Chapter 6. Ethnographic Letters and Postcards

Image: “May 1942 – Local residents in Rue Negrelli (now El-Gaish Street), Ismailia, Egypt (real photo postcard c.1930 – restored duo-tone version)” by aussiejeff, via flickr, under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

At a glance…

Correspondence from the field—whether formal or informal—serves as a mode of self-reflection, dialogic exchange, and methodological innovation. From Margaret Mead’s letters to interdisciplinary dialogues and speculative letters addressed to intellectual figures, these epistolary forms reveal the uncertainties, affective textures, and everyday details of fieldwork. Ethnographic postcards, in particular, offer a fragmented, multimodal, and emotionally resonant register for representing field experiences.

Learning objectives…

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to:

1. Describe the methodological and epistemological functions of letters and postcards in ethnographic research.
2. Explain how correspondence reveals internal dialogues, uncertainties, and reflexivity in ways that complement or challenge conventional fieldnotes and reports.
3. Identify the compositional features of letters and postcards—including second-person address, visual elements, and brevity—and explain how these shape interpretation and affect.
4. Critically evaluate how postcards invite new forms of engagement, ambiguity, and meaning-making in ethnographic practice.

In the chapter…

6.1. Introduction: Post deterritorialization
6.2. Receptive methods
6.3. Postcards for pedagogy and practice
6.4. To read and to write
6.5. Ethnographic postcards: A pedagogical experiment and exercise
6.6. Learning Activities
6.7. Showcase
6.8. Suggested readings
6.9. Other resources
6.10. Works cited

6.1. Introduction: Post deterritorialization

he critical role of correspondence and letters in ethnographic research is often underappreciated. Letter writing by anthropologists provides insights into the micropowers of fieldwork and offers closer examinations of methods and research processes. The open and fragmented state of letters initiates dialogue, maintains connection, and prompts response and self-reflection. The practice of writing letters from the field signifies a place, measures distance, and convenes both absence and presence; letters depend paradoxically on a sense of alienation and distance as well as intimacy and immediacy (Derrida 1987: 185). This register of writing—like any other—is a certain method unto itself; it requires the writer to anticipate an audience and distill, capture, describe, and translate from a new perspective accordingly. These habits of translation, critical self-reflection, and intersubjectivity are particularly important aspects of fieldwork and the discipline of anthropology at large. The process, reflection, and contemplation through composition inherent to the practice of writing letters provides a moment for meta-analysis and methodological examination. While immersed in another culture, or feeling out of place, letters re-establish a sense of direction and connection to the location, position, readership, and objectives of origin. This makes them valuable, as Margaret Mead describes, to balance between the ‘immersion’, ‘empathy’, and ‘self-awareness’ that fieldwork ‘depends on’ (Mead 1977: 38). Letters contain details of the culturally unfamiliar intended for a familiar audience, this requires a step of translation important to anthropology which conveys the estranged experience of the researcher and casts a new light on the familiar.  A hyperbolic example of this can be found in the 1979 poem by Craig Raine, ‘A Martian Sends a Postcard Home’ in which a Martian writes of life on Earth to an extraterrestrial audience. Read from the terra, this poem provides a new and estranged view of some earthly preoccupations which may seem mundane and familiar.

At night, when all the colours die,
they hide in pairs

and read about themselves —
in colour, with their eyelids shut.

(excerpt from Raine 1979)

Back to Table of Contents

6.2. Receptive methods

Letters written from the field that reveal the author’s internal dialogue provide clarity over the impressions, doubts, and discomforts that inevitably accompany fieldwork. In doing so they expose more of the process and struggle of interpretation and writing. Letters also open retrospective probing over the ethics of fieldwork. This discussion over generations of scholars is vital to the methodological and practical growth and health of the discipline. They also serve as reminders that authors have their own insecurities and hesitations, and that the final product is never ‘complete’–in a comprehensive sense–but inevitably admits many omissions and compromises (Scheld 2009).

Transparency over these details is integral to developing adaptive and responsive methods. In Mead’s reflections on letter-writing she confesses that “[w]hen I started to write these letters, I had no sense that I was discussing the making of a method, that in making what I was doing intelligible to myself and to my family and friends I was recording steps in the development of a new kind of holistic approach.” (Mead 1977: 35). Her letters, as she predicts, promised to be useful for future fieldwork as she narrated the work-in-progress as a whole. Anthropology, as Mead points out, is—and should be—continually ‘building on itself’; each generation of students must adapt to a “world that has changed” (Mead 1977: 38). And letters offer a particularly valuable correspondence between past, present, and future anthropologists, conveying challenges and intricacies of the research process. For Anthropology to remain adaptive and responsible it must be critical of its own methods and pasts, personal reflections through letters are an effective way of building upon and learning from the mistakes, blindspots, oversights, and limitations of those that came before. Letters that offer self-conscious internal dialogue leave their authors vulnerable to future examination; a willingness to admit this exposure demonstrates a continued commitment to the growth of the discipline. In this sense, letters extend the usefulness and ‘afterlife of ethnographic work’ (Dányi, Suchman, Watts 2021) beyond the conclusions of the final report for future examination of methods.

