Education is literally a way of leading out into the world, where we are exposed to beings and ways of life different from those to which we are accustomed. If we take education in this sense, then Anthropology is educational through-and-through. But it is a sense that challenges the orthodox idea of education as the intergenerational transmission of authorised knowledge. Philosophers of education, from John Dewey a century ago to Gert Biesta today, have struggled to articulate a vision of education that would escape the stultification of the transmission model. A critical anthropology needs to catch up with this literature.
Description:
We human beings don’t just live our lives. We lead them. In what senses does a life that is led have a past and a future, and a notion of its own direction? How can it take us beyond what already exists? These, fundamentally, are the questions of education. The word ‘education’, after all, is derived from the Latin ducere, ‘to lead’, plus ex-, ‘out’. Education leads us out into the world, so that we may observe, study and respond to the phenomena we find there. This studio starts from the premise that as a way of leading life with others, Anthropology is educational through-and-through. It is not so much a subject to be taught as one that sets out to learn. By way of the conversations and collaborations it joins or initiates, anthropological study opens our eyes and ears to possibilities of knowing and being that might otherwise go unheeded.
This premise, however, challenges both educational and anthropological orthodoxy. On the side of Education, it overthrows the traditional idea of pedagogy as the transmission of authorised knowledge from one generation to the next. Education is rather a task in which generations can work together in forging a future common to all. It is about learning to attend to things, and to respond to them, rather than acquiring the knowledge that absolves us of the need to do so. On the side of Anthropology, we can no longer pretend to study ‘other’ peoples and ‘their’ worlds. What makes Anthropology educational today is that we don’t so much study other people as study with them, who also study with us. This must be as true, moreover, of what goes on in the ‘field ’as of what goes on in ‘school’. We can no longer place the field and the school on opposite sides of a division between the production of knowledge and its transmission. Both are places of education, potentially transformative for all who enter them.
Ever since the publication of John Dewey’s Democracy and Education, over a century ago, philosophers have struggled to articulate a vision of education that would escape the stultification of the transmission model. Keyworks include Hannah Arendt’s ‘The crisis in education ’, Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Jacques Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Jan Masschelein’s ‘E-ducating the gaze: the idea of a poor pedagogy’, and Gert Biesta’s The Beautiful Risk of Education. A critical anthropology, if it is to address the multiple crises of our own times, needs to catch up with this literature. If education is the means by which a society ensures its own future, then what kind of future is implied, and how does the past bear upon it? How should we imagine generations and the relations between them? How can we rethink both education and democracy so as to heal the rift between them, that is currently tearing our societies apart? How can we learn to live together in difference, both presently and into the future?
We invite studio participants to add what, for you, have been pivotal sources of inspiration, with a view to creating a list of essential readings in this field. To keep the list to a manageable length, please add no more than two references.
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Through a short vignette, I introduce various ways in which anthropology can act as host for educative encounters. The story also subtly implies the nurturing of particular sensibilities by which the educative potential of encounters might be unlocked.
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The spider in my backyard challenges me to encounter it, to enter its world. To do so, I must let go - at least for a time - of other pressing engagements. I must slow down, be still, and lend my attention to this wonderful eight-legged beast in all its complex entanglements. As I do so, a space of encounter dawns, and educative threads weave their slow emergence. Not only do I awaken to the rustle of the wind, its caress upon my skin and its waving rhythms in the leaves before me. I also notice the still patience with which she sits, eight hair-laced legs sensitively placed to trace the smallest of vibrations. And now - very slowly - in the stillness - in fleeting moments only - a part of me reaches across the divide, the space between our radically different evolutionary paths. In waves, I begin to appreciate the phenomenological life of this differently-bodied being, so Other to myself. I am lost in the flow. What does her little, complex body afford? What world does she habit and perceive? My reflections gradually fold back upon myself. The alterity of the spider's body - and this encounter in my yard - bringing awareness of my own body, with its very different set of affordances. Added here, my slow encounter with a French phenomenologist, and various anthropological and ethnographic voices. Other ideas, drawn from a deep spring that persistently brings me back to the same place, bubble to the surface. The experiencing body is indeterminate, so who is to determine the limits of its affordances? And now the mystics begin to speak and other strange folk amongst whom I have lived and worked, with whom I have shared my life. For whom also the body is mysterious and incomplete, so much more than the objectified shape of common imagination. The spider before me repairs her web. Her body dips and weaves, her eight legs meticulously working in complex harmony, pushing a thread back there, attaching another here, and moving on. She knows her environment and intelligently navigates her world. Later, I stand before my first-year students, in all their beautiful hopes and sadnesses and fears, and ask them what education is for. Behind me, caught on an endless loop, the spider repeatedly weaves her web. What do they see? Do they see it? This little complex creature, this Other life. And what are we, as humans? Can we learn to intelligently navigate our world(s), individually and collectively, our bodily and perceptual affordances (whatever these might be) awakened and brought to life? I look across the crowd. Just some, just a handful of eyes have met me. We look across the divide, the weight of our experiences, our previous encounters, now let into the room, at once present in our living bodies, with which - I hope - we will have confidence to lean in and advance. And this differently-bodied-being continues skilfully weaving, enticingly drawing us on.
How come we live in a post-critical pedagogy and post ontological turn world yet still resort to hierarchical role divisions (us/ them, teachers/students, academics/non-academics, old/new generations) and educative practices anchored in ideas of expertise that may be detrimental to plurality?
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"How dangerous those who've understood the codes become when faced with those who haven't." (Pennac, 2010: 94)
"Awakening to love can happen only as we let go of our obsession with power and domination." (hooks, 2001: 87)
We must dare in the full sense of the word, to speak of love without the fear of being called ridiculous, mawkish, or unscientific, if not antiscientific. (Freire, 1998:3)
I would like to engage in this discussion not only by seconding the need to converse more with pedagogical perspectives but also by questioning the identities of authority we still enact (or not?) in research and pedagogical practices within and beyond classrooms and universities. How could we challenge or how have we been challenging both educational and anthropological orthodoxy by acting differently in our everyday pedagogical encounters, conversations or classrooms - letting go of forms of authority, filiations to traditions and validation?
