The Ethnographer as Conceptual Persona: On the Many Shopping Centres

There is a long tradition of ethnographic work that is premised upon the reflexive acknowledgement that the ethnographer changes, grows, and develops as they learn about and experience the field, enabling them to form new connections, associations, and relations to the actors within it. Yet the figure of the ethnographer, imbued with coherency and author(ity), means that there is always an assumed fixity and stability to the field, as it is observed by a subject that is understood to be reflexively aware of its own becomings and yet still an unchanging entity that observes the fieldsite. In this chapter, we present an ethnographic account of a shopping centre as experienced by various ‘conceptual personae’. Drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari (1994), we will develop an account of how conceptual personae make available different shopping centres, by allowing new connections and disconnections, conjunctions and disjunctions, associations and dissociations, giving rise to their own concepts and imminently produced ways of knowing. We will explore the shopping centres of the disembodied, the insomniac, and the paramnesiac, each of which offers different ways of noticing a shopping centre and the capitalist milieu of which it is a part.