Paper Short Abstract:

The presentation describes the navigation across Polish, Chichewa, Chitumbuka, colloquial English, and academic English during ethnographic fieldwork in Malawi. This complexity affected the practices of writing, conceptualization, and dialogue, causing the impossibility of establishing a singular "home" language. Commenting on that, I ask about the potential for multilingual, "meta-media" ethnographic methodologies.

Paper Abstract:

Drawing on James Clifford's assertion that "relations of 'weak' and 'strong' languages govern the international flow of knowledge" (1986), this presentation describes a research project on voice and sound practices in Malawi, conducted by a Central European, Polish-speaking ethnographer. During this research, the relational process commenced with learning Chichewa and Chitumbuka, languages prevalent in northern Malawi. Subsequent methodological approaches included trilingual (Polish, English, Chitumbuka) fieldnotes drafting, interviews and conversations with polyglot research collaborators and other local subjects, and strategic decisions about which languages to use in writing the final ethnographies.

In this understanding, the ethnography—here defined as the "art of description" (Ingold, 2014)—is an effect of an intricate weave of pre-discursive practices and experiences. It is followed by a complex writing process that transcends divisions between asymmetrical languages. The research project navigated between languages (Polish, Chichewa, Chitumbuka, colloquial English, academic English), with no singular "home" language given a priori. By critically examining the presumptive neutrality of academic English as a default linguistic framework, the presentation suggests that such a methodological choice dissolves significant dimensions of reflexive knowledge—both my own and that of my collaborators. I thus raise the question of the potential for multilingual, "meta-media" (Flusser) ethnographies to fulfil the transformative character of the discipline.