Short Abstract

How can art — and its entanglement with anthropology — open new relational possibilities in a polarised world? This panel invites reflections on ethnographic work that engages with artistic practice to generate encounters, translate differences, and imagine alternative publics.

Long Abstract

Marcus and Myers’s The Traffic in Culture (1995) marked a key moment in the reconfiguration of the anthropology of art, foregrounding the intersections between contemporary art and anthropological inquiry and emphasizing the anthropologist’s entanglement within artistic worlds. This shift inaugurated forms of collaboration and research-creation that blurred the lines between ethnography and art-making.

Three decades on, the urgency of such collaborations has intensified. We inhabit a world increasingly shaped by polarising forces—political, affective, epistemic—that fracture publics and constrain political possibility. Against this backdrop, art and anthropology share a vital task: to reimagine relations, to make perceptible the entanglements obscured by division, and to generate spaces of encounter amid conflict.

This panel asks how artistic–anthropological practices can intervene in, rather than merely describe, polarisation. How might aesthetic forms serve as methods of inquiry, care, or repair? Can art–anthropology collaborations open new ways of knowing and being together that neither discipline could achieve alone?

We invite contributions that critically examine the creative turn in anthropology through this lens—whether through ethnographic encounters, co-creative processes, speculative projects, or critical failures. Together, we seek to imagine what forms of anthropology entangled with art might not only study but transform the conditions of a polarised world.

This Panel has 3 pending paper proposals.
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