Abstract
This essay explores the evolving relationship between art and anthropology, tracing a movement beyond traditional disciplinary tensions to examine areas of mutual influence and "third spaces" of interdisciplinary collaboration. While both fields historically diverged in methods and forms, recent shifts reveal artists adopting ethnographic approaches and anthropologists embracing creative practices. This essay focuses on these intersections, proposing that art and anthropology can be viewed as parallel, analogous modes of inquiry, where research operates as a "practice of correspondence" with the world (Ingold 2019). Through examining experimental ethnographic and artistic methods, such as those employed by artist Alecia Neo and the Karrabing Film Collective, I illustrate how collaborative and performative practices can yield new, affective, and non-discursive forms of knowledge. These case studies reveal how alternative outputs—non-textual, participatory, and process-oriented—can express layered experiences and cultural insights beyond conventional representation. I argue for valuing creative expressions as valid translations of ethnographic research, suggesting that anthropology and art can, in their shared "third space," move beyond fixed boundaries toward speculative and interdisciplinary understandings of lived realities.
Introduction
The fields of anthropology and art have historically been seen to be in tension, with heterogenous practices, discourses, and professional forms of production. Following disciplinary shifts in the 1980s and 1990s, we can trace corresponding movements in which “ethnographic research is [increasingly] presented as a (kind of) art” and “art projects are presented as (a kind of) ethnographic research” (Rutten et al. 2013). However, in this essay I seek to focus on a different trajectory which follows scholars who have, from the mid-2000s onward, been concerned with re-defining the relation between art and anthropology. Arguing for the affinities and cross-fertilisations between these fields, I consider them as analogous modes of study, and it is within the space in between anthropology and art that I seek to analyse how “the practice of research” can thus operate as “a practice of correspondence” with the world (Ingold 2019, 666).
Firstly, I suggest that expansive, experimental approaches to ethnography and fieldwork can unfold productive methodological tools and deeper collaborative relations with our interlocutors. I then argue that regarding both artistic and anthropological research outputs as forms of knowledge reframes them in relation to the aesthetic, affective, and speculative ambitions of both fields. I accompany these with discussions of the practices of visual artist Alecia Neo and Aboriginal media group Karrabing Film Collective. Ultimately, in considering the disciplinary separations of anthropology and art, rather than trying to assert that one is like the other, the generation of a “third space” yet undefined (Grimshaw et al. 2010) can allow productive dialogue to take place and move intersubjective research towards the pursuit of shared, trans-disciplinary approaches.
Methodological Movements
I begin by turning attention to the methods and processes utilised by artists and anthropologists, to argue that methodological approaches that draw on both anthropological notions of ethnography and fieldwork as well as artistic experimentation can yield deeper collaborative modes of engagement with communities.
In both fields of anthropology and art, parallel developments of postmodernist reflexivity have taken place. On one hand, following the “crisis of representation” in anthropology, the Writing Culture debates (Clifford 1988, Clifford and Marcus 1986) challenged the conservative anti-aestheticism and disciplinary claims of academic anthropology and proposed a move towards an expanded, self-critical, and potentially radically creative practice of writing ethnography. Disrupting the academic standardisation of anthropological methods thus prompted the deconstruction of ethnographic fields as contexts shaped by historical and spatial factors (Schneider 2008, 173) and arguments for multi-sited ethnography (Marcus 1995). It also included growing interest in sensory ethnography (Pink 2009) and different ways to communicate inter-subjective ethnographic insights outside of text-based paradigms.
Here, “ethnography” is understood not as a specialised disciplinary method but, following Clifford, as “a willingness to look at common sense everyday practice—with extended, critical and self-critical attention, with a curiosity about particularity and a willingness to be decentered in acts of translation” (2000, 56). A similar approach to ‘fieldwork’ as a method takes it not to be the exclusive reserve of anthropology but rather a social symbolic imaginary in which collaboration, performance, and co-construction emerges from fluctuating relations among people, things, and places (Marcus 2010, 35). This recognises the traditional conception of fieldwork to be rooted in the deeply grounded witnessing of events unfolding in the ‘field’ but opens it to contemporary experimental practices that can further involve our research ‘subjects’ in reciprocal collaborations.
