lived sense of place. How does it feel, smell, and sound to live there, move through, dwell, or else to be excluded from it.
Doing this well requires attention to more than visual cues. Consider what sounds punctuate the space, what histories lie just beneath the surface, what movements are enabled or blocked. Use pacing to mimic movement through space; shift between wide-angle and close-up to reflect sensory and affective attention; embed memory, speculation, or local myth to signal layered temporalities. Strong place-writing often relies on juxtaposition, material detail, and attunement to atmosphere. These techniques allow writers to convey the dynamism of place—not as static scenery, but as lived and contested terrain.
Here are some techniques and examples that illustrate how to write place ethnographically:
- Multi-Sensory Description. Go beyond the visual. Describe sounds, smells, textures, even tastes. Use active verbs to convey movement and interaction: “The farmers market was not just a blur of colors but a chorus of voices, smells, and textures: children shouting with excitement at the petting zoo, the scent of South American food drifting from the food truck, the sticky press of shirts against bodies in the midday heat."
- Pacing & Syntax to Mimic Movement. Use sentence rhythm to mirror movement through space. Short, abrupt sentences for quick transitions; long, flowing ones for slow immersion: “Turn left at the corner store, dodge the scooters, sidestep the gutter’s questionable stream—then, suddenly, the alley opens into a bright, expansive square.”
- Embedded Histories & Speculation. Weave in fragments of memory, folklore, or imagined futures to show how time accumulates in place: “No one planted anything in the lot behind the factory—the soil was too thick with rust and engine oil. But old Josh told me that before the trucks came, her mother used to grow tomatoes there, ‘fat and red as a child’s fist.’”
- Materiality & Objects as Storytellers. Focus on objects as carriers of social life and routine: "The bus stop bench was etched with initials and knife marks, but one patch remained smooth: the spot where Ms. Dina sat each morning, her grocery bags forming a quiet fortress around her until the #42 arrived.”
These strategies help avoid both generic description ("The neighborhood was peaceful") and data dumps (lists of geographic or architectural facts). Instead, they allow you to ground your ethnographic writing in place as something felt, inhabited, and shaped through relational life.
- Dua, J. (2023). “Anthropology at sea.” American Ethnologist 51: 40–46.
- Massey, D. (2005). For space. London: SAGE Publications.
- Tuan, Y.-F. (1977). Space and place: The perspective of experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Focus
Render place as lived, layered, and affectively charged.
Learning Goals
- Distinguish between abstract space and socially meaningful place.
- Practice writing that evokes the sensorial and relational texture of place.
- Analyze how settings shape and are shaped by social action.
Activities
- Choose any ethnographic account that you like and analyze how place is introduced and made meaningful. What details give place its social texture? What sensory details are used? What kind of social world is imagined or invoked?
- Write a short vignette (150 words max) that foregrounds place without naming it directly. Let place emerge through interaction, movement, and material detail. You should capture not only what it looks like, but how it feels to inhabit it.
- Discuss: What’s the difference between writing “about” a place and writing “from” within it?
- Discuss: What are the risks of over-romanticizing or exoticizing place? How can we write place ethically?