What’s (in) a Vignette? History, Functions, and Development of an Elusive Ethnographic Sub-genre

Abstract

Despite their great diversity, most anthropologists would agree that they recognise a vignette when they see one. What, then, is a vignette? By untreading etymological and historical origins of the vignette in anthropology, we discuss its development since it first entered ethnographic texts. We argue that vignettes were long treated as tokens of effeminate textual embellishment, therefore missing systematic methodological attention. We then show how recently, the affective turn boosted the epistemological significance of vignettes by focusing on how writing not only seeks to transport lived affects from the field onto paper, but how it aims to evoke such affects in the reader. In a final step, we offer a set of quality criteria for the ethnographic vignette. Discussing place and style, its relation to fiction and retrospection as well as trends towards its textual independency, we propose how to render this lucid sub-genre of ethnographic writing epistemologically uniquely valuable.