ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the contents and character of children's drawing and speech. It addresses drawing as the tangible expression of imaginary processes in which links between disparate entities are established and syncretic forms are brought to life into a single representative space; as exemplified in the images below by three-year-old Bridget and eight-year-old Simon. The chapter focuses on the act of imagining/drawing as a dynamic activity that allows the children to reach the faraway chotac yacno, 'nonindigenous places', and thereby reveals their being impelled towards them. Ethnography of the imagination poses a series of thorny epistemological and methodological problems, not least the difficulty of defining what the imagination is and the impossibility of directly accessing another person's imaginative activity. The imagination, as Vincent Crapanzano suggests, constitutes 'an important dimension of human experience' and thus requires ethnographic consideration but problematically resists and even 'disappears with articulation', making it notoriously difficult to research and represent.
