Short Abstract

Anthropology of art often overlooks the generative processes behind artworks. This panel seeks methods to make such solitary, often non-social processes visible and ethnographically analyzable.

Long Abstract

Generating artworks is a process that exposes subjectivity in action, making subjectivity — often considered private — visible to others, and therefore a legitimate object for ethnographic inquiry, calling for explicit methodological proposals.

We invite contributions that present, compare, and explore methods for observing processes typically treated as solitary or non-social (e.g. composing, writing, designing, rehearsing), with art as a key entry point but not the only one. Exemplary approaches may include, among others, forms of participant observation that move from external observation to genuine participation, where the researcher’s involvement becomes a tool to access and describe otherwise hidden dynamics, as well as micro-phenomenology, think-aloud and elicitation protocols, video-stimulated recall, diaries, co-creation practices, and studio shadowing — provided that the researcher’s stance and procedures are made explicit.

Core questions: What does the researcher’s presence activate or transform? How can interventions be tuned — in timing, intensity, and reversibility — to reveal processes without stalling them? What can count as traces (verbalizations, gestures, drafts, versions, failures), and at what temporal resolution? How do we enable comparison and dialogue across cases without reducing them to metrics or dissolving them into purely autobiographical accounts? What ethical considerations arise when rendering inner dynamics intersubjective?

The aim of the panel is collective refinement: building a shared vocabulary and practice for engaging with reputedly non-social, subjective processes through ethnography, and opening space for methodological inventiveness.

Propose paper