ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author focuses on five ways in which non-representational theoretical ideas can inform ethnographic writing. He illustrates the qualities, such as vitality, performativity, corporeality, sensuality, and mobility, with a few examples from the writing of some authors he admires. Vitalist approaches argue that there is an exceptional quality to life: a certain impetuous ardor possessed by both inanimate and animate beings which makes life unexplainable by deterministic laws of prediction. Being sensitive to the quality of performativity means tuning in to the eventness of the world, taking a witness stance to the unfolding of situated action, and being open to the unsettling co-presence of bodies affecting each other in time–space. The sensuality of non-representational ethnographies depends on a re-awakened scholarly body. Mobile ethnographies have thus begun to make sense of the itinerant and kinaesthetic aspects of fieldwork and to portray ethnographic work as happening on the move.