Within art, on the other hand, we can note shifts in the 1990s towards conceptualisations of cultural difference and representation, with contemporary art becoming “one of the main sites for tracking, representing and performing the effects of difference in contemporary life” (Marcus and Myers 1995, 1). We can observe affinitive movements in art that draw on similar commitments to long-term embeddedness and social relations, not least following the rise of socially-engaged art, social practice, and relational aesthetics in the 1990s (Bourriaud [1998]2002, Bishop 2012).
However, many have criticised contemporary art’s appropriation of ethnographic fieldwork practices. Hal Foster’s well-known critique “The Artist as Ethnographer” (1995), alongside other discussions by Arnd Schneider (Schneider 2008, Schneider and Wright 2006, 2010), have addressed the issues of representing the ‘other’ in contemporary art, along with questions of ‘alterity’ and ‘outsiderness’. Additionally, the lack of standardisation of methodological practices adopted by artists departs from the “ethnographic method” harnessed by anthropologists—differences in temporal length, depth, and systematisation affect the degree to which rigour, ethics, reflexivity, and criticality is carried out (Foster 1995, Schneider 1996). Nonetheless, we can trace the institutional emergence of “artistic research” in academia, with an increased recognition of unconventional research modes as well as openness to non-discursive forms of knowledge production (De Assis 2023). With this comes a considerable heightening of artistic investigations anchored in methodological rigour, theoretical depth, and scholarly presentation.
Furthermore, by expanding our conception of ethnography to emphasise its intersubjective and interactive encounter, I emphasise the complexity of relations between researcher/artist and subject. The use of artistic methods in conjunction with fieldwork can powerfully serve to “to elicit meaning from physically inscribed bodily practices and their material results (objects)” (Schneider 2004) and give voice to aspects of idiosyncratic, lived experience that are difficult to render discursively. Here, I will discuss the socially-oriented art practice of Alecia Neo, specifically Between Earth and Sky (2018), to suggest that creative and expressive methods can yield new and productive modes of collaboration and anthropological insights.
Alecia Neo, Between Earth and Sky (2018). Video still.
In Between Earth and Sky, Neo engaged with a community of caregivers in Singapore to articulate their embodied experiences of caregiving. As primary carers of persons with mental illness and degenerative disease, they commonly grapple with emotional stress and socio-economic hardship, and their perspectives are often overlooked within a larger societal stigmatisation of mental illness.
Over a year-long process, the artist worked with caregivers from the non-profit organisation Caregivers Alliance (CAL), along with movement coaches Sharda Harrison and Ajuntha Anwari, to collaboratively find expressive mediums to communicate their caregiving realities. Rather than seeking to narrativise or speak for her interlocutors, Neo guided them through movement and voice workshops designed to aid them in processing their daily experience of long-term caregiving in unfamiliar but potentially generative ways, reflectively expressing an “everyday choreography of survival” (Cox 2015), which were subsequently performed in self-directed movement pieces.
Researcher Jill Tan writes that transposing everyday emotions, challenges, and calibrations into movement provided “a non-verbal vocabulary and deeper self-knowledge for the caregivers” (2023, 8), allowing them to articulate inner feelings in subtle articulations that “[confront] the truer reality of the acts of improvisation and getting by in daily life” (9). Furthermore, by refocusing attention onto the caregivers themselves, the body is used as “a central axis for expression” (4), where embodied movements in the creation process have the ability to powerfully surface habituated activities and gestures, offering insight into their values and how they sustain social worlds via the physical practice of caring for others.
Alecia Neo, Between Earth and Sky (2018). Video still.
