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Paper short abstract

This communication examines a post-fieldwork experiment transforming ethnographic material into a sensory beach performance. It reflects on multimodal ethnography's potential to bridge the text-image divide and open spaces to anthropology beyond academia.

Paper long abstract

Despite growing experiments with visual, sensory and performative methods, anthropology remains marked by a persistent polarization: text-based knowledge production retains analytical authority while multimodal work is relegated to supplementary or illustrative status. Paradoxically, spaces fostering new approaches may exclude text entirely – raising questions about inverting rather than overcoming polarization. This paper examines a post-fieldwork experiment that directly engaged this polarization. Drawing on a long-term ethnography with Pagi fishermen navigating environmental and social transformations in coastal Goa, India, I transformed ethnographic material into a sensory performance-narration where the sea narrates the Pagi's past and present lives, and imagined futures. Following the challenge of creating an embodied experience, the piece was performed on a beach. The audience - predominantly anthropologists - positioned themselves facing the ocean, listening to the sea, engaging multisensorially: attending to salt air, wind, waves and shifting bodily positions as the narrative moved through temporal transformations. Photomontages combining photography, drawing and text complemented the narration. Reflecting on this experiment, I recognized multimodal ethnography's distinctive potential, namely, in this case, how sensory engagement enable understandings impossible through traditional presentations, with bodies becoming sites of learning. Yet I also felt confronted with an uncomfortable question: at what point do multimodal approaches stop being anthropology and become something else? This paper reflects on the potential to translate academic knowledge for specialized and non-specialized publics alike by bridging rather than reproducing old polarizations, and considers what role embodied, sensory forms might play in academia and on opening spaces to anthropology beyond it.