Tag: Fieldnote
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From the Infra-Ordinary to the Pocket Archive
If there’s a gravitational center to my small experiments with the urban, it’s Georges Perec’s insistence that attention belongs with what barely appears—the infra-ordinary. In his short essay “Approaches to What?” (in Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, 1997), Perec asked what happens every day and recurs every day: “the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common.” Rather than…
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The Market After the Market
This field note is part of Fragmented Ecologies. When the night ends at Samper Mendoza, the market doesn’t really close—it exhales. Around dawn, the aisles empty, the lights dim, and the ground begins to show what the commerce of care leaves behind. I arrive just as the sweepers begin their rounds. Plastic bags rustle. Brooms drag.…
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From Neat Things to Urban Fragments
Tin Ethnography began with a tin I used to carry everywhere—not an Altoids tin, but a more generic one. Inside it, I kept what I thought of as daily essentials: a small lantern, a few pills, a magnet, a cloth for cleaning my glasses, Band-Aids, a small brush to dust my devices, and a multi-port charger.…
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Six Specimens, Many Classifications
This is a field note part of Fragmented Ecologies. Every week at Samper Mendoza, I return to the same stalls and yet find new plants, new names, and new configurations. The market never repeats itself. This time, I began classifying—not scientifically, but fragmentographically. I selected six specimens: flor blanca, ruda, pepinillos, uña de gato, calaguala, and pasiflora. Each one…
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The Long Goodbye at Samper Mendoza
This field note is part of Fragmented Ecologies. Friday, July 18, 2025. 7:32 am On Mondays and Thursdays after 10 pm, I walk into Plaza Samper Mendoza with a small notebook and a phone camera. It’s a popular nocturnal herb market in Bogotá, Colombia—rows of dried leaves, bundled roots, and bottled syrups. My project here is simple…
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Learning from Jazz Music
From The Companion Series Jazz has accompanied my work for years—not as background music but as a way of sensing. In the long hours of writing, walking, or arranging fragments, its syncopated pulse has shaped how I think and move. The improvisations of New Orleans jazz, in particular, taught me that method can be rhythm: an…
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Learning from Gay Talese
From The Companion Series Gay Talese writes as if he were sketching with light. Long before ethnographers spoke of atmospheres or affect, he was already tracing the invisible geometries of ordinary life: the slight lean of a doorman, the delayed lift of a newspaper corner, the hesitation before a cab door shuts. In his 1961…
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Learning from Jorge Luis Borges
From The Companion Series Borges was never an ethnographer, yet his fiction may be among anthropology’s most methodologically provocative archives. He did not describe worlds; he fabricated them, and in doing so, showed how language itself makes reality. Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (Borges 1941 [1999]) stages a world where nouns vanish, verbs proliferate, and perception replaces substance.…
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Learning with Others
Studio Ethnography has always been a school without classrooms: methods learned on streets, in print shops, through drawings, sounds, and small experiments. The Companions Series makes this explicit. It gathers the people, practices, and traditions that have quietly shaped how I work—those whose gestures have become part of my own hand. I organized this small curriculum into…
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Printing Ethnography Otherwise
From The Atelier Series Emden, 2023 Tarde began as a small experiment—an afternoon of folding and cutting paper, a game of formats. However, it soon evolved into something else: a means to rethink how ethnography could be practiced and shared (Marcus 2013; Schneider & Wright 2010). I had been reflecting on the minimal and often overlooked…