Inspired by DIY culture, punk fanzines, guerrilla publishing, and the self-publishing possibilities opened by digital media,\u00a0Tarde<\/em>\u00a0focuses on a single topic, case, or urban situation in each issue. Rather than offering a closed explanation, each edition works as a small field device: a folded object that combines different formats, narratives, materials, ethnographic vignettes, visual essays, and data visualizations. Its pages emerge from walking, observing, collecting, registering, and exhausting the world outside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Tarde<\/em>\u00a0is unfinished by design. It is a publication, but also a method, a rehearsal, and a portable archive of urban attention. Each issue experiments with how research can circulate beyond academic formats, how small observations can become public arguments, and how print can still operate as a modest but powerful infrastructure for noticing the city differently.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The idea of producing minor ethnographic stories draws on what Gilles Deleuze and F\u00e9lix Guattari described as minor literature: \u201ca political literature of minorities[1].\u201d For them, the minor does not simply refer to something small or marginal. It names a way of working from the edges of dominant languages, formats, and institutions to make other forms of expression, attention, and politics possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the case of\u00a0Tarde<\/em>, minor ethnographic stories are not grand narratives about the city. They are situated fragments, partial accounts, small scenes, overlooked gestures, material traces, and everyday encounters that reveal how urban life is continuously assembled. They pay attention to what is often ignored: street objects, informal practices, atmospheric conditions, improvised uses, nonhuman presences, infrastructures, and the people whose routines quietly sustain the city. This minor approach has three implications. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Although\u00a0Tarde<\/em>\u00a0is conceived as a self-published publication, each issue is curated and discussed with guest scholars, artists, designers, journalists, and practitioners to ensure careful, rigorous, and situated content. The handbook also has a digital extension\u2014this website\u2014where printed materials can be expanded, complemented, and reactivated through additional references, images, notes, and resources. At the same time, people from anywhere in the world can download, print, fold, and distribute each issue under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Beyond serving as a platform for exploring the minimal, ordinary, and often taken-for-granted situations that shape urban life,\u00a0Tarde<\/em>\u00a0is imagined as a space for experimenting with other ways of doing and sharing urban anthropology. It moves away from conventional academic formats and from the hegemonic spaces of knowledge circulation dominated by large publishing companies. Instead, it asks what ethnographic research can become when it is folded, carried, printed at home, shared by hand, read in public, or used as a small device for noticing the city differently.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In doing so,\u00a0Tarde<\/em>\u00a0proposes an open-access, collaborative, and inventive hybrid artifact: part publication, part fieldwork device, part archive, part visual essay. It has both a physical and online presence, but it remains modest, portable, and easy to reproduce. It is a collectible document that can travel across classrooms, workshops, streets, libraries, and everyday conversations. Whether you are an academic, a student, a practitioner, or simply curious about urban life,\u00a0Tarde<\/em>\u00a0offers an invitation to look again, to notice more carefully, and to imagine ethnography as something that can be made, shared, and inhabited otherwise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Expanding Andrea Ballestero and Brit Ross Winthereik\u2019s attention to the imaginative force of analytic practices in ethnography,\u00a0Tarde<\/em>\u00a0connects crafting and designing methods with \u201ca form of [ethnographic] knowledge production\u201d and with the \u201ccreative and organized process of generating insights\u201d [2] in urban research.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The project also works as an entangled, experimental, and interdisciplinary hub for inventive, sensory, and multimodal methodologies across printed and online media. Two main sources of inspiration guide this aim:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n 1. Tarde<\/em>\u00a0follows Sarah Pink\u2019s [3] understanding of multisensory ethnography as an interconnected set of sensory relations that exceeds individual modalities, fixed categories, and disciplinary boundaries.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n 2. Continuing this interdisciplinary orientation, the handbook draws on Celia Lury and Nina Wakeford\u2019s [4] explorations of methodological inventiveness, especially their attention to ethnographic practice through epistemological devices and material artifacts.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Tarde<\/em> is named after Gabriel Tarde (1843\u20131904), a French sociologist whose work on social interaction, singularity, imitation, and variation can also be understood as \u201cminor.\u201d His contributions were largely displaced from mainstream sociology after being overshadowed by \u00c9mile Durkheim\u2019s conception of society as the stabilization of well-defined macrostructures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The handbook takes Gabriel Tarde\u2019s invitation to analyze the world by paying attention to small social interactions and extends it toward the encounters, materials, gestures, situations, and urban elements that are often ignored. For Tarde, these small interactions produced open, temporary, and unstable networks that, when connected, composed larger social formations. This is also how Tarde<\/em> understands the urban: not as a fixed container, but as an assemblage of minor encounters constantly being made and remade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As a final note, Gabriel Tarde\u2019s work strongly influenced Deleuze\u2019s philosophy, particularly his thinking on repetition, difference, and assemblage. It also played an important role in Bruno Latour\u2019s notion of association as an alternative to conventional concepts of society. In this sense, Tarde has often been considered a precursor of Actor-Network Theory, an epistemological approach that this project takes as one of its main workbenches.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [1<\/a>] Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1986). Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature<\/em>. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. p. 66.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [2<\/a>] Ballestero, A. And Wintherrek, B. (Eds.). (2021). Experimenting with Ethnography: A Companion to Analysis<\/em>. Durham: Duke University Press.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [3<\/a>] Pink, S. (2009). Doing Sensory Ethnography<\/em>. London: SAGE Publications.<\/p>\n\n\n\nA collection of minor ethnographic stories<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/tarde.info\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/a-thing-1024x681.png\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nCan we find other ways to do and communicate ethnographic research?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Ethnography as an inventive machine<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/tarde.info\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/machine-1024x704.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nWhy Tarde?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
References<\/h3>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n