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.