Paper short abstract

Researcher-as-Obstacle (RAO) is a method for accessing artists’ lived creative dynamics in real time. By intervening during making, RAO reveals how artworks affect their makers and how subjective processes become ethnographically observable.

Paper long abstract

Researcher-as-Obstacle (RAO) is a methodological framework designed to make artists’ subjective creative processes ethnographically accessible while they unfold. Rather than interviewing after the fact, RAO introduces controlled obstacles during the act of making and uses micro-phenomenological questioning to capture the artist’s moment-to-moment experience. This intervention foregrounds the oscillation between action (what the artist does to the work) and affect (how the evolving work redirects the artist’s attention, intention, or stance).

The approach reframes artworks not as completed objects but as active sites for accessing lived processes. Artists frequently describe the work-in-progress as “telling,” “guiding,” or “resisting” them. RAO documents how such expressions correspond to fine-grained experiential shifts that shape creative decisions in situ. These data reveal a dynamic field structured by tensions—between repetition and exploration, control and loss of control, recognition and surprise—within which artists evaluate what feels “alive,” “right,” or “worth continuing.”

Drawing on a first proof-of-concept case study, the presentation shows how RAO renders this field visible and analytically tractable. The method provides an empirical basis for studying subjective dynamics typically inaccessible to observation alone, and it opens a comparative avenue across artistic domains. For anthropology, RAO offers a way to treat artworks-in-the-making as relational phenomena: places where forms emerge, affect, and negotiate agency. For creativity studies, it specifies how felt qualities—rightness, aliveness, vitality—function as process-guiding criteria.

RAO thus positions artistic creation as a privileged entry point for an ethnography of subjectivity in motion.

Paper short abstract

This paper examines methodological issues in the ethnography of private rosary practice among Catholic mestizo women in Argentina. Considering interviews and micro-phenomenology as methods, it reflects on the limits and possibilities of accessing subjective devotional experience.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the methodological challenges raised by the ethnography of the private and individual practice of the rosary among Catholic mestizo women in Salta, Argentina. The rosary is a devotional practice based on the repetition of prayers alternated with the enunciation of episodes from the life of Jesus. Under the influence of Jesuit spirituality, these women make an additional effort to visualise the scenes of the evoked episode, picturing themselves as internal observer. This imaginative work is central to their devotional experience and raises specific ethnographic questions concerning access to and description of inner practices.

To explore this inner experience, I conducted a series of long, in-depth semi-structured interviews, as well as a more focused interview centred on the lived experience of meditation, inspired by micro-phenomenological approaches. I argue that while this method can provide valuable insights into the subjective experience of meditation, it is also a relatively invasive and rigid approach that risks compromising the ethnographic attention to human relationships by positioning the ethnographer in a hierarchical role akin to that of an experimental conductor. However, by adapting the method to the fieldwork context and combining it with less directive approaches, it was possible to collect innovative ethnographic data. This strategy, for instance, made it possible to map some of the visual traces that compose these mental images, including devotional artworks and fragments of semantic memory.

Paper short abstract

This paper discusses my use of miniature cameras placed on tools and bricks to reveal hidden artistic subjectivity in Chinese Linxia brick carving. By catching real-time dynamics and micro-decisions, it shows the identity dilemmas of craftspeople and unspoken modes of their self-expression.

Paper long abstract

My research focuses on the self-expression and habitus-development that actually occurs, but is not often visible, in the making of Linxia brick carvings, which is usually regarded as "just executing a existing design."

I examined the different choices made by artisans working on the same subject - for example, what main images they choose for the overall work, to what extent they follow the established design, what carving techniques they use, and the finer details of their designs - to observe these tiny but observable differences. Specifically, I used miniature cameras placed on both the bricks and carving tools to catch the craftspeople’s faces and the real-time dynamics of their work. Differences are often not often clearly realised by the craftspeople themselves, but they continue to emerge during their repeated production process.

This technique in participant observation reveals a clear contradiction in artistic expression: the image content is designed and determined by the client and the manager, yet during the actual carving process, craftspeople showcase their styles through attention to detail, skill, and choices. My research does not view this process as assembly-line commercial production, but rather records and analyses these untaught and unspoken modes of expression, evidencing originality or creativity. Based on these process-oriented observations, I consider whether through observing such habits researchers can describe the processes of skill and art in ways that better reflect internal perspectives, and whether artisan’s self-identity can be understood within the distinctions between "worker" and "artist".

