Memory narrations as a source for historical ethnography and the sensorial-affective experience of migration

Studying an entire historical migration sensorium using a vast body of oral histories is a new and ground-breaking twist in ethnographic research. This chapter defines historical ethnography as a tool for historical explanation drawing from the traces of the past, while considering how the relationship between the past and these traces is mediated through oral histories as documents and how the description of experience in the first person reflexively engages the historian-ethnographer’s position. It draws on and combines the methodological imperatives of history (documentation) and ethnography (reflexivity). The chapter reflects on the methodology for reading life histories combining a macro- (across the corpus) with micro-analytic approaches (of case studies) in order to demonstrate their complementarity and value in historical ethnography. The critical standpoints for the political analysis of culture and the sentiments around the migration experience of the past and in the current formations of citizenship rely on the ability to address such construction and politics of the archives

Cognitive psychology · Cognitive science · Ethnography · Sociology · Anthropology · Anthropology: Ethics, History, Culture · Balkan and Eastern European Studies · History · Indigenous Cultures and History · Psychology

• Migration and the senses

  Open Access•Nicholas Bascuñan-Wiley•Sociology Compass•2021

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