A Creative Ethnography Approach: Reconstructing the Socio-Material Remains of the Ghost Ships of Suva

Abstract

Drawing on visual elements, this article uses creative ethnography as a method of visualizing imaginative elements and observations. Generating improvised dialogues based on the visual prompts of the author’s video entitled Ghost Ships of Suva, the technique explores and speculates on the imagined lives of sailors and workers who once inhabited the abandoned fishing vessels that were filmed in the Fijian island of Viti Levu. The material life of the vessels and their socio-material relationship with the past inhabitants are explored with the idea that even the discarded material world is full of subjectivities with which we can connect. As a discussion on the socio-material “lives” of these ships, as a meeting-point of socio-material subjectivities, the article employs an approach driven by Donna Haraway’s concept of speculative fabulation. Through the reconstruction of dialogues, the article engages with Tim Ingold’s paradigm of aliveness and improvization, part of the processes involved in making images and videos with the Creative Ethnography Network (CEN). The conclusion acknowledges the complexities of socio-material entanglement: where elements of intersubjectivity between researcher and subject become vital agents in producing ethnographic knowledge.