Evident correspondence and letters also offer an important counterpoint to the mythical figure of the ethnographer, sardonically dubbed “The Lone Anthropologist” by Renato Rosaldo and “The Great White Man” by Trinh T. Minh-ha (from Cerwonka & Malkki 2007, 5). This stereotype portrays the ethnographer as an isolated, authoritative figure who single-handedly produces knowledge in the field. However, the collaborative and dialogical nature of correspondence disrupts this myth by showcasing the interdependent and relational aspects of ethnographic research. The exchange between Cerwonka and Malkki in their co-authored text, ‘Improvising Theory: Process and Temporality in Ethnographic Fieldwork’ (2007), reveals how ethnographers rely on the intellectual and emotional support of colleagues to navigate the complexities of fieldwork. This dialogical process highlights the collective and situated nature of knowledge production, challenging the notion of the ethnographer as a solitary, omniscient observer. Instead, it presents ethnography as a collaborative endeavour shaped by continuous interaction and mutual influence, underscoring the importance of community and collegiality in the research process.

Back to Table of Contents

6.3. Postcards for pedagogy and practice

Beyond close methodological examination, letter-writing can be valuable as a pedagogical tool: an exercise in composition and creative writing, and active responsive reading. As Suzanne Scheld (2009) points out, by lending a proximity to the field, an informal and open-ended prose, as well as a sense of being addressed directly, letters incite a feeling of culpability, responsiveness, and agency in their readers in a way that is often absent in academic texts. Letters can serve as a way of connecting students to authors that otherwise might remain abstract intellectual figures. Scheld proposes that letter writing to anthropologists as a pedagogical strategy reminds students that they are valued and valuable by  affirming that they are “legitimate members of an academic community” (2009: 66). She also describes that letters from anthropologists about their own work and publishing process ‘underscore[s]’ writing as an imperfect, ‘on-going’ process that requires ‘patience’  (2009: 67).

In Improvising Theory: Process and Temporality in Ethnographic Fieldwork, Allaine Cerwonka and Liisa Malkki (2007) emphasize the value of an extended e-mail exchange between the authors—an at-the-time novice ethnographer and her mentor, Malkki—during Cerwonka’s fieldwork in Melbourne, Australia. In this sense, letters also serve as a valuable pedagogical tool between researchers and their supervisors. Indeed Mead wrote to Boas; and Malinowski requested that his student, Camila Wedgwood, write to him. Cerwonka’s exchanges with Malkki provide a platform for their thoughts, emotions, and methodological choices. Their correspondence reveals many anxieties and uncertainties inherent in fieldwork, such as her concerns about the appropriateness of her field sites and the ethical dilemmas she faces. This reflexive process also helps clarify the researcher’s positionality and the impact of their presence in the field. Their correspondence documents the research process, emotional experiences, and intellectual developments in real-time and offers a unique perspective on the ethnographic method. Malkki subsequently used the letters to teach ethnographic methods, demonstrating the challenges and decisions faced by fieldworkers. This approach provides students with a practical understanding of ethnographic research that goes beyond theoretical instruction, emphasizing the dynamic and improvisational nature of fieldwork.

Moreover, letters facilitate an ongoing dialogue that bridges disciplinary boundaries. In Cerwonka and Malkki’s case, their interdisciplinary correspondence between anthropology and political science enriched their respective approaches and highlighted the benefits of integrating multiple perspectives in ethnographic research. This dialogue underscores the collaborative nature of knowledge production and the value of diverse academic influences in shaping robust ethnographic insights.

In another interdisciplinary dialogue, Charles Briggs (2014) writes a letter to write to Sigmund Freud, contextualizing his ethnographic experience in the Delta Amacuro rainforest of Venezuela through the lens of psychoanalytic interpretations of mourning. By addressing Freud directly, Briggs takes the act of putting authors in conversations more literally; this playful tactic is useful to situate different perspectives and conceptual developments, imagine how they might respond to one another, and lend transparency over his process of reading observations through a Freudian interpretation. The letter—seemingly expectant of a response—provides many points of analysis couched in a speculative, open-ended prose. It also occasions Briggs to reveal his rethinking of the role of anthropology—as ‘the work of mourning’, he proposes—highlighting some of the strengths of both interdisciplinary dialogue and meta-reflection.

