Beyond explanation and description : What can poetic evocation contribute to the ethnography of a place’s social imaginaries ?

In his exploration of the dwelling, Bachelard (1957) illustrated the difficulty of describing what makes a place for those attached to it, arguing for the role of poetry in this endeavour. Social sciences have often failed to properly engage with such proposition. The emergence of poetic anthropology (Affergan 2020) and lyrical sociology (Abbott 2007) has begun to address this lapse yet are still to reach beyond the realm of the written word standardised within academia. This presentation will first discuss how poetic evocation, in contrast with positivist explanation and constructivist description, constitute a strategy of restitution that responds to the ineffability of experience (Béguin 2013) and embrace Castoriadis’ refusal to see imaginaries as simple « images of » (1975). Drawing from my doctoral research in architecture on the social imaginaries of urban fallows in Liège (Belgium) and Montreal (Quebec), I will then explore three narrative-descriptive experiments combining spoken and written words to objects, drawings and photographies, in collaboration with visual artist Olivier Patrisse and graphic designer Maxime Gillot. Those experiments will be shown in their ability and limits to provide socio-historical portraits of the communities attached to the investigated places. Those portraits attempt to embrace the plurality and emotionnality of the imaginary experience while adressing the social domination mecanism at hand in the architectural transformation. Evocation will be shown as an asset for the renewal of socio-historical research and the imaginary of a place of attachment as an abstract experience rendered ethnographically accessible through scholarship and arts collaborations.