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Undoing anthropology requires a fundamental examination of its core epistemic practice: ethnographic fieldwork. Strathern’s concept of the ‚second field‘ highlights the dazzle between field immersement and field description. Ethnographic experimentation has mostly addressed and messed with the relation between the two. Interestingly, the current surge of multimodal anthropologies cannot be fully framed in those terms, as it incorporates a novel, but hitherto overlooked anthropological space: the studio. Traditionally associated with artistic and design practices, the studio stands for the creation of artifacts and things aimed to expand and transform the more-than-human collectives we inhabit. As such, the studio as a site of the artificial has been traditionally opposed to the lab and the field as ‚truth spots‘ of science. Yet, at the core of multimodal anthropology, there is a constitutive relation between the studio and the field that enhances or replaces the conventional anthropological interplay between a first and a second field. The studio serves, first, as a space for speculative anticipation, involving the creation of devices and forms that will fundamentally shape the field. Secondly, it provides a space of syn(es)thetic displacement, performing aesthetic interventions aimed at altering the distribution of the sensible. Drawing from two ethnographic projects mediated by studio processes —a game design process about real estate markets and the construction of a dithering booth for hosting interlocutors— I advocate for embracing anthropology as an interdisciplinary practice of the artificial.

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In my new "curatorial design" (Elhaik, Marcus 2010; 2020) I build on my early fieldwork on critical art and curatorial practices in Mexico City (2016), as well as on a recent book on contemporary aesthetics (2022).  In the latter, I had engaged the image work, ethical demands, and existential struggles of contemporary artists who find their inspiration in natural history and ocean sciences. In this new inquiry, I shift my attention to the audiovisual media practices of cetacean ethologists and communication scientists, as well as fishers’ video diaries of interactions with cetaceans. To these, I also juxtapose contemporary artists’ sonic and visual records of encounters with these decidedly intriguing marine mammals alas too often reduced to the moniker “charismatic”.  Concretely, I zoom in on three audiovisual media practices: the sound compositions of Ariel Guzik, an artist who designs and engineers instruments to communicate with whales and dolphins in the Sea of Cortez; the hydrophone recordings, spectrograms, drone footage, and photo-identifications by a team of cetacean ethologists and communication scientists who run a research vessel and a bioacoustics lab in the Tyrrhenian Sea near Rome; and the online platforms of fishers who produce video diaries of potentially fatal interactions with orcas in the Strait of Gibraltar.  These carefully selected media practices are the fragments of actuality and "micro-tonalities" that compose my book and radio documentary in progress, provisionally called The Strait and The Sea. 

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If anthropology is to participate in constituting the very futures anthropologists often call for - futures of hope, care, inclusivity and sustainability for people, other species, organisms and planet - we need to dramatically shift the temporalities of the discipline, and to engage theory, concepts, methodology, knowing and engagement outside the anthropology and academia to that effect.  

I will not advocate for the Anthropology of the Future, but instead for a new Futures Anthropology, which is capable of occupying and shifting the futures spaces where academic economists, engineers, designers collude with the business consultancies, professional futurists and government collude in seeking to "shape" futures.  

I argue for a new movement where we are attentive to how a revised anthropology can contribute, and where we consider what we need to do to be listened to; not only in an interdisciplinary stage but in the discipline of anthropology. 

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When Alfred Haddon first visited the Torres Straits in 1888 he did so as part of a biological expedition where innovative dredging techniques and mapping methods tested the correlations between speciation and geographical isolation. Haddon’s vision of fieldwork for the famous 1898 expedition was largely shaped by an understanding of experimental assemblages capable of capturing local living systems. In the 1950s, ethnographers at Rhodes-Livingstone Institute (RLI) in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) stopped using tents for fieldwork and began using caravans and vanettes instead to avoid being associated with colonial officers on tour. The invention of “situational analysis” by RLI anthropologists was in no small measure expressive of this self-reflexive attention to movement and politics in racially charged contexts. Today, anthropological fieldwork often translates into the collaborative production of theatre plays, ethnographic films, digital archives, soundscapes or exhibitions. Ethnographers past and present have thus been drawn into inhabiting and designing their field sites through the ecological assemblage of instruments, recording machines, resonant densities and situational relations. Getting a hold on such “spiderweb anthropologies”, as I shall call them here, can perhaps help us better understand how fieldwork always weaves fragile installations oscillating between tension, suspension and regeneration, between capture and captivation.