The moment ethnography becomes past: De-temporalising ethnographic nostalgia

In this chapter, I use the analytical notion of ‘ethnographic nostalgia’ to make visible some of the time distortions effected on ethnography by what is written before. I define ethnographic nostalgia as a desire to locate those we study within an ethnographic field, our longing and aspiration to capture the ethnographic present as this has been previously described by a particular academic literature. Ethnographic nostalgia captures the structuring effect of previous ethnographic knowledge on ethnographic production in the present: our inclination to see the people we study through the lens of the books we have read about them; or the degree to which our choice of research topics (and our privileging of certain parts of social reality as an object of study) is structured by our respective fields.