Paper Short Abstract:

This paper, based on two decades of experience sharing anthropological knowledge with artists and art students, aims to discuss experimental techniques and approaches that allow us to reconfigure and reimagine ways of nurturing an anthropological sensibility beyond the boundaries of the discipline.

Paper Abstract:

Communicating and nurturing an anthropological sensibility in learning and artistic processes involving non-anthropologists has been my challenge over the last two decades. This experience has become an epistemological feedback loop, in which sharing processes allow me to interweave the knowledge and actions of the people I work with with my own practice as an anthropologist. The territories in which this happens are mainly an arts and design school that has always welcomed anthropological knowledge enthusiastically, as well as artist collectives that engage with the discipline as part of their creative processes. Although I call on the well established connection between the fields of anthropology and art (Fernandes Dias 1999, 2001; Sansi 2015, 2020; Schneider & Wright 2010; Foster [1996] 2004), over the years I have simultaneously developed a set of experimental methodologies. These include leaving the classroom and the academic context, assuming the potential for nomadism and affectation that fieldwork calls for. Long walks in different settings, discussing academic texts in unlikely contexts and conditions, materialising and sharing knowledge through visual and performative resources are some of the approaches I have developed trying to reimagine forms of communicating anthropological expertise. It has been also an endeavour to devise sensitive ways of relating to a "world on a knife edge" (Ingold 2018) and its urgencies, crossing agendas that circulate between the two fields, such as ecology, gender politics or decolonial processes, among others. In this paper I intend to share some examples and formulate a set of reflections about this journey.