Back to Table of Contents

6.4. To read and to write

Letters generally open with a declaration of place and time to situate the author. This act initiates a self-conscious examination, which, as Margaret Mead affirms, inevitably prompts reflection on the feeling of being ‘observed back’ (1977).  While Mead was referring to being ‘observed back’ by one’s readership, letters may also provide a moment to reflect on the feeling of being ‘observed back’ by one’s interlocutors and company in the field. The form of the letter also invites close detailed descriptions of one’s settings, impressions. Often, this entails engaging multiple senses to suspend the reader temporarily in the place of the writer. The impulse to write a letter arises in part from the desire to affirm one’s place and presence and maintain a kind of intellectual and emotional proximity to the reader(s); they therefore often include highly descriptive accounts, the relevance and analytical significance of which may not be necessarily or immediately clear. This affirmation, projection, and proximity and are nonetheless significant, however, particularly for developing dexterous and skillful writing. Each of these dimensions to letters draw on compositional techniques that are important for writing ethnographic accounts, writing letters thereby incidentally strengthen overall writing prose.

The succinct form of letters, sometimes explicitly imposed by the setting in which they are written—as is the case for Mead here, “It’s no use, dear friends, I just can’t write you a nice long descriptive letter on this ship, it rolls too much. To summarize:…” (1977, 65)—constrain content. Consequently, they require concise writing and leave the reader wondering what was left out (Scheld 2009). This incites distinct forms of both reading and writing—that which is speculative, open-ended, and partial. Usually postcards also include a photo, drawing, map, or graphic which symbolically captures some fact about the whereabouts or context of the writer (Danyi, Suchman, Watts 2021). In this sense, postcards require pause, they capture disparate sites, punctuate work, represent spans of time and space, and offer a backdrop to political cultural contexts (ibid.). This feature also opens a kind of ‘third meaning’ (Barthes, from Taussig 2011) from the interplay between the content, form, and visual element; this dynamic inevitably inspires different composition; either the writer has to explain the visual or else they know that it’s there and that their composition will be interpreted, on some level, ‘beside’ it.

Postcards are also unique in that they are addressed in the second person. This prose requires the author to consider and account for their audience’s reception, and invites the reader to take part in the interpretive process. This form of writing departs from the conventions of the objective third person that characterizes most academic work, as well as the intensely reflexive sometimes confined nature of first person found in autoethnographic accounts, to instead open more of a dialectic of interpretation and speculation. By implicating the readers in both the writing and interpretation, postcards prove to be a dynamic register. As Allan Bass points out in the introductory glossary of Derrida’s ‘The Post Card’, ‘poste’ has etymological resonances in ‘position’ ‘postilion’ ‘relay’ and ‘imposter’; while the root ‘post’ evokes a ‘halt’ it also implies an immediate sending or conveying; notably, Derrida plays with—or “exploits”—these multiple meanings (1987, xxvi). This semantic variability illustrate the dialogic, speculative, paradoxical, and playful nature of letter-writing.

Because letters consist of descriptions, settings, and impressions intended for a mixed audience–that is both intimate and public–they require a kind of meta-perspective and flexibility that proves to be a valuable compositional and conceptual device. Calling on a range of prose promises to improve the flexibility of the writer. And while they might be direct, they are often directionless, suspending anticipatory schemas or preemptive understandings and instead demanding active and responsive ‘good’ reading (Derrida 1987).

Back to Table of Contents

6.5. Ethnographic postcards: A pedagogical experiment and exercise

Ethnographic postcards, sent from the field, present a unique method for capturing and disseminating research insights. This showcase explores an assignment within an Urban Ethnographic Field School course at the University of British Columbia, where students were tasked with writing a series of postcards from the field. This innovative approach enriched students’ comprehension and engagement with their fieldwork (see a few examples of student postcards here). By integrating contemporary ethnographic practices and theoretical frameworks, this assignment exemplifies a practical application of multimodal ethnographic methods.

