ABSTRACT

In this epilogue, I review the contributions to this volume for their collective insights regarding ethnographic method and theory. After exploring the polysemy of “twist,” I provide four alternative themes for linking these chapters. The first, emergence, foregrounds how ethnographic analysis cannot be predicted in advance because it appears through embodied participation in fieldsites. The second, memory, originates in the reality that ethnography is always historical, and that history appears as simultaneously individual and social. The third, representation, links questions of the senses and affect to questions of epistemology and the ethics of ethnographic practice. The fourth, authority, involves power, inequality, and ethnographic voice. I link these themes to Bronislaw Malinowski’s discussion of blunders in fieldwork, and to my own work in digital anthropology and queer anthropology. Overall, these themes provide a point of departure from which to address how the work presented in this book provides insights that can lead to productive new “twists” for ethnography itself.