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Paper short abstract

This article argues that ethnography is a poetic practice. Using Trans-Queer-Kothi community poems, it shows how poetry archives embodied, sensory knowledge and theorises marginalisation, advocating collaborative, ethnopoetic methods.

Paper long abstract

This article argues that conventional ethnographic writing fails to capture the poetic and sensory realities of marginalised communities, such as the Kothi (a term in South Asia denoting male-assigned individuals who embody femininity, often within queer and sex-worker circles). Proposing that doing ethnography is akin to writing poetry, it employs an ethnopoetic lens to demonstrate how poetry functions as a method of embodied knowing. Through collaboratively created poems, the analysis reveals how Kothi verse articulates the body as a historical archive, maps sensory landscapes of risk, expresses queer temporalities, and wields metaphor as a survival tool. The article contends that these poems are not merely illustrative but are primary epistemological documents that theorise lived experience. It concludes by advocating an ethnopoetic method centred on embodied listening, sensory documentation, and collaborative hermeneutics, thereby shifting anthropological practice from writing about communities to engaging with them through their own expressive forms.