“The post card is neither private nor public.”
Derrida, 1987:185
Ethnographic Postcards: A Premise
Jacques Derrida, by Pablo Secca (source)
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.
Ethnographic Postcards: The Assignment
You can find a few examples of student response to this experiment here.