Epistolary storytelling: a feminist sensory orientation to ethnography

ABSTRACT This article presents a series of letters the authors exchanged while conducting ethnographic research in Belize and Ghana. The letters reveal an affinity between feminist ethnographic praxis and a politically attuned epistemology of the senses, what the authors call a sensory feminist orientation to scholarship. Expanding on criticism of the way sensory hierarchies inform Western knowledge-building, the authors reevaluate their own epistolary exchange as a methodological provocation. As stories, the letters detail what the authors orient themselves toward in the field, as well as embodied moments of disorientation: danger, violence and estrangement. Untidy and raw, they offer readers an opportunity to “listen to sense” and, in the process, consider the consequences when ethnographers are encouraged to excise certain field encounters from scholarship. The article includes paintings that Beth Uzwiak created while in the field as a component of the authors’ sensory experiment in epistolary ethnography. Their focus on the affective registers of storytelling contributes to broader efforts to disrupt the androcentric tendencies of ethnographic voice.