Paper short abstract

This paper explores the weaving process of Indonesian traditional woven cloth in translating the creative dynamics involved in making art, which can only be explored through active participation. Exploring themes of gender and embodiment, I explore how cultural knowledge evolves creatively.

Paper long abstract

This paper is an ethnographic account of my participation in a women's tenun (Indonesian woven cloth) group in West Manggarai, Flores, Indonesia. During my fieldwork, I applied ‘follow the thing’ (Marcus, 1995; Knowles, 2014) to the context of the creative journeys of traditional Indonesian textiles, particularly in the making. In an attempt to explore ‘creativity’ as it is experienced through the social processes of weaving as a practice, I strapped into a traditional backstrap loom (gedogan) and learn the basics of weaving woven cloth in West Manggarai. Throughout the fieldwork, actively learning the traditional craft became the best tool for understanding the creative making process (Ingold, 2010, 2011). As a traditional art, textile-making is culturally significant across the Indonesian archipelago; it is respected and passed down through generations as tangible knowledge. This paper applies ethnography and autoethnography to examine the weaving process, from dyeing the thread to sitting for hours inside a backstrap loom. This is a translation of the creative dynamics involved in making cultural art, which can only be explored through active participation. Exploring themes of gender and embodiment, I explore how cultural knowledge evolves creatively.

Paper short abstract

This paper explores Irula indigenous song-making through Moonge and Kohal practices, showing how melodies emerge silently during everyday life. Using interviews and minimal intervention, it reimagines participant observation to trace subjectivity, memory, and embodied composition beyond performance.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines musical composition among the Irula community of Attappadi, South India, as a largely silent, embodied, and affective process that unfolds beyond formal performance and explicit authorship. Focusing on wind instruments, the Moonge (bamboo flute) and the Kohal (a flute-like wind instrument), it traces how melodies emerge during everyday activities such as cattle herding and leisure, long before they take ritual form. While the Kohal is a complex instrument played mainly by elders in ceremonial contexts, proficiency in it depends on years of informal engagement with the Moonge, a simpler instrument learned through ordinary labour and play.

Methodologically, the paper reimagines participant observation through low-intensity, reversible interventions that align with local modes of learning. Walking interviews accompany Moonge players during herding, while audio diaries and delayed elicitation capture retrospective reflections on when and how tunes “arrive.” Rather than initiating composition, the researcher’s presence functions as attentive co-presence, making perceptible moments of humming, pauses, partial melodies, breath regulation, and finger memory, forms often dismissed as non-activity.

Ethnographic traces include melodic fragments, repeated phrases, bodily gestures, rejected sounds, and life-course transitions from Moonge to Kohal, analysed across multiple temporal scales. Comparison across cases is enabled through shared processes of emergence and apprenticeship rather than metrics or autobiographical reduction. Drawing on theories of silence, affect, and memory, the paper also reflects on ethical questions of documentation, consent, and rendering inner creative dynamics intersubjective. It argues that silence and incompleteness are not methodological limits but central ethnographic data for understanding indigenous creativity.

Paper short abstract

Drawing on collaborative participation in an printing project, I explore my evolving participation from audience to co-creator across nine issues, revealing methodological possibilities for accessing creative processes, making visible the messy, deeply social negotiations behind artistic production.

Paper long abstract

Creative processes are often treated as solitary, highly personal, and even private. As subjectivity in action, drawing together materialities, embodied craft, personal imagination, and deeply social interconnections, creative processes are insightful sites for anthropological study. Yet accessing creative processes can be methodologically challenging. This paper considers collaborative co-production of artworks, specifically artistic printmaking and zines, as affording insights into the complexities of arts practice.

During year-long fieldwork at an Icelandic co-working space of 250 creatives, I became unexpectedly and increasingly embedded in the production of a multimodal zine series. Beginning as an audience member at the launch of issue 1, my involvement deepened across nine issues: contributor, volunteer, co-producer, and co-leader. Each issue included social design principles of democratic decision-making, multimodal arts practices, and experimental uses of materiality. The culmination was the development of my own project—a zine of ethnographic fiction and art—produced in collaboration with 10 other participants.

My shifting participation fundamentally altered what became observable and what counted as ethnographic evidence. As an audience member I encountered a finished object. Behind this product, though, was a whole series of deeply social, often messy processes of negotiation, conflict, problem-solving, relationality, and reciprocity. Collaborative participation in this project revealed creativity not as isolated inspiration but as collaborative sense-making—a process of finding order in chaos through traceable negotiations, material iterations, and collective problem-solving that made visible the deeply social dynamics of artistic production.