Paper Short Abstract:

Based on two cases of co-creation in the field - with a group of ceramic makers in China and a network of contemporary artists in Japan - we explore the emergent nature of both artistic practices and research methods, opening up a space to rethink ways of knowing in academia and beyond.

Paper Abstract:

How do artistic practices arising in the field become research methods for anthropologists? In what ways do anthropologists’ research processes animate the practices of our friends in the field? In this paper we explore the emergent nature of artistic practices and research methods alike by comparing two instances of co-creation with interlocutors in the field - a group of young ceramic makers in Jingdezhen, China and a network of contemporary artists in Osaka, Japan. Zihan’s research explores how, against the backdrop of an increasingly anxious social atmosphere in contemporary China, young migrant ceramic makers ‘craft’ wellbeing in creative practice and everyday life. As Zihan’s interlocutors learn to ‘articulate’ their creative inspirations and life stories through their daily conversations and interviews, she learns skills of capturing the ‘inarticulable’ by drawing, photographing, and making ceramics with them. Iza’s work with artists in Osaka entailed many encounters of co-creation, sometimes led by artists, at other times inspired by Iza’s invitation. The artists’ own engagement in various forms of research and experimentation in both material and verbal forms of expression troubles any neat opposition between verbal and non-verbal articulation of ideas, and traces the process of arrival at insights. While these emergent and co-created methods aim to better represent and evoke experiences in the field, they also, in turn, pose challenges for integration into academic discourse. Such arising issues offer an opportunity not only to adopt a more open-ended approach to methods, but to rethink the epistemological underpinnings of anthropological academic endeavour.