Abstract
Experimental sites and encounters: The #Colleex network as a catalyst for the renewal of ethnographic arts
By Eeva Berglund, Aalto University, Finland & Tomás S. Criado, TU, Munich Center for Technology, Germany
In this paper we review and explore the rise of collaborative methods in anthropology. We progress against a background of a historiography we briefly lay out, of a transformation of anthropological knowledge production as part of a wider scientific and academic institutional project (of which we are a part, yet also critical and uncomfortable with). We do so by introducing the European Association of Social Anthropologists’ #colleex network (for Collaboratory for Ethnographic Experimentation) describing some of the art and design-inspired methodological experiments presented at its first workshop ‘Ethnographic Experimentation. Fieldwork Devices and Companions’. We foreground how the mode of research we explored in Lisbon offers a set of ingredients for reflecting on emerging objects of anthropological collaborations with artistic and design practices, that are different from the critical approaches mostly seen hitherto. We are more focused on the production of venues or opportunities for knowledge creation and on what anthropology gains in its collaborative risk-taking with art and design practitioners (broadly defined), mutually parasiting, or ‘cross-pollinating’ each other. Three illustrations of these situations, using images from the collaborative live-tweeting of the event (collected in this storify: https://storify.com/tscriado/1st-colleex-workshop), will be provided.
Author keywords
ethnographic experimentation, art-inspired anthropology, sites, encounters