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

In her 2015 paper, Towards a Politics of Whimsy: Yam Bombing in the City, Joanna Mann argues for whimsy’s capacity to prompt change. Impossible to grasp, always in excess, always in-between, whimsy, she argues, is “intrinsically joyous” (p. 65), a way of becoming in the world that renders the familiar, the quotidian, indeterminate, and mysterious and that calls the body into action. “Despite, or perhaps because of, its out-of-placeness”, Mann writes, “whimsy can function as a powerful political force that is able to … foster new ethical spaces and modes of political action” (p. 65).