Whimsy, ethnographic writing and the everyday: Possibilities, politics, poetics

The whimsical interrupts our focus on the banal, the practical, the instrumental. It is the thing out of place: a rose on the pavement, a magnolia inexplicably in full bloom in the winter grey, a bright red velvet coat, a downpour as you’re getting out of the car without an umbrella; art slid under a door to say ‘thank you’. In this chapter, we think, write and play with notions of whimsy, drawing into our scrutiny and inquiry reflections on how whimsy intersects our everyday living and working, and how it applies to our ethnographic writing. Engaging with prose and poetic writing that came to us both before and after Covid-19, we consider how we each have been living through the pandemic, and how whimsy offers a way to experience as well as to write. We argue that whimsy is both relational and contextual, as well as political, but that its power lies in the aesthetic and the indirect. Whimsy can be disruptive and power-ful but it is a power that asserts itself gently, slowly, even arbitrarily.