Beyond a departure from conventional notions of authorship, the artist firmly anchors her practice in reciprocity and collaborative praxis. Her deep engagement with her collaborators demonstrates a commitment to creating a reciprocal dynamic in which experimentation, expression, and co-production can take place. The “practice of research” thus, as Ingold asserts, is “a practice of correspondence, and of care” (2019, 666). Through Neo’s work, we can observe how such ethnographic methods as employed by artists can yield new anthropological understandings via experimental modes of collaboration, such as movement workshops, and thus attend more closely to an anthropology “with” people, rather than “of” people (Ingold 2019, 662).
Alternative Outputs
Next, I will examine the outputs that emerge from artistic and anthropological research and argue that a consideration of them as sites of knowledge which encompass affective, aesthetic, and non-discursive forms allows for the speculative and future-oriented ambitions of both disciplines.
Much has been written about the textual dominance of ethnographic output, as well as the impossibility of representing “the fleeting experience of fieldwork… in artificially crafted texts, that frequently enclose forcible completion” (Schneider and Wright 2010, 20). In the process of “textualization” (Clifford and Marcus, 1986), despite strategies to evoke multiple authorship, academic expositions always “[evoke] what can never be put into a text” (Tyler 1986, 138). As such, research outputs need to be able to convey the heterogenous and participatory aspects of fieldwork, and thus “the ideal polyphonic text has in itself no final form or encompassing synthesis” (Strathern [1991]2004, 11). Anthropologists have turned towards aesthetic, sensory, and poetic forms that can be found in the arts to challenge such problems of representation (Schneider and Wright 2010, 9-14). Additionally, scholars have pointed to the inherently open and processual nature of art as potential approaches to anthropological research and representation, encouraging an embrace of an extended ongoing-ness and “incompleteness as a norm” (ibid., 20) against the idea of an ultimate ‘truth’ that can be narrated.
Ironically, as anthropology moves away from textualization, we can observe a contemporaneous emergence of research-based art prioritising text and discourse. To an extent brought about by an “intellectual milieu” emerging from the rise of art research doctoral programmes in the 1990s (Bishop 2023), this current is characterised by a shift towards research-based installational art with a reliance on large amounts of information accompanying the display of objects, books, and other materials. The accumulation and spatialisation of information here functions as a similar postmodern strategy to dismantle authorial mastery and adopts the language and protocols of academia, yet, as Bishop argues, falls short of critical analysis. This form of artistic research thus tends to reproduce the language or atmosphere of academic research, performing a similar closure of synthesis.
On the other hand, other voices in artistic research argue for its role in producing novel non-discursive forms of knowledge. Here, an emphasis on ways of knowing and modes of thought irreducible to Western rationalism and cognitivism crucially incorporates decolonial, feminist, and queer epistemologies. Through a reassertion of the aesthetic as the foundation of “a cognition based in bodily sensations, in affect, in empathy” (Holert 2020, 61), it challenges an objective relationship to truth and produces new epistemological horizons, often via fabulation, speculation, and personal narrative.
I thus argue that rather than making the distinction between anthropological product or artistic work, research in its various outputs from artistic-anthropological practice should be considered as equally valid modes of knowledge production; in other words, as complex, affective, experiential, and speculative translations of reality.
A striking case study is the work of the Karrabing Film Collective. An intergenerational grassroots media collective of around thirty Indigenous Aboriginal filmmakers, as well as anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli, the Karrabing Film Collective use filmmaking as a counter-practice to tell stories about their lives in Australia’s Northern Territory, speak to multi-dimensional knowledges and relationships to their human and more-than-human ancestors, and challenge contemporary settler-colonialism and present-day injustices.
Karrabing Film Collective, Night Fishing with Ancestors (2023), Film still.