Rita Laura Segato, in her work 'counter-pedagogies of cruelty', advocates for ethnographic and educational practices that escape a logic of domination and epistemic injustice. By introducing her thoughts and a Levinasian approach to alterity, I would like to invite the participants to share aspects of their own pedagogical practice to help us imagine and live more encounters of epistemic love.
This presentation discusses the experience of preparing Cuban coffee in my kitchen in Canada as I connect to my students through zoom during an early morning class. I reflect on how making, drinking and being addictive to coffee creates a form of correspondence between our bodies and a tragic past.
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Teaching the Anthropology of the Caribbean to undergraduate students whom many have never put a foot outside of Canada can be challenging when experiential learning is at the core value of one’s teaching philosophy. In time of COVID, this geographic disconnection may be even more complicated by the fact that online teaching can detach students and teachers from possible sensorial pedagogical experiences –except from what can be transmitted through images and sounds transduced by the zoom meeting. This presentation discusses the approach of considering everyday life “rituals” as enmeshed in a series of anthropologically meaningful correspondences, including small actions and daily activities we just take for granted such as preparing our morning cafe. As a case in point, this presentation reflects on the experience of preparing Cuban coffee in my kitchen in Canada as I connect to my students through zoom during an early morning class. More than just making coffee though, I use this ritual to connect with my students, to welcome them in my home as friends would do when visiting each other. I also used coffee making to talk about Indigenous resistance, slavery, colonialism, plantation system and exploitation. I end up tasting the coffee to talk about senses and the taste of burned and dried beans of coffee. The colour, the oily sensation of the beans when we touch them with our fingers, the colour and the smell of the raw beans, are all indicative factors that can help engage with the embodied experience of coffee and the land where it comes from. Making coffee takes all of its significance when we reflect on the correspondences between the historical tragedies that brought this beverage into our kitchen and the addiction we feel for it. Making coffee is a daily action for most of my students, independently of how they prepare it; the process connects us with a distant past that may seem geographically disconnected. But if we really think about it, we can come to the understanding that we also relate with the soil in which the beans come from with every sip of coffee.
This paper will draw on 12 years of experience teaching the interdisciplinary and practice-based PHD programme AMP to ask how co-creative practices and dialogic learning in Anthropology can help expanding methods in ethnographic research to access the imaginary realm of the fieldwork.
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This paper will summarise 12 years of experience teaching the interdisciplinary and practice-based PHD programme AMP (Anthropology, Media and Performance) to PhD candidates with backgrounds in Theatre, Film or Anthropology. AMP started in 2010 as a collaboration between the Anthropology and Drama departments at The University of Manchester. The programme built on the combined legacy of Victor Turner’s Anthropology of Performance, the Granada Centre of Visual Anthropology and pioneering work in Applied Theatre at the university. The strong interest in ethnofiction and the work of Visual Anthropologist Jean Rouch that I shared with co-founder Paul Henley, would form the fundament of AMP methodology through intersubjective and reflexive approaches.
The AMP programme aims to combine ethnographic fieldwork methods with creative drama practices, inviting candidates from both fields to conduct collaborative and creative practices with the participants during the fieldwork period. Over the years PhD researchers have conducted fieldwork on a variety of topics including migrants crossing the Mediterranean, HIV survivors in Chile, ritual performance among shamans in the Amazon basin, Muslim youth exploring changing identities in Manchester, etc. The fieldwork research and co-creative practices have resulted in feature length films, photo exhibitions, participatory animations, radio dramas, and other works of art exploring the boundaries of ethnographic method by engaging with the imaginary realm of the fieldwork through fiction and improvisation.
The paper will draw on video clip samples produced as part of the programme to ask how the combined dialogic learning of AMP and the fieldwork experience can contribute to shared anthropological knowledge and innovation by facilitating access to the imaginary worlds of the participants.
This provocation explores absurdity in art as a possible if unlikely approach to education. What might anthropology as education learn from forms of creativity that consciously construct the non sensical? What 'sense' might anthropology make of the function of nonsense in art, culture and society?
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Education is challenged to tread a delicate path between the reliable transmission of information, training in skill, and respect for the autonomy of the learner. What matters is how these elements are mobilised in ways that allow participants (educator and learner) to think, to be clear and interested, to trust in creativity while also investing in good habits that do not become a form of servitude (Stengers 2011, Arendt 1961/2006). Effective education pivots on good communication if it is to renew a life in common (Dewey 1916/2011). It is important to set the student's mind in motion through ways of educating that are vivid rather than enforcing dead forms of indoctrination and passivity. Such mobility draws on imagination and experience and it is perhaps in the arts that one might seek examples for how to mobilise both in ways that are vivid, effective and affective.
Education of this kind is closely aligned with democracy and freedom and focuses on making sense of the world. What happens if it can no longer be safely assumed that the values of freedom of thought and shared responsibility underpin education, or have become eroded to the point of being unrecognisable, nonsensical?
What has art to say with nonsense?
Andre Breton, writer, poet and founder of surrealism, suggested that Dada was' the marvellous faculty', of drawing together two widely separate realities found in experience and creating a spark from their contact that was intentionally dis-orientating. He goes on to say "Can such a gift not make the man whom it fills something better than the poet?" (Ades 1976, p 30). Dada generated nonsense to reflect the nonsensical that was ongoing in life in response to the brutality of WW1. It is one of many examples of the way in which art has responded to breakdown in meaning and values in culture and society in the 20th and 21st centuries
This provocation explores absurdity in art as a possible if unlikely approach to education in the present. What might anthropology as education learn from cultural forms of creativity that consciously construct the non sensical? What 'sense' might anthropology make of the function of nonsense in art, culture and society?
This provocation will involve a Dadaist activity as an experience of the issues followed by a brief provocation (outlined above) and hopefully a rich discussion.
Education and anthropology address a changing view of the world. This proposal aims to explore how both anthropology and education are tied to a particular form of active "seeing" interweaving discourse, ways of knowing and vision.
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Moving and perceiving are priorities for living and for learning with others. In this proposal I take "seeing" as an anthropological approach able to contend with the visual lives and visual learning of others. Streams of images and visual information are an increasing part of education and our own differing everyday experience that challenge how we study social life. The question of visuality and what becomes visible addresses processes of attention from interconnected perspectives. On the one side the ongoing social and material functions of the visual world, while on the other the intricacies of the seeing and being seen 'gaze', as a form of learning able to ‘liberate and displace’ (Masschelein 2010).
