In Alive in the Writing, Kirin Narayan (2012) sets out to explain how ethnographers could stand to benefit from employing the stylistic tools of creative prose. The techniques of those who write novels and narrative non-fiction, she argues, offer ethnographers a way to give a sense of moments and things that may in their fullness elude capture in field notes or photographs – ‘A scene depicting a person's vulnerability stranded within a messily unfurling story’ she writes ‘can communicate more about that person than a summary that tidily wraps up how things turned out’ (65).

Geertz (1973) would likely have called this thick description, helpfully pointing out that through such methods one might distinguish even between a wink and a twitch. Towards the end of his life, he was happy to go on record and announce that, ‘I don't do systems’ (Micheelsen, 2002). From the 1970s he was noted for his distinctive way of writing – an anthropologist ‘who recoils at typologies, grand theories, and universal generalisations’ (Shweder and Good, 2005, 1). Rather, he argued for the selection and presentation of vivid fragments over the abstract description of societies in their totality (Pollock, 2015, 5). Reflecting on his four decades of practising the approach, he described anthropologists as working with ‘swirls, confluxions, and inconstant connections’, and their final product as ‘pieced-together patternings after the fact’ (Geertz, 1995, 2).