One particular strategy that Karrabing harnesses in their films is disorientation, where the introduction of various concepts and contexts part of everyday life in the Indigenous north without clear explanation for non-Indigenous viewers are intentionally used to subvert “the expected conventions of ethnographic exegesis and ready cross-cultural translation” (Lea and Povinelli 2018, 36). The collective’s approach to filmmaking also follows an oral history tradition, where ideas are developed communally with “no storyboard no script” (Karrabing Film Collective 2023), and members inhabit multiple roles in the production of the films—idea-generation, acting, sound-recording, shooting on smartphones and so on. Using techniques of “improvisational realism” or “faux realism”, they interweave contemporary stories with ancestral narratives, folding in surreal elements and fragmented frames of reference. Such formal strategies empower them to disrupt hegemonic visual histories and establish connections across different registers of time and space.
Karrabing Film Collective, Wutharr, Saltwater Dreams (2016). Film still.
On one hand, we might see the collective’s practice as ethnographic in nature, where they construct narratives from their everyday lives and produce anthropological films which present social and political analysis of shared experiences of displacement, dispossession, state bureaucracy, environmental degradation, cultural identity, and forced assimilation from Indigenous perspectives. On the other hand, their use of fictional narratives, experimental filming, and editing strategies, as well as the circulation of the films in the contemporary art world, aligns their work more strongly with artistic research outputs. Yet, the Karrabing did not set out to resolve issues of anthropological representation nor create artworks; filmmaking instead serves as a pragmatic mode of self-organisation, as “a way of doing, involving and being together on country that is otherwise being strangled” (Lea and Povinelli 2018, 42).
Instead, what Karrabing does so powerfully in practice is to collapse collective forms of creation in ways that thwart easy definitions and genre categorisations—equally “fictional” and “true” in their fabulated plots which are generated from reality yet creatively incorporate surreality. In fact, it is within the gaps of interpretation in the films’ reception by audiences that pulls into visibility the acts of remaking and formation, as open-ended, undefinable and incomplete. In doing so, the collective produces works which powerfully generate new knowledges, provoking audiences into new ways of understanding complex and deeply intimate realities. This is where we can potentially locate a shared paradigm where anthropology and art can meet, both fields arguably rooted in a speculative ambition towards “what life might or could be like… nevertheless grounded in a profound understanding of what life is like in particular times and places” (Ingold 2013, 4).
Conclusion
The bidirectional currents between art and anthropology point to the fact that distinctions between the fields cannot be attributed to inherent differences in methodological approaches or representational forms, but rather the situating of research with respect to particular historical, cultural and disciplinary positionings (Grimshaw and Ravetz 2015, 424). In this essay, I have traced these currents of movement. I have shown how shared intersubjective and reflexive commitments to expanded notions of “ethnography” and “fieldwork” feature in both anthropological and artistic practice, and discussed Alecia Neo’s long-term engagement with caregivers to demonstrate how such methods can both powerfully draw out aspects of lived experience that exceed verbal discourse and engage interlocutors in reciprocal collaboration and correspondence.
Thinking next about research outputs and products in art and anthropology, I have observed parallel movements towards and away from academic textuality in response to questions of representation and authorship. I argue that shifting attention beyond disciplinary distinctions to highlight creative forms and expressions as equally valid translations of ethnographic research can yield potent and generative outcomes, as exemplified in the work of Karrabing Film Collective.
In this respect, I echo calls to consider anthropology and art as different and ongoing knowledge practices and research endeavours (Ingold 2019) across which methods and concepts are borrowed, exchanged and appropriated. Referencing Bhaba’s (1994) notion of “third space” as the border zones of contact where the enunciation of cultural difference takes place, Ravetz, Owen and Grimshaw (2010) propose the generation of a “third space” to unsettle disciplinary certainties and reconceptualise the boundary between art and anthropology. It is perhaps in this space that the fields can move beyond their oppositions, speak to each other on self-reflexive terms, and shift towards productive new horizons.
This essay was written in response to the question "Discuss the movement of anthropology towards art and art towards anthropology", MA in Material and Visual Culture (Anthropology) at UCL.
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