In designing this activity, I considered how employing ethnographic postcards in anthropological fieldwork offers a distinctive amalgamation of personal reflection and public discourse. Inspired by Jacques Derrida’s (1987) notion of the postcard’s paradoxical nature—both intimate and exposed, private and public—in designing the activity, I considered how this method enables students to creatively capture and convey their field experiences through a medium characterized by fragmentation. Derrida’s “envois” demonstrates the potential of this communication mode, where the text is non-linear, disjointed, and follows a piecemeal structure. Postcards, especially those written by fieldworkers from various sites, emerge as a series of discontinuous, episodic pieces, reflecting a fragmented mode of representation. This representation mode disrupts traditional narrative expectations, fostering creativity to document aspects of field experience often omitted in other modes of ethnographic representation. Fragmentation often leads to juxtaposition and comparison. Dányi, Suchman, and Watts (2021) employed ethnographic postcards to bridge disconnected field sites, illustrating how juxtaposition and comparison can yield new insights.

The potential for creativity through disruption and juxtaposition is further amplified by the playful nature of postcards, which engage the reader in the interpretive process. The fragmented, open-ended nature of the text, sometimes accompanied by drawings, necessitates active reader participation to piece together meanings and connections, transforming reading into a playful, interactive experience. This experience produces a proliferation of meanings. This multiplicity underscores that playful postcard fragments can generate a vast array of readings, none of which are definitive or authoritative.

If fieldnotes offer a form of liminality—between experience and final representation—postcards from the field embody another form of in-betweenness: neither public nor private, both intimate and exposed. They thus provide an opportunity for students to explore and experiment with ethnographic writing. The public and uncontrollable nature of written communication is epitomized in postcards, allowing students to reflect on the idea that once a text is written, its meaning is no longer under the author’s control.

In designing the activity, the idea of meaning in a constant state of flux is another aspect that I prompted students to explore. Postcards, fragmented and brief, often reference people, events, and emotions that are not fully present within the text, requiring the reader to piece together meaning from both the said and the unsaid. Moreover, the sender’s physical absence in postcards emphasizes how the message’s meaning depends on the reader’s interpretation, influenced by what is absent as much as by what is present. In this way, students can reflect on how meaning is never fully present or absent but is always in flux, constructed through the interplay of what is communicated and what is omitted.

The theme of absence and presence leads students to another significant aspect of the postcard medium that I considered in designing and including this active learning activity. Postcards convey a sense of intimacy between the sender and the recipient, paradoxically paired with physical distance. This highlights how feelings are experienced through absence as much as presence. It is therefore no surprise that “one of history’s great love affairs, that of Abelard and Heloise, was conducted mostly by letter” (Peters, 2016:265). The written words on postcards attempt to bridge the gap created by physical separation. Michael Jackson (2010) reflects on this separation experienced in the traditionally distant field to explore the emotional and relational aspects of fieldwork. Jackson emphasizes integrating emotions, senses, and subjective experiences into ethnographic research, arguing that such integration fosters a deeper understanding of the complexities and nuances of human interactions and cultural contexts. The postcard medium provides an opportunity for students to engage with and capture some of these emotions, thus enriching their ethnographic practice. Moreover, inspired by Andrea Gaspar’s experimental provocation to explore what love and ethnography have in common by writing epistemic love letters, students can experiment with themes of love for the field, ethnography, or the discipline of anthropology in their postcards.

The assignment of writing ethnographic postcards can therefore serve as a powerful pedagogical tool, fostering a deeper engagement with the field and enhancing students’ ethnographic practice. By embracing the fragmented, playful, and multimodal nature of postcards, students can explore the complexities of meaning-making, the interplay of absence and presence, and the emotional dimensions of fieldwork. This method not only enriches their understanding of ethnography but also encourages a more critical, creative, and accessible approach to documenting and sharing their experiences. This multimodal technique can also make academic work more collaborative, self-critical, and accessible. These techniques challenge conventional representations and strive to democratize knowledge production. We dedicated a class meeting to reflect on and discuss the experience of writing the ethnographic postcards.

The Assignment

he assignment invites students to explore the potential of postcards in capturing field experiences by writing a series of ethnographic postcards. Students are encouraged to reflect on various aspects of their fieldwork, including significant encounters, relational dynamics, embodied experiences, and the unsaid or unconscious elements of their interactions. The postcards, addressed to specific individuals, groups, or objects, serve as a medium for expressing thoughts, emotions, challenges, and discoveries, thereby fostering a deeper engagement with their research.

By integrating visual elements and concise narratives, students can creatively document their journey and gain insights into the emotional and relational dimensions of ethnographic practice. This exercise aims to enrich students’ understanding of the fieldwork process, emphasizing the interplay of absence and presence and the fluid nature of meaning-making in ethnographic research.