This contribution reflects upon a programme of practitioner research in autism support services in Scotland. In particular I compare the possibilities of situated learning and critical reflection associated with anthropological inquiry with more common models of practitioner education and training.
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Practitioner education in social care services for autistic people often comprises the impartation of ‘autism knowledge’ that has to be applied in practice. This unilinear model of knowledge transmission is analogous to the trope of ‘translation’ that dominates the field of autism research. In this contribution I will share a programme of practitioner research that instead provides opportunities for situated learning and looks to generate useful insights from day-to-day autism support practice through systematic reflection and the critical engagement of practitioners. I have previously compared the reflective practitioner of Donald Schon (1983) to the participant observer of anthropology (Long 2020). In this talk I will also argue that the relational aspect of anthropological research has much to offer a field that should look to co-produce knowledge and insights with supported autistic people rather than simply do research about them.
In this presentation, we discuss some of the ways in which an educational anthropology, as a practice of becoming attentive and responsive to others and the lifeworld, is mobilised in anthropological research training at Oxford
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How might an 'e-ducational gaze' which 'liberates and displaces' our view (Masschelein 2010) be integrated in a 'traditional' anthropology curriculum?
In this presentation, we consider some of the ways in which an educational anthropology, as a practice of becoming attentive and responsive to others and the lifeworld, might be mobilised in anthropological research training at master's and doctoral level. Using the example of a methods course called 'Ethnographic Portraiture' taught at the School of Anthropology & Museum Ethnography at the University of Oxford, we discuss the ways in which the pedagogical scaffolding for this course has been redesigned in recent years to actualise some of the principles of an educational anthropology.
We begin by briefly introducing the history of the course, before setting out the present pedagogical principles that we use in the transformed, present-day course. We move on to illustrate two of the guiding concepts we work with during the course today. The first is 'ekphrasis', whose ancient and modern definitions - emphasising the visual imagination as evoked by text, and the translation of one media into another, respectively - can become key to the practice of creative anthropological work. The second is 'abduction', coined by Peirce, defined as a species of speculative reasoning, involving insight (cf. Leach 1982:52) and which helps summon the artistic, as well as playful sensibility of anthropology.
We reveal two practical exercises that we ask students to undertake with relation to these guiding concepts, and conclude by briefly showcasing a small selection of the work students have produced in response to these concepts and associated activities.
Taking education as a way of leading out into the world and learning as an ontological process, this proposal presents aspects of learning in ecovillages, bringing different takes on education, based on openness to "read the world" and education of attention towards "intuition" and "attunement".
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This study took place in two ecovillages - in Brazil and Scotland -, between 2013 and 2016, on learning processes within communities that seek a sustainable way of life. Educational processes in these two contexts suggest attention, intuition, tune and resonance as ways of learning with everything that surrounds us - human and non-human beings.
Learning how to carefully pay attention to life, forms, textures, interactions flows within an ecosystem is an intrinsic part of living in a harmonic relation to nature in Arca Verde. Reading the world’s “teachings” in its materiality and, thus, engaging in an integrated way is very important to build a clay house, to handle an agroforestry, but also to be aware that the presence of certain animals, that cross your way in a given moment, means something to your spiritual journey. Understanding the meaning of an animal apparition is an exercise of both observation and intuition, as told me one of my interlocutors - Brigit - while contemplating a snake that was stuck in the front of the kitchen door. She observed trying to understand, by it, what was the “snake teaching”. Furthermore, she brought a reference to the meaning of the snake for the “ancient people”. The apparition of an animal is not random, but part of a greater intelligence that must be unraveled as a track in the way of the one that "receives" it, towards self knowledge and healing. Placing yourself as an apprentice means being open “as a child that is always admired with everything around”, and to develop a certain sensibility to comprehend Universe’s clues. This opening disposition enables us to learn with the Universe, as opposite to closeness that makes us unable to reconnect. Although some members of this community would take things like this, others would explain animal’s apparition through a more rational approach. Different understandings and ways to relate to life cohabit. The notion of “learning with the Universe”, refers to an attention that makes relations between all things arround us and our existential journey and, through the first, giving meaning to the last. It is an affirmation of reality in its multiple dimensions, layers, densities, in an ontological perspective that implies pluralism.
In Findhorn, most of the decision making processes happened through “attunement”, as a proposal to “move from head to heart and body”, which implies educating the attention to perceive senses (body signs), sensations and emotions and intuitions instead of rational thinking. Learning to be in tune with oneself, with ones own intuition, with other intelligences, or even with a grupal field, educating attention to intuition and experience, would lead us to be closer to a non individual sphere, being ways of accessing elements that are, at first, unconscious. Attunement is a way of communication through communion, once people don't make them to connect with something that is separated, but instead with the unity of the whole life that lives inside of us and above us.
Moving upstream and downstream rivers can be a way of countering mainstream ways of education and research by setting up a context of learning where the individual faces the limit, becomes vulnerable and can open up to difference and other ways of being in the world.
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We start from a story to bring to the table:
“An accomplished kayaker after having been the first to paddle through the four great rivers of the Himalayas faces a different challenge. He has been diagnosed with a brain tumor. After some medical treatment he feels that “the only way out was downstream” and therefore to paddle the Indus River as a way of healing. He said that releasing control and surrendering to the flow of life, gave him so much freedom and that he felt at home.”
Runner and Feldenkrais practitioner Paolo Maccagno and kayaker Deborah Pinniger move up and down rivers. Maccagno’s ongoing experimental project “Running with Salmon” explores salmon’s upstream movement for learning to die, while Pinniger’s lifelong engagement of kayaking down rivers across the world, pays homage to the educational potential of rivers. Over several months their respective aims and skilled practices have informed a conversation on limit and education which will be the subject of their contribution.
In relation to the above story, they have been asking themselves, “what does it mean to go home?” They have been exploring this question through running and kayaking and by looking at salmon’s way of life. Maccagno and Pinniger’s work has been focused on leading groups of people (often vulnerable) in marginal (prison) and remote (wild rivers) places through practices at the limit, where body and movement are the core of the experience and a source of knowledge. These practices inspire a sense of self beyond the boundary of subjectivity and identity revealing instead one’s own presence and aliveness at the cusp of life. They consider these liminal contexts in relation to their high educational potential, affording the individual to become exposed and vulnerable, yet at the same time offering the possibility to move forward through a new sense of life.
