A playful ethnography: laying the cards on the table of writing the field

This short article revisits insights generated through a classroom exercise designed as a methodological device for exploring key aspects of ethnographic observation and fieldnote writing. Centred on a modified card game, the activity assigned distinct roles to players with divergent instructions, to observers focusing on different dynamics, and to a group tasked with observing the observers, enabling multiple perspectives on the same social interaction. The resulting fieldnotes, composed by two student groups 1 year apart, revealed variation in what was noticed (and what was not) about bodies in the field, how these observations were described, and how meaning was tentatively constructed across observers. Drawing on this experience, the article argues that brief, structured simulations can render visible the embodied nature of ethnographic description. The exercise sheds light on the challenges and choices inherent in ethnographic practice, offering insight into the entanglement of observation and recording in producing ethnographic accounts.