Embodied approaches to ethnography

Following Pink’s (2012, 8) thought, embodied approach to ethnography is a critical way of inquiry that is open to a variety of alternative methods as ways to produce valid scientific knowledge. In this thesis, I combine immersive entanglement, participatory observation and multisensory body-based interviews that integrate drawing, dialogue and movement tasks (cf.

Stelter 2010, 863).

I got to know about ethnographic approaches that put corporeality at the centre of the analysis only much later having already conducted my actual fieldwork and multisensory interviews.

After getting acquainted with these embodied approaches to ethnography, I realised however

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that they reverberated with my inquiry and the way how I had attended the field (see Haanpää 2017, 49; Vannini 2015, 317; see also Pink 2012, 8; cf. Robben 2004, 385; Herzfeld 2004, 431−432). These approaches to ethnography are interested in examining embodied and sensuous elements of being-in-the-world that go beyond discursive ways of inquiry.

Interestingly enough, using the analytical framework and practices informed by choreographic thinking, movement improvisation and my experience from the field of dance education, I had actually directed my attention and choices to be (intuitively) in alignment with embodied ethnography. This resonates with the insights of Pink:

[A] sensory approach crosses and sometimes unites academic, applied and artistic concerns with theory and practices of research and representation. Through a focus on the senses and the experiential, academic and applied researchers and artists might potentially collaborate at the boundaries or intersections of their already interlinked fields of practice. A project in sensory ethnography might well produce a contribution to interdisciplinary theory-building, an applied intervention and an artwork. (Pink 2012, 21−22.)

Also, Merchant (2011, 55) acknowledges the limits of classical ethnography in studying realms of human senses or in trying to access non-linguistic realms of the research participant’s experience. Outside the scholarship of IR, embodied approaches to ethnography have been applied more widely in social sciences such as cultural anthropology (Pink 2012; Howes 2006;

Classen 2005; Ingold 2000), human geography (Rodaway 1994) and sociology (Simmel 1997;

see also Sparkes & Smith 2012). Embodied ethnography has been used in the aforementioned disciplines in a variety of ways to research human interaction, cultures and the experienced life-worlds of communities (Pink 2012). “[S]ensoriality is fundamental to how we learn about, understand and represent other people’s lives” (Pink 2012, 7). In sociology this turn has been called sociology through the body versus sociology of the body. In this thesis, I am interested in exploring how could the IR through the body be like. I examine what is political about an embodied perspective to the international and what kind of consequences embodied practices of resistance have in the international politics of climate. Nevertheless, conducting embodied ethnography does not come without challenges:

Seeking the senses is a difficult task…How do we access the fleeting, embodied encounters, immanent sensations, practical skills and sensuous dispositions? (Sparkes & Smith 2012, 172.)

Embodied research requires more patience with the sometimes elusive multivocality of the corporeal and sensuous material it deals with (Cooper Albright 2013, 31). However, I could also argue from the perspective of relational ontology of the body that no human discourse can

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be seen totally stripped off corporeality. Following Hast (2018, 18), the challenge of researching bodies is not so much the fact that it is often messy and sweaty, but rather that the body’s experience is temporary. Although bodies remember and feel anew, there is no real return to the original experience of the moment (ibid.). This is why I have aimed at developing ways to describe the experiences of the bodies on the resisting choreography in manifold ways. I do this through the impressionistic activist portraits and multisensory descriptions of the resistance, where the discursive and embodied are connected by integrating bodily sensations and perceptions to the text.

From an embodied perspective, the role of an ethnographer should be to evoke, animate and rupture the data in order to better grasp the corporeality of the world (Vannini 2015, 318− 320;

see also Sparkes 2009, 23; Stoller 1989, 1997). Similarly, Chadwick (2017, 60, 71) proposes embodied listening of the qualitative research data. In concrete terms, she problematises the traditional transcription procedures, and invites scholars to use more poetic expressions of the transcribed texts to better incorporate the physical, affective and somatic “data” embedded in the interview material so as not to lose these valuable elements on the way (ibid.). Sparkes and Smith (2012, 183) also call for “more evocative strategies of representation, that is to write sensuously”. What I appreciate about Chadwick’s (2017, 59) approach is that she does not see the body with its “fleshy energies” separate from language and subjectivity.

Nevertheless, I think that in addition to more embodied listening and representation of the data, we also need to rethink how to enter the field of inquiry in more embodied ways (see Sparkes and Smith 2012, 168; Pink 2012, 7). One case in point is to reflect what, in the first place, is perceived as valuable data for the research, and whether embodied material could inform the research in ways that discursive data cannot (see Malkki 2007, 165−166). Moreover, “curiosity about how theoretical paradigms will shift in the midst of the bodily experience” should be considered (Cooper Albright 2013, 12).

Finally, it might even be unnecessary to make the distinction between ethnography and embodied inquiry: Ethnography per se can already be considered as a deeply embodied practice where the researcher is corporeally and affectively engaged with the field (Malkki 2007, 176;

see also Lie 2013, 2020). However, I still think that by underscoring the meaning of embodied approaches to ethnography is necessary in this research owing to the choices I have made in the interview processes and in the field more widely.

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