By recognising what they do in relation to Ingold’s notion of anthropology as a practice of education, they investigate the inspirational notion of educere-leading out (Ingold 2018), through their practice of running upstream and kayaking downstream along rivers. Movement is at the centre of their inquiry and is conceived not as displacement in space but in its incipiency as an “issuing along with things in the very processes of their generation” (Ingold 2011: 12), constituting the existential ground wherein humans can be resituated in the world along with all its non-human inhabitants.
They would like to suggest that moving upstream and downstream rivers can be a way of countering mainstream ways of education and research by setting up a context of learning where the individual faces the limit, becomes vulnerable and can open up to difference and other ways of being in the world. In so doing they would like to show the potential of experimental methods of research and participate to the current debate around anthropology and/as education (guided by the works of Ingold, Masschelein, Manning and Biesta) by opening a path into the anthropology of the limit as an educational practice.
This contribution will reflect on a field school held at Kuruman, an early mission station in South Africa, for students from both Cambridge and Sol Plaatje Universities in 2018, in the wake of student calls for 'free, quality decolonial education' emanating from #RhodesMustFall in Cape Town.
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Tim Ingold's Anthropology and/as Education suggests anthropologists should approach their work in the field and in the classroom as related activities of learning through attention, care and establishing common ground. While Ingold's primary focus was on participant observation, this contribution will suggest this is an equally fruitful way to approach other modes of fieldwork, in particular that mainstay of archaeological field projects, the field school. Through considering a field school organised with Sol Plaatje University at Kuruman in South Africa in 2018 as a location for experimenting with decolonial pedagogy, this paper will draw on the ideas of Ingold, Paolo Freire and Walter Mignolo, but also African modes of education, to imagine a future in which the field, rather than being approached primarily as a site of extraction, can be conceptualised as a place of dialogue, exchange and learning, where it may be possible to acknowledge and recollect past traumas, but also begin to develop new forms of remembering in common. While the field may be a necessary place of repair, where space and time can be found for such projects of re-collection, the challenge for the future of 'Anthropology as education' arguably lies in translating insights and methods arising from such experiments into the more hierarchical institutional structures of the university and the museum.
Both anthropology and education look to make easier our dwelling the world. To do so, both must reshape themselves to find new ways of action. It has to do with new forms of accompanying different manners of dwelling a humanely and sustainably developed world where our dreams may become true.
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As an artist, educator, and anthropologist I have been trying to put together art, education, and anthropology in daily life as a learning explorer journey. What I found so far is that these three (Disciplines? Social fields? Life dimensions?) have to do with dwelling the world: from perception, epistemology and ontology, respectively. I found dwelling a powerful and useful concept. It allows us to assemble daily life to make sense of it.
Sense is another point in common for them: Art, education, and anthropology are three ways of making sense of life. Thus, they are also deeply related to affect: how we affect and are affected by others. But, trying to focus on our studio theme, how do education and anthropology affect and make senses in contemporary society?
Educators have earlier taken in that learning doesn’t have to do with knowledge transmission but with experience (Dewey, Arendt). We are struggling to learn how to help students to have experiences which bring meaningful knowledge (David Ausubel) to them. We already know it is also social constructed (Lev Vygotski). At the same time anthropologists have learned that conditions and possibilities of collective life are only reachable by learning with others instead of learning about them. We are struggling to learn how to do it. We have looked to art strategies and technology possibilities and conditions. We already know it is also about experiences.
We understand contemporary society from two former ideas. First, the absence of a meta story which helps us to acknowledge our presence in the world (García Canclini, 2010) and an economic value production model which uses aesthetic-imaginative-emotional dimensions of arts to increase company profits and facilitate their access and positioning in new markets (Lipovetsky & Serroy, 2015). I name this economic value creation logic fragmented cultural capitalism. Therefore, in contemporary society, we construct meaning necessarily linked to the affective dynamics of desire and enjoyment (Blanco & Sanchez, 2018). This cultural economic global order works within a communicative ecosystem. It integrates all communicative processes, their interrelationships, and ways of meaning construction. From a communication ecology approach, the communicational and the digital are a "co-construction process in which the subjects affect the transformation of technologies and in which they modify the ways of being, doing and think about people” (Amador, 2013, p.13 in Barrios, 2015, p.86). The digital articulates the communicative ecosystem and, dynamically, configures the everyday life. It shapes our image of what reality is from the interactions we build when communicating, including the devices we use for this (Giraldo-Dávila & Maya-Franco, 2015). Thus, it affects our ways of knowing by building new and more experiential sensitivities.
These sensitivities demands us, educators and anthropologists, to take in the risk and stop leading out to the world but accompanying every different manner of dwelling it. Accompany means not only to respect others, but to be able to put on their shoes, to let them be. Then, a humanely and sustainably developed world, where our dreams may become true, might be possible.
What makes our work anthropological? Speaking from my experience of walking with nursing home residents, I follow Ingold to suggest that participant observation is a practice in which anthropologists do not study other people but study and work with people, which makes it distinctive and valuable.
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What makes our work uniquely anthropological? Speaking from my own experience of working with nursing home residents with dementia, I follow Ingold (2021b) to suggest that participant observation is a particular practice in which anthropologists do not study other people: we study and work with people. This distinguishes our work from other social studies of human conditions.
One of the most devastating effects of bodily decline is cognitive impairment. The majority of nursing home residents suffer cognitive impairment to varying degrees, which affects their capacities to reflect upon and articulate their thoughts and feelings. Given its emphasis on the necessity of language and mental capacity in knowledge production, interview-based nursing home studies often exclude residents who could not talk coherently and give informed consent due to dementia. Struggling with how to communicate with residents to understand their experiences of daily care delivery, I was faced with the question: What can I know when residents can no longer tell?
