BOOK OF ABSTRACTS ethnographic explorations (original) (raw)
Related papers
Visual and New Media Review, Fieldsights, April 1, 2020
How can one do an ethnography of a “mysterious force” that celebrates human struggle? How can one convey an experience of the uncanny in Flamenco music? Far from offering a definitive answer, what is suggested here is an experimental approach to ethnographic remediation. Drawing from the poetic notion of ekphrasis and the sonic concept of “acousmatic listening,” this experiment proposes to re-examine how we can use ethnographic texts when conveying presences —as much human as nonhuman.
This paper takes its cue from two art objects that can be considered in themselves as nontextual experiments in ethnographic research. The series Museum Photographs by Thomas Struth, as Guggenheim Museum curators put it, " captures anonymous individuals and crowds looking at iconic works of Western art in the world's most popular museums. " More than the aesthetic value of the artwork and its meaning, Struth's refl ection emphasizes the audience's reaction to the art object, evidencing his concern with the social potential of artworks in the art world. In a similar way, Christoph Büchel puts the public at the center of his installation Simply Botiful by soliciting affective responses to hyperrealistic and emotionally loaded issues. This paper purports to look at Büchel's installation with Struth's conceptual lens as a methodological tool to disentangle the complex web of relations between people and things that gravitate around the art world. Ultimately, it poses the question: if art objects are mediators of and commentaries on reality, under which conditions can artistic practices serve the purpose of exploring new avenues of ethnographic inquiry? In the syllabus-informed institutional frameworks that parse the academic disciplines of the humanities and the social sciences, art and anthropology are commonly held to be two separate domains, where the latter explains the former so as to produce an understanding of art that departs essentially from it. Despite recent theoretical and methodological reconceptualizations, 1 the analytic fl ow is traditionally held to be one-1 Most notably the expographic experiments of Latour and Weibel (2005) and the experimental modes of anthropological research through art collected in Schneider and Wright (2006). Arnd Schneider (2008) in particular is an advocate of the role of the visual art in anthropological representation and research. Beyond the realm of visual art, Max Liboiron prompts interesting ethnographic performances through his interactive art installations: the public engage with traditional anthropological themes such as exchange, consumption, regimes of value, the ecology of the landscape, trash-based social economies, and so on (see http://emedia.art.sunysb.edu/maxliboiron/webpages).
Three modes of experimentation with art and ethnography
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2008
Whilst the Writing culture critique since the mid-1980s has led to a number of experiments with ethnographic writing, the visual side has been neglected. Thus this article argues that by looking at the work of Oppitz, Downey, and Lockhart, which has not been considered in the canon of visual and general anthropology, anthropologists can develop new strategies of visual representation and research in regard to (1) conceptualizing closeness to and distance from the ethnographic subject, (2) the multiple positioning of the participant observer, and (3) developing new formal possibilities of visual representation. In doing so, anthropologists can start to address the unfulfilled potential of visual experimentation inherent in the Writing culture critique. This article then discusses three examples of experimentation with art and ethnography, that is, Shamans of the Blind Country, by anthropologist and film director Michael Oppitz (part-narrated by the writer William S. Burroughs), the video-and installation work of pioneer video artist Juan Downey among the Yanomamö, and the experimental film and photographic work Teatro Amazonas by contemporary artist Sharon Lockhart in Brazil, based on a collaboration with anthropologists. Prelude In this article I shall discuss three examples of experimentation with art and ethnography. By 'art' , I mean the visual arts in the widest sense (including film, video, photography, installation), and by 'ethnography' that method of fieldwork and participant observation which continues to define a core of social and cultural anthropology. Two of my examples are works by artists, Juan Downey (a pioneer of video art) and Sharon Lockhart (a contemporary photographer and film-maker), and one is by an anthropologist (and, on this occasion, film-maker), Michael Oppitz. Discussing work usually classified as belonging to different historical periods and genres of contemporary art and anthropology bears a certain risk, and at the same time offers the potential for exploration, precisely because it allows us to challenge previous borders and categorizations across the two disciplines. To my knowledge, Downey's and Lockhart's work have not been considered by anthropologists, 1 and the anthropological side of their work does not receive central treatment by art writers. 2 There are rather few artists and visual anthropologists who would be familiar with Oppitz's film. 3 He is more widely known (especially among German-speaking anthropologists) for a substantial written oeuvre in anthropological theory, that is, the interpretation of French structuralism (which also informs his film) and, among area specialists, for the ethnography of Nepal
The invisible theatre of ethnography: performative principles of fieldwork
2006
I have been arguing for some time now that ethnography is going to change or is changing by the same means that it already has within it—not by obsessing over its political efficacy with the text-cultures it invents—but by opening ethnography to its own performance and performativity.—Abdel Hernández, September 17, 1997. 1
The Ethnographic Object: A Composite at Play
Event and Everyday: Empiricisms and Epistemologies. Edited Volume by Yasmeen Arif , 2024
This paper re-envisions the framing of an ethnographic object as an object which is continuously in the making by using the mutually overlapping yet distinct conceptual relationship between an event and the everyday. If we think of an ethnographic object as always in emergence then can we characterise this emergence as a particular kind of “event-ing” the everyday? By using the ethnographic elaboration of a play in the making, this paper argues that an ethnographic object seen through the interplay between the notion of an event and everyday can be conceptualised as an act of time in constitution which is forever at play. Drawing from Deleuze’s conception of a zone of intensities in a constant flux, Bergson’s understanding of duration as method and Serres’ conceptualisation of foldable time, this paper argues that an ethnographic object is a constant play of heterogeneous discrete elements which remain at play as a composite.