Paper short abstract:

To understand urban life we must understand transient encounters despite the epistemological and methodological challenges to a discipline rooted in long-term participant observation. A chance meeting with a stranger (five minutes, few words) yields a story of love, bereavement and creature comfort.

Paper long abstract:

Walking through Belfast city centre with my dog. A man on a bench holds out his hand to her and looks at me. I smile, nod and sit down beside him. ‘She’s a lovely dog’, he says stroking her, ‘how old is she?’ ‘Eighteen months. Do you have a dog?’ He replies in two staccato words: ‘Dog. Dead.’ His eyes fill with tears. ‘I’m so sorry. What kind of dog?’ He struggles to speak but manages ‘Westie’. We sit in silence for few minutes while he strokes Torridon, then say goodbye and go our separate ways. Fleeting encounters with strangers are a mode of sociality central to urban life but this presents a challenge for anthropology, where fieldwork expectations are deeply rooted in long-term participant observation. Yet to understand urban life we must understand transient encounters. My meeting with this man was happenstance, our conversation only lasted a few minutes, but his words and gestures tell a painful story of love, bereavement and the comfort of creatures. A kind of oral flash fiction. Social scientists and philosophers have long been fascinated by the figure of the stranger as someone from elsewhere, an outsider, as straddling two social worlds, or as a threat, yet contemporary urban encounters with strangers are the rule not the exception and people learn to navigate these relationships with relative ease. This paper explores engagements with strangers, a dog as a research assistant, and the power of storytelling to create momentary ethnographic encounters worthy of anthropological attention.