Paper short abstract:

In addition to paying attention to the affective realm of research, we need to explore how to do affective ethnography, quite literally, graphically in drawing and writing. How could the construction of ethnographic knowledge in two-dimensional text provide opportunities for affective engagement?

Paper long abstract:

Doing ethnographic fieldwork on drinking the Qur'an in Zanzibar led me to engage with local conceptions of the body. Liquefied Qur'anic verses were ingested for healing purposes - but what happened with them after ingestion, how did they relate to boundaries of inside and outside, bodily substance, and a spiritual force without which bodies would not be living bodies? Responding to my inquiries about the body, I sat with several interlocutors in interview-like situations where we were and had bodies. Skillfully, my interlocutors made extensive use of metaphorical descriptions. Although these metaphors directed attention away from the bodies that we were in these conversations, they also were designed for me to connect to the abstraction of the body in a different - an affective - way. In order to translate this affective dimension of what these metaphors did, it did not suffice to write about these metaphors - rather, I reverted to drawing the images that people had painted for me in words in order to allow my readers to have a different - an affective - encounter through that which they find printed in my text.

In addition to paying attention to the affective realm in doing research, I argue in this paper, it is also important to engage with how to do affective ethnography, quite literally, graphically in drawing and writing. Constructing ethnographic knowledge, even in two-dimensional text, includes providing opportunities for readers to affectively engage.