Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I present three ethnographic vignettes that explore acts of listening to “milieu” in France, Morocco and Sweden. With these vignettes, I demonstrate that sentient and non-sentient ethnographic subjects emerge not in milieu, but with milieu, thus reorienting ethnography and its “object.”

Paper long abstract:

Moroccan poet Idriss Aissa writes, "Our relation to place is irrational. There are things that surpass reason therein. There always remains an unknown and invincible power (magnetism, magic, gravity…) that ties us to a path, a dwelling, a city, a country-side, a hidden place in a residence, in a garden. ...We are secret characters in a grand and multi-century story that places are recounting."

What stories do places recount and how might the ethnographer better listen? As humans recognize a more humble place in planetary politics (Bennett 2009; Morton 2013), ethnographers have begun listening not just to people, but to the milieu they inhabit (Helmreich 2016; Kohn 2013). Milieus have atmospheres, chemical compositions, climates, rhythms, that are unique to each, but that also help create the things, people, plants and animals that inhabit them. They leave material sediment in the strata of conscious and unconscious memory. The French refer to this as terroir, the effects of local minerals and climate on things produced by the land. If terroir determines not just how things "taste" but their very genetic particularity, and if people are what they eat and breathe, then it makes sense to talk about the intimate inter-being of the botanical and the social ecology.

In this paper, I present three ethnographic vignettes that explore acts of listening to "milieu" in France, Morocco and Sweden. With these vignettes, I demonstrate that sentient and non-sentient ethnographic subjects emerge not in milieu, but with milieu, reorienting ethnography and its "object."