Learning to fly: a story tale for my three years old son. An unconventional ethnographic restitution on a creative ethnography on body suspensions

A very small number of scholars have payed attention to contemporary body suspensions in Western societies: the little available bibliography is mainly constituted by psychological researches questioning the mental wellbeing of practitioners. This paper is based on the doctoral research ‘Learning to fly. A trans-spatial ethnography on body suspensions in Europe’, in course of development at the Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Lisbon. The project aims to investigate meanings associated with suspensions, as well as the flow of materials, ideas, and people circulating in Europe during festivals and private events. The traditional methodology soon revealed its limits due to the bodily and intense sensory character of the experience, and so new strategies of self-narration have been proposed as experiment, involving the artistic taste of participants and ethnographer’s contribution with suggestions and questions