The Gradual Gaze: Drawing as a Practice of Ethnographic Description

SUMMARY this article explores the act of ethnographic drawing and its potential. I introduce a concept of gaze that I call “the gradual gaze.” I suggest that drawing, which can transform the gaze into the gradual gaze, is a creative and heuristic way of attentive thinking and a process involving both unlearning and learning. The mimetic quality of drawing strengthens the fieldworker’s eye and entails a search for connectedness with the environment and people. The fieldworker’s domain of experience offers insight for understanding the mimetic practice in drawing. However, this mimetic practice goes beyond duality, imitation, and representation. This article explores the triangular relationship between the fieldworker, the subject drawn, and the drawing. [drawing, ethnography, slowing down, mimesis, epistemology] no doubt, drawing is represented, experienced, and ex- perimented with a compulsion, like the effect of an