Necrography: Writing in the Ruins of the Clinical Gaze—A Method for the Structurally Abandoned

Abstract

Necrography is a writing practice for sites where welfare, psychiatry, and recovery-oriented care no longer have the language to describe the lives encountered there. Drawing on two decades of field presence across four sites in Israel—an abandoned drug-and-sex courtyard in South Tel Aviv, an open-air drug scene in the same city, a semi-abandoned lakeshore hotel in Tiberias, and a peripheral dementia ward in the Galilee—I argue that under conditions of structural abandonment, the qualitative instruments I was trained to rely on, including interviews, consent procedures, and member-checking, failed at the threshold of encounter. Necrography is a response to these conditions. It operates through three linked practices: composite autoethnographic fiction, attention to instrument-refusal as data, and, when prolonged exposure narrowed my capacity to write, the use of VERSO—a configured language-model aid set to return short, non-consoling sentences from the researcher’s accumulated field materials. I propose necrography as a procedural method for documenting populations that remain socially present yet institutionally illegible. Its central criterion of rigor is composite fidelity—the recognizability of a pattern across structurally similar sites. The method is situated within the sociology of institutional abandonment and the broader post-qualitative turn in ethnographic research.