---

6.6. Learning activities

Learning by doing: Four writing exercise prompts

1. Write to your future self in anticipation of doing fieldwork. What is it like, what kind of challenges – personal, intellectual, professional, or logistical – do you foresee?
2. Write about a time when you felt like an imposter, not necessarily conducting any kind of field work, just at a time when you felt out of place, who would you write to and why? What would you say, how would you situate yourself to your reader? Who are you being watched by? Afterwards, reflect on this process. How did your understanding of the context change in your writing it up?
3. Write to an anthropologist you admire with questions specifically about their research process – from fieldwork to interpretation or writing. Take an anecdote or instance from their written ethnography and inquire about things that you imagine to have been omitted in this final report.
4. Pretend you are an anthropologist with a controversial fieldwork experience (this can be a ‘real’ controversy ie. HTS, Chagnon.. or a hypothetical, either way provide description) imagine the doubts, insecurities, mistakes they are contending with and how they might convey those to a loved one.

Back to Table of Contents

---

6.7. Showcase

Below you can find some of the postcards created as part of an experimental writing exercise described in section 6.5.

Back to Table of Contents

---

6.8. Suggested readings

Pandian, A. & McLean, S. (2017). Crumpled Paper Boat: Experiments in Ethnographic Writing. Duke University Press

This volume consists of a series of essays that span various experimental writing techniques in anthropology and the genre of ethnographies from poetry, fiction, memoir, and cinema. The text is dedicated to the ‘means of conveyance’ and the act and processes of writing itself. The authors explore themes of reflection, prose and poetry, distance, representation, subjectivity, and literary techniques. In their courageous and wide-ranging accounts they also detail numerous ethnographic sites. And importantly, they engage with broader methodological debates in the discipline and discuss the genre of ethnography and the role of anthropology.

Taussig, M. Postcards for Mia. MIT Press. 2023

Postcards for Mia is Taussig’s playful collection of drawings, stories, and letters sent to his granddaughter from his travels. This text documents Taussig’s many vibrant accounts and observations as well as his explorations of themes of magic and myth in particular. It is a testament to Taussig’s creative eye and prose. This work invites a kind of movement between what Taussig locates as the child and adult brain, drawing in one’s imagination and wonder.

Modan, G. (2016). Writing the Relationship: Ethnographer-Informant Interactions in the New Media Era. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 26(1), 98–107. 

This article discusses channels of communication in ethnographic practice, in particular the impact of new media forms on correspondence patterns between researchers and informants. In the author’s words: “the effect of new communications media on relationships between ethnographers and members of the communities they study.”

Gugganig, M., & Schor, S. (2020). Multimodal Ethnography in/of/as Postcards. American Anthropologist, 122(3), 691–697.

This article highlights postcards as a valuable medium and object of study, drawing on the advantages of multimodal presentations more broadly. They offer a history of postcard forms, and discuss the potential they offer to research and experimental writing techniques.

Sanjek, R. (1990). Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 

This volume details unique forms of writing in the field by contributing Anthropologists as well as seminal figures in the field. They explore the practice of taking fieldnotes in depth, keeping journals, using headnotes, and the practice of writing letters and examine both the content and effects of such documents. In drawing attention to ‘the secret life of fieldnotes’ – in their various forms – the authors shed light on the many dimensions and tails of text upon which final accounts emerge and rely on.

Back to Table of Contents

6.9. Other resources

• Notes on a Postcard. from Alegra lab
• Michael Taussig’s Postcards. from The MIT Press Reader.
• Special Section on Multimodal Postcards. from American Anthropologist.

Back to Table of Contents

6.10. Works cited

• Bass, Alan. 1987. “Translator’s Introduction: L before K. Glossary.” In The Post Card, by Jacques Derrida. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Briggs, Charles L. 2014. “Dear Dr. Freud.” Cultural Anthropology 29 (2): 312–343.
• Cerwonka, Allaine, and Liisa H. Malkki. 2007. Improvising Theory: Process and Temporality in Ethnographic Fieldwork. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Dányi, Endre, Lucy Suchman, and Laura Watts. 2021. “Relocating Innovation: Postcards from Three Edges.” In Experimenting with Ethnography: A Companion to Analysis, edited by Andrea Ballestero and Brit Ross Winthereik. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478013211-008.
• Derrida, Jacques. 1987. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Mead, Margaret. 1977. Letters from the Field 1925–1975. New York: Harper & Row.
• Raine, Craig. 1979. “A Martian Sends a Postcard Home.” Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Scheld, Suzanne. 2009. “Letter Writing and Learning in Anthropology.” The Journal of Effective Teaching 9 (3): 59–69.
• Taussig, Michael. 2011. I Swear I Saw This: Drawings in Fieldwork Notebooks, Namely My Own. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Back to Table of Contents