Paper short abstract

This paper asks how reflections on laboratories might illuminate current debates on field research.

Paper long abstract

Anthropological appeals to evidence usually invoke a connection between the imagined field and the argument in a text, in an appeal to authorial legitimacy that Strathern calls an 'aesthetic impasse'. The location of knowledge generation appears to play an important role in most research traditions, often defining different disciplines by their association with either laboratories or fields. This paper asks what the laboratory can tell us about the field, and what social anthropology can tell us about hybrid methods such as 'living labs'.