Drawing on a year of ethnographic fieldwork on working cattle ranches in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, this ethnographic poem – an analytical ‘rapstract’ (Petitt, 2018) – speaks to the multisensory and multispecies methods necessary to understand the power relations infused in the multispecies triad of human, horse and cow in a ranching setting (also see Petitt, 2023a). Arguing for pushing the frontier of sensory ethnography to include what I am framing as ‘energy bubbles’, this piece strives to bring heightened attention to the dynamic nuances of multispecies and particularly non-human power performances. The rapstract typically breaks the ‘fourth wall’ in directly spelling out the analytical moves by its author, in addition to the elements of field poetry (Zani, 2019) or poetic inquiry (Fernández-Giménez, 2018), portraying the ethnographic setting and analysis. Moreover, this rhyme refers explicitly to method whilst simultaneously showcasing the artful research method of rhyming/ethnographic poetry itself.

The practice of poetry differs greatly between practitioners and poets, as does probably the motivation for and aim of writing poetry at all. Poetic attention, and rhyming in particular, are increasingly crucial for my understanding of the world around me, especially in research settings. In my research, which mainly takes a multispecies ethnographic approach and almost exclusively deals with gender and intersectionality questions in cross-species relations in agriculture across different continents, I use rhyming poetry in three overarching and entangled ways: in data collection, for analysis and to disseminate research results. (2) 

When I first started conducting data analysis through rhyming, I didn’t know there was a whole field called ‘ethnographic poetry’ (Maynard and Cahnmann-Taylor, 2010). Because the first pieces I wrote and performed at conferences struck me as some sort of rhyming abstracts, and because I read them to some kind of beat, I called them ‘rapstracts’, although they do not stem from a rap tradition. After I was asked to publish some of these texts in a Swedish journal for gender research (Petitt, 2018), the word ‘rapstract’ stuck. 

What I had discovered and somewhat formalised was that writing analytically through rhyming helped me to focus on the core of what I wanted to say – there is not space for fluff and over-explanation in a rhyming poem – and the process helped me to discover unspoken premises and potential logical stumbles that I needed to work through. The rhyming itself allowed me, forced me, to come up with different ways to say the same thing – find different words that rhymed – and still convey the essence of what I was trying to say. This practice sharpens my analysis in that it helps me feel what part of the sentence – and thus the idea itself – is crucial to my conceptualisation, in my analysis and that absolutely has to make it into the next version of the phrase or stanza. It is a little bit like moving between different languages, making sure that the right nuance of a word is translated when I choose between potential synonyms in other languages. Building text one verse at the time, it becomes easy to see if one line actually follows logically from the verse before, and if any verse or stanza is unnecessary. In the analytical phase, the poem thus works as my ‘bullshit detector’. 

As a method to collect data, the ethnographic poem in my rhyming version has been crucial at times during my field work. Inspired by Leah Zani’s (2019) field poems, I write about field rhymes, as a particular kind of field poems. During my yearlong horseback ethnography on two working cattle ranches in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, where I conducted multispecies ethnography focusing on the multispecies triad of the humans, horses and cattle living, working and moving together, these rhymes helped me distil the essence of an experience, meeting, happening, a day or relation or even everyday practices over a longer period. The word ‘distil’ pops up continuously when I read about the experience of writing poetry or songs, such as in Mary Gauthier’s (2021) thoughtful book Saved by a Song. While catching every single detail of a day or event might seem ideal in the field, often it is simply not possible. We always make editorial and subjective choices. 

At my ‘home ranch’, where I lived during my fieldwork, I spent my days together with the mother and daughter who were the only other humans living and working there, and I took part in whatever they did. Not only did they do the horseback cattle work, but they also tended to fences, hay, equipment as well as taking up all the managing work of an owner, manager, cowboss and so on. At the neighbouring ranch, where I spent roughly two days a week during fall, late spring and summer, in order to get a different perspective, the days in the saddle were longer as they had more cattle, vast grazing lands and a hired (all male) cowboying crew.  Sometimes, after ten hours in the saddle I would come home to my house at my home ranch absolutely exhausted. Mustering the energy to eat, shower and prepare for the next day, the writing of field notes could feel like an insurmountable wall. I would do what I could during the day, scribbling down words and sentences, mumble into my voice recorder and use my cell phone and the mounted camera strapped to my chest to capture events, thoughts and feelings. But most of the time I needed all parts of my body, brain, energy and focus to ‘read’ the cows in front of me and around me, communicate with the horse beneath me and to pay close attention to how my fellow humans were moving and potentially signalling what I needed to do next. Many days I simply did not manage to write much on the fly.

