Living with Oil Palm: Incorporating Ethnographic Sensibilities in Critical Resource Geography
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.22380/2539472X.3015Keywords:
ethographic sensibilty, resource geography, extractivism, critical geographyAbstract
Ethnography offers a critical and potentially transformative intervention in the politics of knowledge-making in resource geography. This article proposes a methodological and analytical framework for an ethnography of resources in extractive contexts that attends to their spatial politics. It develops the concept of ethnographic sensibilities and argues that this constitutes a mode of engagement with people, place, and knowledge creation that can add theoretical and epistemological nuance to critical resource geographies. Based on the author’s research on oil palm in the Colombian Caribbean, it suggests three methodological/analytical elements for incorporating ethnographic sensibilities into resource geography: a sensitive openness to ethnographic grounds; an embodied exposure to the materiality of extractive space; and a reflective, multi-level writing practice. From these, it develops an analysis of the spaces of resource extraction and the spaces of community life, revealing their entanglements and overlaps.
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