Paper short abstract:

Ethnographic experiments have emerged as a form of speculation with novel modes of relation with the empirical. The locus of knowledge production in them is not the anthropologist’s unmediated experience but rather the experimental arrangement (field device) through which ethnography takes place.

Paper long abstract:

We live in a tumultuous epoch that demands from anthropology to learn how to inquire anew since our conventional modes of relation to the empirical (this technical knowledge we have traditionally called method) seems to be unable to cope with the growing complexities of our worlds. Under these circumstances, Martin Savransky has argued that our modes of inquiry demand ‘a practice of speculative experimentation as a means of imagining novel and future modes of social inquiry’ (Savransky, 2016: 23). It could be said that his invocation has been embraced by many anthropologists engaging in all kinds of field experiments in recent times. Far from the traditional naturalistic relation to the empirical, in these experiments anthropologists devise the ethnographic encounter with their counterparts: arranging scenographies (Cantarella, Marcus, and Hegel 2019), designing infrastructures (Kim Fortun et al. 2014) or engaging in co-reaction processes (Martínez 2021). The experiment emerges thus as a form of speculation with novel modes of relation with the empirical. I argue that ethnographic experiments involve a radical transformation in the anthropological relation to the empirical, since the locus of knowledge production is not the anthropologist’s unmediated experience in the field, but rather the experimental arrangement through which ethnography takes place. In this displacement, the field loses its relevance in the conceptualisation of empirical practices and it is by relegating the field to a secondary position that ethnography is enhanced by the inventive and speculative experimental arrangements (what I call field devices) through which ethnographic experimentation is carried out.