Sitting down at night and letting the feelings, images and thoughts run through me, paying poetic attention to it all, in addition to ethnographic attention, the rhymes would roll into my head and body and I would write them down. Rather than struggling to try to capture as much detail as possible about everything from morning to evening, I would lean in to the pleasure of poetic pondering and the sharpness it could bring to a heightened sense of perception. I could capture that which struck me as most remarkable about the day, a particular event or social relations. I could capture thoughts that were hard to express in ordinary language. I could get something down on paper where I would otherwise write nothing. Over time, these field rhymes collected into a rich and varied multispecies ethnographic portrayal. Most days I also wrote some additional field notes, but as I went through my material, I often found the rhymes became particularly useful in the analytical process – together with field drawings. (3)

Both field rhymes and analytical rhymes have made their way into my research dissemination. When teaching or presenting at conferences I often, almost always, use a rhyme to either portray an ethnographic piece or make an analytical point. Sometimes I make a rapstract for the particular presentation to sum up the main take away points, including as a part of the second MEAM conference that links with this volume. People have come up to me afterwards expressing that it was when they heard the rhyme that they really understood the theoretical framework I had been explaining during a presentation, or that they really could imagine the field setting and the context. These poems also reach a wider academic audience beyond academia. My choice to use the cowboy poetry format has meant that I can share my work with my cowboying interlocuters in the field, giving them an idea of what I have been up to and conveyed in a way that they find more accessible. Cowboy poetry is a tradition amongst working cowboys and performed at rodeos and cowboy gatherings of different sort. It tends to rhyme, use a ballad structure and heed no particular verse measure; and it typically tells of cowboying life with a funny twist or tone. 

The poetry at the beginning of this piece, a rhyming ethnographic poem, came about a couple of years after the fieldwork took place. I had been kneading the material I collected and had come quite far in analysing my ethnographic data into explicit theoretical development and methodological advancement and the rhyme sprung from a need to clarify the use of these artful methods. The rhyming poem is thus based on my original field work, and draws – as most analytical work – on other scholars’ theorisation and methodological contributions as well as my own conceptualisation of the ‘energy bubble’. The concept of the energy bubble is an emic formulation and more-than-human concept whereby power is felt in space. I build here on the idea of ‘feel’, which horse writers have conceptualised as that elusive and embodied feeling of interconnection between horse and rider (Brandt, 2004; 2006; Zetterquist Blokhuis, 2019; Blokhuis and Lundgren, 2017; Dashper, 2016; Fijn, 2021). Horse riders strive for this connection and in my field setting of working cattle ranches, not only the human and horse are taken into account when striving for smooth connection, but also their triadic interaction with cattle. Moving cattle smoothly and calmly, which is the stated goal at these cattle ranches, human and horse need to gauge their own energy bubble towards that of the cow or cattle that they are trying to move. The bubble is not referred to as a physical entity but as a socially felt pressure in space. Learning from humans, horses and cattle alike to perceive these bubbles through various senses, I started to understand them as the very core of the local and situated multispecies power relations of the multispecies triad of the American West. 

The main point of the rhyme, however, is the usefulness of artful methods and poetic ones in particular. Such analytical poetry has served to ‘w/rap up’ some of my talks at conferences and teaching spaces and is thus meant for dissemination, as a way to think through a particular theory or understand and portray a particular piece or angle of field-based material. Yet most of what I rhyme never meets the eyes or ears of others – the rhymes are ways for myself to think through, or feel through, my data collection and analysis. Moreover, as they follow the ballad structure of cowboy poetry, rather than any particular verse measure, they are rhythmic in my head and when I read them out loud myself, but they might stumble and seem rhythmically erratic when others read them. In this way, engaging poetry can be relational. A bit like riding a galloping horse – you need to synchronise with the horse’s movements in order to find the ‘feel’ and to not bump about on their back. Try it, read it again, and see if you can get the poetic ‘feel’.