Moments of Dislocation: Why the Body Matters in Ethnographic Research

Ethnographies originate in everyday interaction with others, but anthropologists’ analysis and interpretation of people’s social world is often restricted to their words and identifiable actions. Like in every social setting, much of the knowledge we acquire during fieldwork remains unarticulated and habitual. We often lack the tools to even become aware of it, let alone to bring it into the predicated realm. Still, its existence is the only basis we have for recognizing unarticulated experiences of others. Anthropologists have become very interested in bodily experiences, but have tended either to cognitively interpret the experience of others or to privilege their own experiences as a basis for ethnography. I argue that we should instead use our own bodily experiences to intersubjectively recognize those of others, and I propose avenues for doing so.