Ethnographies: In the kitchen of ‘more than textual’ ethnography

Throughout the last century, ethnography has come to stand as anthropology’s main empirical approach. Over this period, ethnography has developed into a particular mode of enquiry, partaking in and learning from the worlds and lives of people and other beings. This chapter aims to explore the challenges and possibilities of ‘more-­ than-­ textual’ approaches, paying particular attention to our own collaborative experiments as well as those of others who inspired us or with whom we have been in conversation. In reflecting about their challenges, we aim to foreground the ‘adventure of relevance’ that contemporary explorations in jointly crafting research objects and conditions of contemporary anthropological enquiry might entail. We will discuss how contemporary ethnographic works have not simply expanded beyond the graphic but have affected our approaches and our objects of study, also refiguring how and what we take the object of anthropology to be, well beyond ethnos. Indeed, going beyond functionalist, structuralist or cultural–interpretivist approaches, some colleagues have started foregrounding multi-­ species or more-­ than-­ human or environmental concerns, engaging with hard-­to-­grasp atmospheric phenomena. What we find so intriguing about these experimental openings of the ‘more-­ than-­ textual’ is that they force us to consider the following questions: What is ethnography today? And, even more importantly, what could it become?