Contribution short abstract:

An anthropologist walks into a hairdressing salon. A hairdresser rages about cultural rights. A mirror witnesses an unravelling scene, exposing heightened emotions, hinting at hidden ones. Academic attempts at meaning-making and dissemination go through many stages. Because. Words. Falter…. Fail….

Contribution long abstract:

Life, and thus anthropological fieldwork, is a multi-sensory experience. Different sensations occur simultaneously with emotions, memories and imaginings in a series of fragmentary episodes that may or may not be connected. When interacting with others, inner lifeworlds may contradict external presentation, and we sometimes grasp for meanings that seem to float just out of reach. Yet this rarely causes an existential crisis because we make meaning primarily through experience—embodiment and intersubjectivity. However, re-enactment of fieldwork experience is almost exclusively through the act of writing—linear sentences, complete paragraphs and logical argument—and when trying to capture embodied experience through lexical communication, ontology and epistemology sometimes collide. This paper explores one ethnographic encounter: a half-hour appointment between a hairdresser, who is angry and upset by a story she heard, six weeks previously, about alleged ‘cultural rights’, and an anthropologist on a routine visit to a hairdresser (a chore to be ticked off on a ‘non-research day’), who is bamboozled by her own simultaneous sensations, emotions and cognitions, and a very large mirror that reflects the scene as actors and audience become one and the same. On leaving the field I return again and again to my memory of that ethnographic moment, memories that subtly change with each act of storytelling, as I attempt different ways to explain, analyse and disseminate anthropological knowledge. The failure of writing, experiments with unwriting through performance and storytelling, and the slog of multiple re-writes, become a Beckettian exposé of try again, fail again, fail better.