Introduction Nocturnal Ethnographies: Aesthetics and Imaginaries of the Night

The idea of publishing a special issue of Ethnologies around the theme of “nocturnal ethnographies” came as a need to answer some of the questions that arose while we were undertaking ethnographic fieldwork on the nocturnal hours in Cuba (Boudreault-Fournier and Diamanti 2018; Diamanti and Boudreault-Fournier 2021). As we were engaging with the night through our bodies, sound recorder and camera, we came to ask ourselves a series of questions which are reflected in this issue: How do ethnographers conduct research at and on night? Are there specific sensibilities linked to the segment of the 24-hour cycle that emerge when night falls? What sort of imaginaries and aesthetics do the nocturnal hours invoke? The articulated and rich responses that we gathered around these questions in the current issue testify to the urgent need to address them, especially in a field – social sciences – that has been historically tied to diurnal practices and day-centered methods (such as observation and visual methods that are so deeply linked to light and clear vision, see Diamanti and Boudreault-Fournier 2021). Moreover, the focus on the aesthetics and imaginaries of the night aims to bridge the social sciences and the humanities gap, in an attempt to enrich the discussion around sensory, creative and interdisciplinary methods. The eleven contributions to this issue reflect on how the imaginaries and the aesthetics of the night affect the work and methods of ethnographers, their fieldwork experiences and their approaches, as well as humans and more-than-humans alike inhabiting the night. By adopting such a lens, we recognize the affective and performative dimension of the imaginaries of the night and the relational quality of its aesthetics. The work done in the humanities on the aesthetics and imaginaries of the night is of great inspiration to our interdisciplinary approach. Scholar Elisabeth Bronfen (2013), for example, engages with the cultural imaginaries of the night in Western visual culture, film, philosophy and literature showing how these rich imaginaries set themselves in relation and contrast to our daily experience, in being informative and performative. Bronfen claims that nocturnal imaginaries have evoked the night either through personification (mainly feminine) or as a journey from dusk to dawn. Night then appears as a site for the formation of imaginaries and aesthetic experiences that silently inform and affect our daily routine “through the hidden, forbidden, and forgotten”: “a journey into the night is a journey to the end of a night, from which we wake up in a day that has been changed because of this passage” (2013: 21-22). In the same way, Le dictionnaire littéraire de la nuit, edited by Alain Montandon (2013), provides a rich and comprehensive understanding of the imaginaries of the night in literature, poetry, theatre, cinema and photography. The entries of this extensive dictionary speak to how cultural imaginaries inform nocturnal experiences. Furthermore, this volume shows how works that focus on night insist on its sensibilities and sensory aspect, by presenting themselves as an ode, a poetic tribute, to the night; a fil-rouge that can be traced through the articles of this issue. Night is thus conceived of not as a mere extension of the day, nor as its negative counterpart. On the contrary, scholars increasingly working on night argue for the necessity of an interdisciplinary understanding of nocturnal times and spaces from a social, cultural, biological, ecological, political, and media-related perspective (Becquelin and Galiner 2020; Candela 2017; Kyba et al. 2020; Gwiazdzinski, Maggioli and Straw 2020). Ethnography is often used as a methodological access point to study the night in relation to urban life, infrastructure, media, rituals, and ecological matters. Night …