Resonant Ethnography: Understanding the World Through Writing

This bookexplores what it means--and what it takes--to write ethnographic texts that resonate with both fieldwork and readers.It approaches writing as a form of embodied thinking and encourages conceptual openness and a willingness to experiment. Drawing on exemplary texts and the authors’ experiences as teachers and writers, it explores the importance of attentiveness, imagination, and ethical engagement. Grounded in anthropology and phenomenology, and inspired by literature, it weaves conceptual reflection with practical guidance and literary sensibility. Throughout the book, the authors show how ambiguity, affect, and imagination can foster understanding. Each chapter focuses on a key aspect of the writing process, exploring fundamentals such as time, voice, argument, and composition. More than just a guide to writing, Resonant Ethnography is an invitation to think, feel, and imagine through writing, and to appreciate what ethnography can be in the world today.

Helle Bundgaard is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. She has conducted fieldwork in India and Denmark, and her teaching and writing focus on literary ethnographic writing as a form of inquiry and imaginative expression. She is the author of several books, including textbooks and the literary ethnography Painting Stories: Lives and Legacies from an Indian Crafts Village (2021). One of her short stories received the Society for Humanistic Anthropology’s Ethnographic Fiction and Creative Nonfiction Writing Award, (AAA).

Anne Line Dalsgård is a professor in the Department of Anthropology at Aarhus University, Denmark. She has conducted fieldwork in Brazil and Denmark. She has co-edited several volumes and published the monography Matters of Life and Longing: Female sterilisation in Northeast Brazil (2004), which received an Honorable Mention from the Eileen Basker Prize committee of the Society for Medical Anthropology (AAA). Throughout her career as an anthropologist, she has had an interest in ethnographic writing as a medium for embodied critical thinking.