“This is what we’ve been doing for a while.”
Anton Novenanto
08 April 2021
Published: 13 May 2021
Image by Anton Novenanto.
For Anton Novenanto’s work in disaster studies, he found that he couldn’t simply visit his research site over one extended trip and construct an ethnography. The wake of a disaster requires a different kind of temporal sensibility. You can’t just go one time, because there are different waves of victimhood. Throughout his dissertation research, each time he returned he found new types of victims with new types of stories. Patchwork Ethnography acknowledges this. He had already been doing this kind of “tailoring” work, what he understood as “multifaceted fieldwork,” collecting and combining the stories of his interlocutors over time to see different connections.
He’s continued this work of ethnographic tailoring through a recent collaborative project on Covid-19 in Indonesia. They’ve modified a patchwork-like approach to use collaboratively in a sociology department, patching together stories from marginalized groups across the country often further marginalized by the pandemic. They tailor these texts to craft a larger narrative to accompany the numbers circulating about the pandemic.
Anton Novenanto is a Lecturer at the University of Brawijaya. nino[at]ub.ac.id
See his translation of the Patchwork Ethnography Manifesto into Indonesian.