Instead of posing the question, "What can we know?", staff in the care facilities ask, "What should we do?" to care for residents who have transcended the limits of knowing through verbal communication. While knowing where the challenge lies, they still strive to care beyond the limits. Despite the loss of speech, staff can gain access, through increased sensibility and sensitivity, to a tacit dimension of knowing as they carry out their intimate care work, such as assisting residents to walk.
In this paper, I will draw on my fieldwork to show how, by learning from staff and following in their footsteps, I could find the pathway leading to the experiential dimensions of people who are old, frail and cared for in an institutional setting. Spending many fieldwork hours in the corridors and communal areas of the care facilities, I engaged myself in the process of participating, observing, reflecting, describing and communicating. The issue of residents' walking was felt, seen, written, thought through and discussed. The entire process made it possible for me to have different experiences, see from different perspectives and combine different practices into developing my own understanding of whether and how residents are assisted to walk in the nursing homes.
For both Kant (1996, 2018) and Foucault (2005), anthropology constantly questions the limits of human knowledge and the nature of concrete existence. The question of finitude has become fundamental since Kant, and for Foucault, anthropology offers no solution. Yet, my 12-months fieldwork in two aged care homes in Adelaide, South Australia leads me to contend that the work of anthropology extends beyond the accustomed ways of knowledge production to explore the tacit or hidden dimensions of human experience. In doing so, the value of work that anthropologists do can be seen through the acquisition of a comparative and critical understanding of human beings in the one world we co-inhabit (Ingold 2021b).
This contribution reflects over the role of anthropology to unsettle ontological and epistemological assumptions by exploring and experimenting other ways of learning and being together in academia.
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My contribution draws upon the experience of working in the interdisciplinary context of the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo (Italy), where I have worked as a research fellow involved in didactic activities, both as teacher of anthropology and co-coordinator of a post-graduate program. I will present two examples in which the potential of anthropology emerged in triggering educational paths that led students and myself ‘in the open’ (Ingold 2007), out of our certainties and exposed to other possibilities of knowing food and landscapes in their reciprocal relations.
The first example concerns recipes, conventionally understood as sets of instructions independent from socioecological contingencies, to be followed in a specific order. We challenged this hegemonic understanding by discussing the ‘recipes’ that George Hunt collected amongst Native Americans of the Pacific North West coast (Boas 1921). By studying and discussing together, we realised that those ‘recipes’, far from being recognisable as such, are indeed stories that question our approach to food, as much as hegemonic educational models. We had the opportunity to experiment ‘for real’ this alternative gastronomic and educational model by organising a ‘traditional feast’ under the guidance of Teetl'it Gwich'in Chief Wanda Pascal.
The second example regards landscapes and the role it plays in shaping relations with food, nutrition, and gastronomic imagination. Each programs at the University of Gastronomic Sciences includes foraging workshops led by the resident professor of ethnobotany, who leads students in the fields surrounding the University, teaching them to recognise edible plants, and giving information about their traditional use. In the programme I was co-coordinating I introduced a workshop, aside the foraging classes, inspired to critical mapping approaches (Wood 2010), to the story system of Australian aboriginal people (Milroy and Revell 2013), and to George Hunt’s recipes (Boas 1921). We ended up telling stories along canals and making experiments that helped us to trigger different relations with the landscape through memory, imagination, and the senses.
These examples support the idea of anthropology as inherently educational. However, at the same time, they also demonstrate that for being genuinely educational, anthropology needs to abandon its status as a discipline, and being regarded instead as an undisciplined approach that leads practitioners to experiment with other possibilities of life, thus exposing them to a fully educational process.
A reflection on a series of pedagogic experiments in architectural training where rather than teaching designers to become anthropologists, an anthropological architectural practice-of speculatively collaborative inquiries-was activated and explored through a series of design studio 'intraventions.'
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Since 2015 I have been involved, in different capacities, in formally teaching or supervising the thesis of architects in training. I became interested in exploring the role of pedagogy as part of my ethnographic engagement with design activists, mostly in the domain of urban accessibility, highly invested in mobilising their experiences and knowledge to transform design practice. Indeed, I believe pedagogic venues offer unique opportunities to experiment with modes of making anthropological conceptual and descriptive work otherwise.
In particular, as an STS-inspired anthropologist, I have explored how to make relevant theoretical-descriptive repertoires-such as, more than human or and pluralist thought-for practice of designing urban infrastructures and environments. With that I don't mean teaching, as is customary, social scientific concepts or ethnographic methods so that our counterparts start practicing some form of design or architectural anthropology, perhaps creatively reinventing some of our tools of the trade in the wake.
Rather, what I have become more interested in is in how anthropological descriptive and conceptual work might become relevant in creating the conditions of alternative ways of designing, hence provoking the conditions of inquiring on almost impossible problems by means of design. This has required transitioning from initially 'predicative' pedagogical modes - telling ethnographic stories or reading and explaining works, hoping this to have an impact on our students' architectural practice - to a series of more 'experiential' ones, using the particular affordances of the design studio for that matter.
To illustrate what I mean, I would like to recount a series of engagements, which initiated in a series of studio projects at the Technical University of Munich, called 'Design in Crisis'. In these engagements architects have had to learn to become affected by multi-sensory aspects of the situations in which they designed (going beyond Euclidian spatial practice), as well as radically involving with usually neglected human and non-human actors they should be co-designing with (going beyond the figure of the solo creator). Some of the central explorations of these courses were: How to relearn to practice a multi-sensory and non-visual-centric architecture with the help of beavers, blind or neurodiverse people? The main pedagogic aim of each of these engagements was the production of speculative architectural toolkits: mnemonic devices summarizing the re-learning required by a different architectural practice, as much as learning device of sorts, showing or describing how to initiate oneself in.
All in all, the process-oriented pedagogical approach of these speculative situations was to experiment with what could described as anthropological practice as a form of 'architectural intravention:' that is, an intervention towards the inside of architectural practice, using the device of the classroom and the power differential of our positionalities to make space for non-conventional output. The hope was that the very design of situations learning to be affected by neglected actors could 're-activate' design practice (to use the vocabulary of Isabelle Stengers). Hence bringing forth an anthropological architectural practice, where all involved collaborated in more speculatively collaborative material inquiries.
What happens when we admit the students' experience in the design studio classroom? Anthropology has helped us in reconceptualizing the 'Alicante Model' for welcoming their affect for people and landscape beyond the reference models of dissident pedagogies that are born "by opposition".
