Ashley Carse
T he ethnographer, we are often told, is a data collection instrument who learns through gradual attunement to a social world-by participating, observing, interviewing, and writing fieldnotes.But what does the ethnographer do when their research engages with materials, processes, and scales only partially accessible to or comprehensible by means of the established toolbox?This is a conundrum for what we might call elemental ethnography: a suite of methods and mode of writing concerned with how society shapes and is shaped by the classic elements (earth, fire, water, air) or suffused with modern substances like chemicals and plastics. 1This collection of ethnographic work on sand and sediment arrives amid growing interest in the elements-especially earth-in the environmental humanities and social sciences. 2By "reconsidering Geos and Anthropos together," Zeynep Oguz writes, it becomes possible to rethink "what the geological and the human entail simultaneously." 3Geosocial theory offers a conceptual vocabulary to reimagine how humans have modified the earth in ways that reverberate back through culture and politics, opening exciting lines of inquiry. 4Less clear is what this means for the aspiring elemental ethnographer in practice.