Encounters prompt unexpected responses and improvised ac- tions, as well as long-term negotiations with unforeseen outcomes, including both violence and love. Ethnographies of encounter focus on the cross-cultural and relational dynamics of these processes. They highlight how meanings, identities, objects, and subjectivities emerge through unequal relationships involving people and things that may at first glance be understood as distinct.
For the sake of clear examples, we have selected from this body of work studies that (a) explicitly and consistently move between the voices and perspectives of members of different groups of people or things and (b) demonstrate how new cultural meanings and worlds emerge through their encounter. Rather than taking capitalism, space and place, and humanness as the frameworks that contextualize relations of encounter, the ethnographies discussed below demonstrate how encounter is the means by which these categories emerge.
If encounter ethnographies of capitalism theorize the systematicity of capitalist relations by fo- cusing on the cross-cultural relationships through which they emerge, other ethnographies of encounter denaturalize space and place by examining the engagements across difference that constitute these categories. Such ethnographies build on historical studies that explore how rela- tionships between colonizers and those colonized created new geographies, such as contact zones (Pratt1992),borderlands(Anzaldu a1987),spacesofdeath(Taussig1987),thenationalgeobody (Winichakul 1994), diasporic routes (Brown 2005; Gilroy 1987, 1993), and oceanic worlds (Ho 2006). Rejecting the notion that colonial powers single-handedly dictated spatial relationships, ear- lier studies demonstrated the intimate and tense negotiations through which colonial worlds took shape. Ethnographies of encounter build on these studies to focus on place as “meeting place”: “ar- ticulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings”
