Embroidering an ethnography: on how collective embroidery affects ethnographic intimacy

Abstract

The article reflects on two ethnographic experiences that examine collective embroidery initiatives in an attempt to understand what this common textile making entails and ask how they themselves become ethnographies in accompanying these spaces of collective embroidery. We focus on two movements. On the one hand, we refer to what collective embroidery produces: gender identities that contribute to (re) configurations, intimacies, healing spaces, and the expression of what is constructed by an affective and gendered dimension that leads to embroidering with others. On the other hand, we describe how what collective embroidery produces affects the ethnographic writing process. We refer here to the ways in which embroidery with others weaves ethnography itself.