Paper long abstract:
For years, the 'Alicante Model' for architectural design teaching was able to sustain a coherent confrontational narrative while the tension with respect to what was happening in the more prestigious schools or in the professional "out there" remained. It happened then that the stability of that world collapsed and other worlds came to the fore from other urgencies that expanded the scale and range of our problems. At that moment it was the epistemic and methodological contributions of critical studies and the social sciences that allowed us to approach the city as a much more dynamic and interdependent matter of interest than we architects had thought.
From the beginning of the educational experience in Alicante, we had sensed that only an intense concentration on the organisation of the dispensable, on that which is not subject to institutional surveillance, would be capable of producing better ruptures than those of a confrontational model. We are talking about the intangible contributions of sharing a paella on Fridays after class, of the off-programme choice of trips, including their affective design, of the design of festive collective practices, of the constant sharing of the courses, etc. These are undoubtedly minor but effective issues for questioning the normative accommodations that articulate the teaching programmes and the understanding of what the university is or can be. This allowed us to design practices to coexist in our difference without ambitions of convergence. However, this spirit was not adequately conceptualised in the Alicante Model: while we allowed our classrooms to be populated by students who, timidly at first, demanded the possibility of talking about the issues that mattered to them in the classroom, we did not know how to explain ourselves the transgression of their presence. Still, it is difficult for us to imagine what they will do as professional architects with it.
In this work we have tried to conceptualise the appearance of this strange knowledge in the design studio classroom, with the aim of knowing what to do with it, but from the certainty that it is important to understand how a territory in the 'near' periphery is used and produced. Also, with the wish that it will make emerge architects that keep their affections at work. At the time, the notion of student-actor allowed us to make the participation of teachers and students in the classroom more symmetrical. Now, the notion of uncommons can help us to deal with the incommensurability of the knowledge that students bring into the classroom. Our wish is that teaching practices do not serve to integrate these incommensurables into a predefined architectural 'whole', but that students make new 'parts' with which to share a living construction of architecture. We know admitting students affected experience in the classroom is an act of dissent that involves miseducating architects in their learning of the discipline and we have found useful the experience of social sciences in taking seriously the knowledge at work in the lives of urban actors, still two foreign languages for us.
I seek to open a space for discussion of 'acts of learning' by diving into sustainability entrepreneurs and their activities to investigate the ways in which they transform socio-material environments and embody in new ultra-social collectivities to provide new understandings of 'acts of learning'.
Paper long abstract:
Research on sustainability entrepreneurship in the different settings in the world might provide novel insights about reasoning in which acts of learning (Hasse & Clausen) play a significant role and might inform our understanding of the present challenges with advancing the Sustainable Development Goals. Often entrepreneurs incite social change (Barth) at a local, regional, and societal level through impacting their customers, employees, and communities (Clausen, 2017; Dana et al, 2014). However, little is known about how entrepreneurs learn to act: to respond to, localize, and advance the SDGs. The presentation investigates with point of departure in Cathrine Hasse’s (2020theoretical perspective on socratic ignorance how entrepreneurs in different local initiatives address, shape and are influenced by their surroundings and how a more fine-grained understanding of entrepreneurs acts of learning might advance the SDGs. The empirical settings are: 1) the Mexican village, Tulum where Mexican, Mayan, and Italian entrepreneurs localize the global climate change agenda using plastic bottles to negotiate the political (regional and local) space. 2) the Moroccan village, Tiznit, a female entrepreneur sets up a Fair trade argan cooperative using innovative technologies (concretely to process argan into oil) but also to overcome constraints in highly patriarchal communities. 3) the Nepalese area, Annapurna where a Danish/English/Nepalese research group where to develop a new trail system for future European travelers but due to COVID19 part of the identification of sustainable trails, hostels etc. went online and materialities became mediated by technologies such as video, and GPS systems which created insight into acts of learning.
All though sustainability entrepreneurship literature in its core is about change, adapting and learning the literature pays less attention to how sustainability activities respond and attend to knowledge sharing, to collaboration between actors and co-creating technologies – as acts of learning. The presentation seeks to open a progressive space for dialogue and discussion to provide new understandings of learning using entrepreneurship and the sustainability agenda as an entry point.
When anthropologists learn, the potentials of such learning are not realized or fulfilled by wilful acts. In this proposal I explore how anthropologists learn in ways that transform socio-material environments and embody us in new ultra-social collectivities.
Paper long abstract:
Anthropologists are professional learners, yet we tend to discuss the topic of learning primarily instrumentally as a topic for educations in schools. In this proposal, I shall contend that the concept of learning is essential for understanding what anthropology is all about. What is learning in an anthropological sense? Some would equate it with experience, but this, on its own, is not enough to deepen our understanding of what learning really is. Contrary to a onetime experience, learning is an ongoing process of inquiry building on preceding learning. It is fundamentally a process, which underlies the ways in which we attend to the world. It is an ongoing process of transformation whereby the traces of what we have previously learned are mobilized in the course of learning something new. We learn, in other words, with potentials - and as anthropologist we build up potentials through learning that make us capable of being receptive (corresponding) to the material and social lives of other people. There is an rather an ongoing creation of fields of attention, emergent agency and the mutual responsiveness - or correspondence - that these make possible ( Ingold 2017 ). I shall exemplify the process of learning as an anthropologist three ways, each of which challenges instrumental understandings of learning: 1. Learning is our way of escaping preformed and fixed categorisations when we meet new people in new environments. 2. Our potentials for learning are not in our head, nor in our individual bodies but in the relations we form as we correspond 3. As we build up new potentials for further learning we join new ultra-social collectivities.
In this communication, I comment on how, while I was trained in anthropology, I learned to move like a crab (Das, 2020): becoming able to hesitate, to stay exposed, vulnerable, thinking and experimenting a little bit more about the relationships between design, anthropology and education.
