Vertical ethnography: Writing the poetics of materiality

Abstract

In gratitude toward those who have paved the way for a multitude of academic writing genres, we continue to de-stabilize writing conventions to propose, so as to put forward, ways of writing ethnographic research differently. We do this through an exploration of how the poetics of materiality can be written in ethnographic research. By means of Bachelard’s work on material imagination and poetic instants, as well as re-visiting ethnographic clay-and-wood fieldwork, we suggest the subgenre of vertical ethnography. This is a genre that enables a shift from the often taken-for-granted thick description, which focuses on interpretations of meaning of what happened in the field, to deep inscription, a writing that breaks through the surface when our entanglement with materiality is awakening poetic sensibilities, enabling a vertical writing of ethnographic accounts.