The ghost character was presented at the -Writing PD: A Workshop on Interpreting, Accounting and Novel Forms of Reporting-[1] in the past PDC16 at Aarhus, Denmark. This character and piece of writing accounts for a series of fieldwork experiences that deals with the unspoken ways of communication from an influential research participant. As a conceptual tool, the metaphor of the ghost has opened space for interventions to both the participant operating as the Ghost, and the researcher in inviting for a dialogue of such experiences. While maintaining the anonymity and playfulness that the Ghost character proposes as its preferred style of participation.
As will be presented in the story, the tools the ghost uses are things of common use by all the staff, and the main method of intervention is to move and hide these things to communicate a presence and a political position around certain everyday issues, which these things come to represent. It is therefore, in the following of such matters in movement that we can see how as Tim Ingold suggests, to ‘witness a thing is to join with the processes of its ongoing formation’ (2012, p. 436). (For a ‘non-human’ perspective on this story, see the Flower Vase complementary version in the 24hrs Ethnography section).
The use of the Ghost metaphor was proposed by the participant doing the ghostly interventions. Such nickname responds to, and hides within, the collective sensorial experiences of repeated moments of serendipity and coincidental encounters between people and moving matters at this context. Whose meanings are also enhanced by the possible -lively and deadly- stories of the second-hand donations the staff works with. These additional meanings are expressed often by the staff and visitors as characteristic experiences from the place.
From a research practice perspective, the Ghost has been useful as a tool to mediate relations between the researcher and participants beyond the fieldwork stage, enabling additional instances of collaboration at the stages of analysis and writing (in current development elsewhere). In that sense, opening the writing as a space for further intervention, collective reflexivity and participatory research reporting. The text becomes another space for a collaborative designing of the ‘ethnographic place’ (Pink, 2015, p. 49) between the researcher and the fieldwork participants as readers and writers themselves. In that sense, this ghostly writing could work as a design approach in which as Sarah Pink proposes, ‘we can see the future as part of rather than as after ethnography’ (Ibid).
This kind of writing emerged initially as a way for the researcher to reconcile its various roles and responsibilities with the research context. The researcher in this story, is also the Saturday manager of the place. Therefore, through this style of writing and through this ‘third voice’ of the Ghost, the researcher aims to find a prudent distance that enables the analysis and reporting of such ethnographic experiences and intermingled roles.
The ghost story below presents three possible voices within one same story. To facilitate the reading, each voice is presented in a different text colour and hides other lines from the text. There are two main reasons for highlighting these different voices: on the one hand to illustrate the confusion that these silent interventions trigger in the other participants involved by the situation. And on the other hand, to blur the sole responsibility of such event, as once the other participants respond, they too become ghosts. As their responses follow the same unspoken style of communication, moving back such hidden things and reconfiguring spaces.
In this site, the ghost character visits the Working Concept section and invites other voices into an open discussion about research experiences with silent interventions.
References
Ingold, T. (2012). Toward an ecology of materials. Annual Review of Anthropology 41:427-42.
Pink, S. (2015). Doing sensory ethnography – Second Edition, Sage, London, United Kingdom.
[1] https://writingpd.wordpress.com/