Paper long abstract:
In her most recent book, Veena Das describes her thinking with the figure of crab-like movements: "my thought seems to proceed in crab-like movements, forward and sideways, rather than being able to run for the finishing line" (2020, xiiii). In an interview about the book, she returns to the figure of crab-like movements to comment on how, in her way of thinking and writing, ethnography, biography and autobiography intertwine: "some thought or idea goes in one direction for years and then it can happen that I don't know how to move forward. And then, sometimes years later, that idea that was blocked comes back, and this can include thoughts from my childhood, for example, or something that is triggered in a classroom, or something that is triggered while walking in the street, or reading a book" (Das, 2021: 789). In this communication, I intend to trace some scenes that I took part in in the classroom, as a student and later as a teacher, in a design school. Among these scenes, I note how the study of anthropology allowed me to learn the arts of noticing (Tsing, 2015), and so, how it allowed me to stay a little longer with what matters when we think about education, preventing me from moving forward into the world armed as a designer, in order to, while I was training myself in anthropology, to become able to stay exposed, vulnerable, in hesitation, thinking and experimenting a little bit more about the relationships between design and education. Among the commented scenes, I realize how the study of anthropology, to which I dedicated myself in the interval between my training, in that school, as a designer, and my return to that same educational institution, as a teacher, de-immunized me, pointing out paths not to move forward, but, rather, so that I could learn to notice, and, thus, allowing myself to stay a little longer with what troubles me: so, my training in anthropology allowed me to learn how to move as the crabs invoked by Das: one step forward, another sideways. In this communication, I observe how the study of anthropology allowed me to return to the educational environment of a design school, and there, no longer as a designer, but as a former-designer quasi-anthropologist, I found ways to stay with the troubles (Haraway, 2016), reconsidering and reclaiming what can be the adventure of education: not as immunization or conformation, but, as bel hooks would say, as a practice of freedom (hooks, 1994); or, as we could also say, with Tim Ingold (2018), as exposure, disarmament, and vulnerability.
We would like to contribute our experience of research into craft and mathematics in whatever way would suit the studio. We could participate in a conversation, lead a mini-studio for participants, or simple present material about our research so far. Please let us know which is best.
Paper long abstract:
Forces in Translation has been exploring the relationship between anthropology, craft and mathematics through participants from these disciplines working together in studio trials since 2019. We have made lines through braiding, weaving and twisting; explored curvature through plaiting bodily forms; and by working in three dimensions we have critiqued dimensional assumptions in topological theory. The aim is to show how working within convergences between mathematics and craft enables a more holistic and realisable way of understanding these disciplines. An anthropological input enables participants to take an emergent and exploratory approach in understanding mathematics and craft, and also to consider scale, vitality and community in exploring aspects of learning, such as skill, patterning, geometry, space and number.
For us, the investigative process is an important aspect of how we come to learn. In our research, that investigative process is qualitative and open, a kind of anthropological intuition or following a Malinowskian 'foreshadowed problem'. In this regard, for our research, anthropology, like art, is a particular approach to education and learning which follows experience.
Our concern with scale and community means that we challenge any notion of mathematics as an abstract, hidden, more truthful version of the world, of which lived practices such as craft or dance are less than perfect exemplars. Rather, we follow thinkers such as James Gibson and Robin Wall-Kimmerer, who show how scale, whether spatial or temporal, has implications for how things are experienced and understood. In similar vein, we do not see our research as a study of craft and mathematical practitioners, nor that our different disciplines are part of a hierarchy where one is in the service of the other. We are exploring our concerns together.
Finally, our approach to investigation is one where practice is key. So we may read papers, write, discuss, film, but we also make things and engage with materials. We find that the act of engagement brings forth new ideas, resonance, and enables a synthesizing approach (rather than an analytical one). This perhaps shows parallels with Arthur Koestler's notions of analogy and bi-sociation, or Charles Peirce's approach to abduction (quite different to that of Alfred Gell!).
This talk centres on the work of regenerating Earth and social systems and what it could mean for education in the twenty-first century.
Paper long abstract:
Through showcasing some aspects of my work with Mycelium Design, CELL - Centre for Ecological Learning Luxembourg and Ferme du bout du monde, I would like to enter into dialogue about how and why the (difficult) work of regenerating Earth and social systems is today essential for learning about and practising humility, courage, peace and being in relationship.
In this studio I would like to share my work on theatre for toddlers as an extension of my anthropological practice and invite a collective introspection on whether we can think about anthropology and pedagogy as the coming together of the sensorial and the material tangible.
Paper long abstract:
I have been engaged in making plays for toddlers, that is make plays for children below 3 years to watch while being a practising anthropologist. But how does one create a language of the theatre when precisely the faculty of language, spoken or the word is not a given? For toddlers, the world through language is not available in quite the same way as us adults or even slightly older children who can imagine up the hills, river and rain if one utters these words. If you gesturally pass a ball to a toddler without a tangible ball, it is confusing. Given this stage of socialisation, how can we create a piece of theatre or art for toddlers where language is not confined to the spoken or the word. Given this constraint, toddler theatre works with tangible physical material, preferably one single material on stage to communicate a theatre experience. Materials move, make sound, can be seen in different ways, they have a surface, tactility, colour and shape - all the crucial elements of theatre. But what is the play of material that makes it theatre? It is at this point, that I have found ways to merge and learn from being an anthropologist while making plays for toddlers. Materials work aurally and visually and certainly creates a sensorial experience for an audience but as creators of a theatre piece what becomes interesting for me is to think about how a conceptual frame can inform the play of material on stage. If paper crumbles or sand takes shape does it evoke an emotion? What happens when actor's bodies interact and play with paper crumbling or sand taking shape? Can we have a concept that informs the movement of paper, clay, sand, glass, steel, seeds or whatever material we choose to work with? How do actors react, respond, laugh or cry or move with material. Figuring out reasons of how and why should materials move, collide, overlap or play is informed by a concept that only we as creators work with. We do not expect to communicate a concept to a child but we work with the conceptual to inform the making of the sensorial. While toddlers are our primary audience, they never come unaccompanied. Adults either as parents or guardians always accompany a toddler. We do not want to treat adults as caretakers of a child in watching a play. They are an equal audience for us and the challenge of this theatre piece is to create something that works for a very young child and an adult at the same time. Narrativising the movement of material on stage in interaction with live bodies, informed by a conceptual frame then becomes the fundamental principle of toddler theatre and this for me is the basic motif of any pedagogical exercise and even anthropology for that matter - an invitation to a sensorial embodiment which allows us to respond to the world beyond ourselves but through the tangible real.
