Short Abstract:

This lab will demonstrate how ethnography is an object that is constituted in its own emergence. This will be done through the performative mode and by using material to demonstrate how any material exists in a relationship of transformation with its own materiality including ethnography. Preregistration form (copy this link to your browser): https://forms.gle/8Z1qfZ16aV8GrS2h8

Long Abstract:

Responding to current global challenges, anthropology needs to recognise that the discursive practice of ethnography does not work with very neat divisions anymore. If ethnography much like all global challenges does not have a fixed itinerary of its production, then how may we concpetualise this term called ethnography? This particular lab titled "Ethnography as emergence" would like to use performative strategies and a sensory engagement with material objects to invite reflection on how ethnography as an object remains forever in constitution. All ethnographies in trying to grasp the emerging complexity of the world at large, never achieves a fixed and determinate coherence in the shape that it eventually assumes. They remain at the realm of being made and the only way to think about this process is to understand the logic and rationale of it's making. This lab proposes to demonstrate this logic of making by deploying theatre improvisational techniques and sensorial ways of working with material objects.

The lab would be participatory, three hour movement based session interspersed with writing. 10 - 15 people will be ideal. Participants do not need to have any background in theatre to particiapte. Technically we can do the lab in a 20X20ft. room with preferably a wooden floor and a mirror, a white board and markers to write and a flip chart.

If ethnography is largely the making of a story, then this lab would essentially be an ethnography of a how a story is made but demonstrated through a participatory performative mode.