The Fall: An Affective Ethnography

While the impossibility of neutral observation has become a truism in ethnographic practice, ideals of ethnographic evidence frequently remain tied to a particular notion of ‘being there’ and bearing witness. This essay critically questions observation in ethnography, asking what happens when a researcher’s ethnographic gaze fails due to overwhelming affective forces that collapse time and space. In doing so, it takes up Stephen Muecke’s discussion of fictocriticism as an act of ‘falling’ into concepts and using percepts to climb back out. I ask what this iterative engagement with affective forces and critical theory means for focalising ethnographic accounts, and how one might come to position ethnographic practice and evidence as an ongoing process of thinking as affect and bodily disposition. I ground this discussion in an autoethnography of inter-personal and political affects in relation to narratives of belonging and nationalism in ‘Outback’ Australia.