This contribution is drawn from a long-running elective at Manchester School of Architecture named 'Graphic Anthropology'. During the pandemic, the focus shifted from public space and its social lives towards the domestic sphere, challenging participants to document the spaces of everyday life.
Paper long abstract:
Anthropology has been a part of the curriculum at Manchester School of Architecture for some time, forming the school's reputation for architectural humanities grounded in the social sciences. One of the longest running units has had several names over 12 years, and was redesigned in 2020 as the 'Anthropology of Home'. This simple premise offered the opportunity to investigate the spaces where we spent so many hours during Covid-19 lockdowns and the shift to online teaching.
For this contribution, I will introduce some of the supporting tasks, or 'field notes' used to frame descriptive essays. These tasks combined practices of graphic description with theoretical richness; always with a focus on the banal and everyday. Describing the process of making a meal, the arrangement of a desk, or meaningful collections of objects made for fascinating and varied portraits of domesticity.
The importance of this for architectural education is clear: design processes often begin from assumptions about lifestyles and how spaces are used. The realities of a residential space are often substantially different to this imagined domesticity, often eliding the messiness and overlapping interests at work in making a home, be they house-mates, landlords, or neighbours. By revealing the students' own idiosyncrasies as both significant and pertinent to the design process, a new design process can be imagined, one which accommodates the actual needs and uses of the most important spaces: the home.
The graphic focus of the field notes is also important for anthropology, with a number of recent moves towards 'graphic anthropology' focusing on narrative forms such as the graphic novel, there are a wide range of other inscriptive practices relevant to the study of anthropology. By immersing ourselves in these ways of knowing, alternative processes of understanding are available to anthropologists as well as architects.
This session will recruit you as a participant, presenting you with one of the tasks undertaken by students, followed by reflections on descriptive understanding through inscriptive practices such as drawing, notation and mapping.
Tim Ingold (University of Aberdeen)
Short Abstract:
Education is literally a way of leading out into the world, where we are exposed to beings and ways of life different from those to which we are accustomed. If we take education in this sense, then Anthropology is educational through-and-through. But it is a sense that challenges the orthodox idea of education as the intergenerational transmission of authorised knowledge. Philosophers of education, from John Dewey a century ago to Gert Biesta today, have struggled to articulate a vision of education that would escape the stultification of the transmission model. A critical anthropology needs to catch up with this literature.
Description:
We human beings don’t just live our lives. We lead them. In what senses does a life that is led have a past and a future, and a notion of its own direction? How can it take us beyond what already exists? These, fundamentally, are the questions of education. The word ‘education’, after all, is derived from the Latin ducere, ‘to lead’, plus ex-, ‘out’. Education leads us out into the world, so that we may observe, study and respond to the phenomena we find there. This studio starts from the premise that as a way of leading life with others, Anthropology is educational through-and-through. It is not so much a subject to be taught as one that sets out to learn. By way of the conversations and collaborations it joins or initiates, anthropological study opens our eyes and ears to possibilities of knowing and being that might otherwise go unheeded.
This premise, however, challenges both educational and anthropological orthodoxy. On the side of Education, it overthrows the traditional idea of pedagogy as the transmission of authorised knowledge from one generation to the next. Education is rather a task in which generations can work together in forging a future common to all. It is about learning to attend to things, and to respond to them, rather than acquiring the knowledge that absolves us of the need to do so. On the side of Anthropology, we can no longer pretend to study ‘other’ peoples and ‘their’ worlds. What makes Anthropology educational today is that we don’t so much study other people as study with them, who also study with us. This must be as true, moreover, of what goes on in the ‘field ’as of what goes on in ‘school’. We can no longer place the field and the school on opposite sides of a division between the production of knowledge and its transmission. Both are places of education, potentially transformative for all who enter them.
Ever since the publication of John Dewey’s Democracy and Education, over a century ago, philosophers have struggled to articulate a vision of education that would escape the stultification of the transmission model. Keyworks include Hannah Arendt’s ‘The crisis in education ’, Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Jacques Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Jan Masschelein’s ‘E-ducating the gaze: the idea of a poor pedagogy’, and Gert Biesta’s The Beautiful Risk of Education. A critical anthropology, if it is to address the multiple crises of our own times, needs to catch up with this literature. If education is the means by which a society ensures its own future, then what kind of future is implied, and how does the past bear upon it? How should we imagine generations and the relations between them? How can we rethink both education and democracy so as to heal the rift between them, that is currently tearing our societies apart? How can we learn to live together in difference, both presently and into the future?
We invite studio participants to add what, for you, have been pivotal sources of inspiration, with a view to creating a list of essential readings in this field. To keep the list to a manageable length, please add no more than two references.
To add your references please copy and paste the link below
https://pad.riseup.net/p/MU98Of0bzROcdq2MSaOx-keep
Accepted contributions:
Session 1Jamie Barnes (University of Sussex)
Aina Azevedo (Universidade Federal da Paraíba)
Leticia Nagao (Malmö University)
Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier (University of Victoria)
Johannes Sjöberg (University of Manchester)
Anne Douglas (Robert Gordon University)
Jamie Wallace (Aarhus University)
Joseph Long (Scottish Autism)
Paola Esposito (University of Oxford) Ben Taylor-Green (University of Oxford)
Luciele Comunello (UERGS) Isabel Cristina de Moura Carvalho (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais - UFMG Brazil)
Paolo Maccagno (University of Aberdeen) Deborah Pinniger (University of Aberdeen)
Chris Wingfield (University of East Anglia)
Orietta Marquina Vega (Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru (PUCP))
Angela Zhang (The University of Adelaide)
Paolo Gruppuso (University of Catania)
Tomás Criado (Open University of Catalonia)
Ester Gisbert Alemany (Universidad de Alicante) Enrique Nieto (University of Alicante)
Helene Balslev (Aalborg University)
Cathrine Hasse (Aarhus University)
Zoy Anastassakis (Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro)
Stephanie Bunn (University of St Andrews) Ricardo Nemirovsky (MMU)
Katy Fox (Mycelium ecosocial design agency)
Subhashim Goswami (Shiv Nadar University)
Ray Lucas (Manchester Metropolitan University)