ABSTRACT
In following some international migrants in the city of São Paulo, inarticulate moments of hesitation, uncertainty, or silence often punctuated their trajectories. These transient and subtle instances revealed that in the context of global mobility, people's experience of life is sometimes indeterminate and opaque. In this chapter, I argue that attention to these moments of inarticulacy in the company of my interlocutors demands a different ethnographic attitude, one where the ethnographer has to abandon the usual toolkit of scientific disclosure and certainty to develop an empathic approach. This approach provides space for what is beyond words and becomes a considerate attendance to the presence of others in the world. To ethnographically do justice to the complexity and density of the lives I followed in São Paulo, I develop here an approach in which empathy and imagination become key ethnographic operations. The approach is crafted as a ‘poetics of resonance’, an aesthetic practice converting lived experience into written expression in a way that imagination is understood to offer a sense of the richness of exploring someone's inarticulate experiences. As a practice, this ‘poetics of resonance’ makes visible certain episodes in a person's life that, through written imaginative pieces, may resonate in the reader some particular significance of minute speechless instants. Three moments from migrants of different countries of origin – South Korea, Paraguay, and Peru – are rendered here as experiments in empathic and aesthetic attendance.
