This article addresses mapmaking as a multimodal method and lens for place‐based ethnographic inquiry. I describe three contexts drawn from my research on and teaching of mapmaking. Drawing from my own sense‐making of mapping as an embodied phenomenon, I discuss how the fields of sensory and materialist studies might expand the interpretive possibilities of multimodal ethnography as an epistemological and ontological lens involving the entanglement of place, body, and experience with knowing and becoming. [mapmaking, multimodality, senses, place, materiality]