Short Abstract:

What happens when one person’s words are spoken by another? Does all speech and writing involve being spoken by other voices? This lab explores practices and multimodal possibilities in collaboration, and attunes to the performativity of anthropological praxis and methods of communication.

Long Abstract:

What happens when one person’s words are spoken by another? This is a common enough occurrence at academic conferences, when presenters are unable to attend due to illness or for other reasons. It also calls attention to the inescapably performative dimensions both of reading aloud as the enactment of a written text, and of the citing of the speech of others (whether through paraphrase or direct quotation) as a practice that ethnographers are, arguably, always engaged in. Could it be said, further, that any speech act, in so far as it mobilizes words and idioms that pre-exist the speaker, is a matter of speaking others’ words, including those of the dead? Does all speech and writing involve being spoken by other voices? How might practices of citation or quotation resemble or differ from those of sampling, collage, or montage? This lab explores what might happen to our writing or our engagements with other media if we were to allow these to be explicitly informed by such questions. What new possibilities for collaboration, for speaking with or alongside others, might this open up? We invite registered participants (12) to circulate a new or existing work in any format. This will then be assigned to another participant who will briefly respond, react, or otherwise develop the piece. We are particularly interested in responses traversing modal boundaries (e.g., image, sound, text). The results will be shared and then discussed and developed further in a workshop format during the lab.

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