My latest paper, Verbing the Urban: Ethnographic Idealism and the Grammar of Becoming, currently under review, began with a simple but disorienting question: what if the city were not a collection of things, but a choreography of verbs? Drawing inspiration from Jorge Luis Borges’s Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, the essay develops what I call ethnographic idealism—a speculative method that treats grammar itself as an ethnographic device. Rather than beginning with nouns, categories, and places, I ask what might happen if ethnography started from acts, mediations, and rhythms—if writing became a way of sensing the world in motion. The experiment unfolds in Berlin’s Alexanderplatz through three vignettes—The World Clock, Tram Tracks, and Pigeoning—each corresponding to a different grammatical intensity on what I term the idealism spectrum.
The paper proposes that grammar is never neutral: it organizes perception and participates in the making of reality. To write the city as verbs rather than as objects is to alter the empirical itself—to shift attention from what the world is to how it becomes. This gesture does not deny materiality; it repositions it as a field of ongoing mediation, vibration, and enactment. The spectrum ranges from light destabilizations, where nouns still flicker, to radical verbings, where even the ethnographer dissolves into movement. Each stance becomes a way of testing how language conditions what can be known, sensed, and written in urban life.
What I sought to achieve with this experiment was not a new style, but a new sensitivity—a way of expanding ethnography’s capacity to think and feel otherwise. The piece contributes to current conversations in experimental ethnography by showing that form is not decoration but method, and that writing can act as an epistemological instrument in its own right. Verbing the Urban invites us to treat description as an ethical practice of attunement, where grammar becomes a site of care and speculation. To write differently, the paper argues, is also to listen differently—to dwell with the city as a field of verbs, flickers, and becomings still in the making.