Multimodal Ethnography

This entry foregrounds how multimodality has come to signal a recalibration of ethnography within (and beyond) anthropology. Multimodality encourages a move toward the extra-textual to more faithfully represent the embodied nature of ethnographic research while opening new strategies to effectively move between abstraction, affect, and analysis. Multimodality also points toward an aspiration to initiate interdisciplinary conversation and to engage with broader publics. Films, art installations, websites, photo essays, and theater performances, to name a few types of multimodal output, invite a different and broader spectatorship that text-based ethnographic exegesis alone can muster. Finally, multimodality signals, for many, a reinvigorated interest in collaborative approaches to producing knowledge that harken to previous disciplinary desires (and projects) to create a shared ethnography through the sensuous and imaginative potentials of the camera. Multimodality anticipates, in this sense, the proliferation of digital tools and platforms that invite opportunities for shared ethnographic storytelling even as it doesn’t reduce its potential to technologically determined approaches and methodologies. In foregrounding the multimodal potentials of ethnography, this entry brackets a detailed discussion of how multimodality has been developed in communication studies, semiotics, and sociolinguistics as a way to understand and analyze multiple and concurrent modes of signification. It also steers clear of a discussion regarding the digital humanities, although it is important to note that initiatives under the banner of digital humanities have greatly impacted publishing in ways that have benefitted multimodal ethnography. The entry offers, rather, an introduction to multimodality as an ethnographic approach, output, and digital curatorial practice, by drawing attention to creative scholarship that moves beyond logocentric scholarly methods and modes of production—that is, approaches that take an external reference as an epistemological starting point—and toward multisensory engagements with knowing and being.