53. On Ethnographic Unknowability [chapter]

2020 Writing Anthropology  
What if I told you to write what you don't know? I ask this because I find the oft-offered advice to "write what you know" both alarming and silencing. Isn't ethnography at least partially about unknowability? If we acknowledge that textual recording is a form of fixing knowledge, how does one write what one doesn't know? How can our writing play on the edge between knowing and not knowing, refusing to fix the unknown by writing it into existence? Exploring this playful and vexing tension in ethnographic writing is my current preoccupation.
doi:10.1515/9781478009160-055 fatcat:bd2uj5drmbenlcr6n3hhyztuom