Creative writing and ethnography: Four explorations

Ethnographies are more than texts, but ethnography and writing have a special relationship. Jotted down observations, field notes, diaries, and interview transcripts all contribute to the making of ethnographic knowledge (see eg. Schindler and Schäfer 2021). As ethnography also has a rich history of ex- perimenting with different genres when presenting research results (see eg. Clifford & Marcus 1986; Visweswaran 1994; Behar & Gordon 1995; Geertz 1998; Zenker & Kumoll 2010), the point of this thematic issue of Scriptum was to ex- plore connections between creative writing and ethnography. As guest editor, and a creative writing researcher trained as an ethnographically oriented folklorist, I was expecting the call for papers to lure in texts on field notes or fieldwork dia- ries, autoethnographical studies of writing processes, a lot of reflexivity, and some experiments into the deep end (or, hope- fully even something baroque, see Marcus 2007).