Paper long abstract:

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.

Paper long abstract:

The paper builds on my early fieldwork on contemporary art and curatorial practices in Mexico City (2016), as well as on a recent book on contemporary aesthetics (2022).  The aim of these fieldwork-based inquiries has been to both problematize the mediatory role and increasing influence of curatorial practice in contemporary life and to evaluate the ethical, political, and aesthetic implications of curation for imagining other ways of living and being human. While "anthropo-curation" or "curating anthropos" designates the conceptual side of these inquiries, "curatorial design" refers to the research design register. Anthropo-curation and curatorial designs are two intimately interconnected forms of work: concept work and fieldwork, respectively.

In my current curatorial design I focus on media practices situated in a marine mise-en-scène dubbed The Strait and the Sea. Specifically, I follow and juxtapose three kinds of practices indexing three different yet intriguingly related ways of life: an inventor, composer, and engineer's sound work and musical records of encounters with grey whales, sperm whales, and bottlenose dolphins in the Sea of Cortez; the hydrophone recordings, spectrograms, drone footage, and photo-identifications by a team of cetacean scientists who run a research sailboat and a bio-acoustics laboratory in the Tyrrhenian Sea; and the multimedia online platforms of fishers who produce audiovisual diaries of interactions with marine mammals in the Strait of Gibraltar.

By juxtaposing these human practices, marine life, signals, noises, instruments, and communication attitudes, the paper explores the ethical, existential, and ecological implications of anthropo-curation.

Paper long abstract:

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. 

Paper long abstract:

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.