Encounter

Anthropologists often talk about ‘encounters,’ but what do they actually mean? This term—‘encounter’—shows up everywhere across ethnographic writing and practice, but is itself rarely defined or discussed. ‘Ethnographies of encounters,’ too, are increasingly common, but are rarely treated as a distinct type of ethnography. In this short essay, I recommend approaching the concept of encountering more consciously, but also defining it in a relatively basic and expansive way. Encounters across difference are open-ended: they can lead to collaboration, conflict, negotiation or an awkward disconnect, to name a few. Encounters are many-sided: much beyond a single studied group of people, beyond the ethnographer’s home society, and more than human. Assuming that encounters are very open-ended and many-sided brings new methodological and ethical challenges. Yet, it helps expand our attention and care in fieldwork and analysis, while postponing our judgements. Keywords: ethnographies of encounter, alterity, relationality, world-making, definitions This essay belongs to the essay series “The Anthropologist’s Toolkit: Reflections on ethnographic methodology”. In this series, authors peer into the anthropologist’s toolkit to reflect on what ethnographic methodology constitutes in all its multimodal forms.