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- Convenors:
-
Catherine West
Jane Mulcock (Esperance Community Arts)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Performing Anthropology Creatively
- Location:
- WPE Paraparap
- Sessions:
- Thursday 24 November, -
Time zone: Australia/Melbourne
Short Abstract:
An essential creative urge is evident across human cultures, often observed in the production and reproduction of social and individual meaning. Is human life supported through connecting intimately with arts practice? How might anthropologists engage with the arts as both method and subject?
Long Abstract:
This panel seeks contributions that explore the role of arts-based methods and arts-based participatory research in anthropology. We consider the logic of Design Anthropology as an apposite structure for pursuing these topics, as it maintains reflexivity between the practice of anthropology as a creative process, and the creative process as a subject of anthropology (Gunn, Otto & Smith 2020). We ask what elements of social, political, and economic design underpin the phenomena of 'creativity' and 'arts' in the current day? While participant observation has long been a hallmark of anthropology, there is a growing appreciation outside of anthropology of what Ingold calls 'observant participation'. The 'participatory turn' is evident in Mulligan and Smith's (2010) 'turn to community', and in Leavy's assertion that arts-based and participatory research are core elements of social science research design. In drawing anthropology and the arts into relation, we emphasise the essential creative urge that is evident across human cultures and in the production of social and individual meaning. Is engaging with arts practice a form of life support? We take a broad view of what constitutes artistic engagement. It can include any medium of expression (for example dance, music, theatre, visual arts and crafts, writing, photography, and filmmaking) in many contexts (for example community arts programs, individual arts practice, ritual, popular culture, and everyday creativity). This panel provides a forum to ponder the diverse moments, materials, ideas, and transformations that occur within and between the 'of' and 'for' of anthropology and the arts.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 24 November, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
3175, 3976, 3805 - why and how do people 'rep' their neighbourhoods? Converging arts and anthropology, this paper attempts new understandings of suburban space and place that encompass its cumulative, changing and creative nature by focusing on young creatives in Melbourne's South-East suburbs.
Paper long abstract:
This paper focuses on the emerging creative scene in Melbourne's South-East suburbs. Between the central metropolis and vast rurality, fieldwork conducted in this stretch of suburbs reveals a diverse group of young people part of a rising creative community.
Navigating local 'street' culture against institutional and commercial presence, this essay explores the processes, tensions, and potentialities of place-making in the suburbs by charting where and how creativity occurs. This appears as a textural cultural landscape with creativity 'above' ground - largely through institutions - and 'below' ground through subversive place-making practices. The different ideas of being and becoming across this landscape empower decision-making and determine collective futures (Tuck and McKenzie, 2014).
Charting key community arts initiatives and individual experiences of creative practise, this study considers why and how young people in the suburbs mobilise their locality for creative expression, and their creativity for local purposes. Neighbourhoods are bound and constructed, branded and performed through the self; place is reified as something made through the cumulation of entangled threads of movement along which people live their lives (Ingold, 2011). This paper implicates creativity in the building and imagining of suburban identity and futurity.
Centring Massey's (2005) beckoning toward an alternative approach to understandings of space, this research harnesses alternative methodologies (mobile methods) and crosses disciplinary borders to urge for a convergence of arts and ethnographic practices.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the production and dissemination of art outside of institutional settings in Athens during a time of economic crisis and social upheaval. It considers how the historical production of urban space has engendered radical artistic engagement with the city and its public spaces.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines the production and dissemination of art outside of institutional settings in Athens during a time of economic crisis and social upheaval. It considers how the historical production of urban space, including periods of population growth, haphazard building practices, urban decay and irregular governmental regulation, have engendered a radical kind of social space in the city. Throughout the crisis, subversive practices such as street art, squatting, and occupy movements have been used by artists to transfigure city spaces into heterotopic sites where the forces of cultural hegemony can be contested. By working outside of institutional settings, artists bypass the ‘formalised’ art world, whilst still having their works seen and voices heard. Within the crisis context, the use of urban space in the ‘illicit’ and ‘unsanctioned’ production of art is considered as form of life support for artists who have become increasingly disenfranchised and isolated from formal art institutions.
Ethnographic research for this paper was conducted in Athens, Greece between 2015-2016, with multiple follow up visits up until 2020. Participant observation was primarily conducted amongst graffiti, street, and performance artists, as well as members of artist collectives and other associated social movements. An ‘actively engaged’ research methodology was used with the researcher also acting as performer, musician and artist through participating in the creation and presentation of art.
Paper short abstract:
When Munasinghe interviewed four traditional Sinhalese drummers, they reported significant differences between their practices in ritual and non-ritual performances. In this paper we explore the social, religious, political and historical lineages of this artform.
Paper long abstract:
Sinhalese low country drummers approach each performance with a complex array of personal, social, physical, and metaphysical postures: a rich empirical base from which to consider the relationship between people, ritual, art and social change. When Munasinghe interviewed and observed drummers for his PhD field research, he became keenly aware of the subtle elements of consciousness that they reported as relevant and appropriate to ritual (healing, exorcism) and non-ritual (entertainment, recording) performances, although their musical output was ostensibly the same. We define two Sinhala terms that refer to preparing the drum and the setting (Pè kireema) and preparing the drummer’s mental and physical state (Pè weema). These terms are key to the differentiation between ritual and non-ritual drumming. In a ritual setting, the drum, drummer/s, ritual practitioners, and audience enter a liminal zone where the sensible and the intelligible intertwine, and the ontological ground can be remade. As a vocation strongly linked to specific Sri Lankan castes and geographies, Sinhalese drumming, in some ways, documents an artistic mediation between the European colonial past and the current independence-era, which is dominated by Sinhala Buddhist nationalism (see Kapferer, 1983; Reed, 2002). Tangible changes to the technical and social conventions of the artform are reflected in the quality of life of the practitioners.