Lab short abstract

Transform fieldwork materials into tarot cards. This Lab experiment with the symbolic representation of local crises. The aim is to create collaborative tools that enable fictional narratives, and facilitate conversations in fieldwork and teaching on the global dimension of local crisis.

Lab long abstract

This Lab proposes an experimental methodology for engaging with our ethnographic encounters through the symbolic language of tarot's major arcana. Tarot's archetypal imagery enables us to approach something ethnographers often engage timidly: the universality of certain situations across our fieldsites. Whilst anthropology has long emphasised cultural specificity and the dangers of universalising claims, the dystopian conditions many of us encounter—state violence, ecological collapse, economic predation—manifest across radically different contexts with striking resonances. By mapping ethnographic materials onto tarot archetypes, we'll create space to recognise these patterns without flattening difference and explore the global dimensions of local crises. Using tarot's structure, we'll explore how symbolic systems externalise forces that feel simultaneously intimate and cosmic.

This Lab brings visual anthropology into conversation with investigations into the social generativity of spiritual practice. Across diverse ethnographic contexts, communities narrate crisis through nonlinear forms such as dreams, visions, and supernatural stories. Creating tarot cards becomes a meditative process of distilling ethnographic complexity into symbolic form, mirroring divination's contemplative attention to pattern and transformation. The lab asks: What ontologies of crisis do our ethnographic materials point to when rendered symbolically? Can engaging our discipline spiritually offer antidotes to polarisation by creating spaces for contradiction, ambiguity, and transformation? The tarot becomes a tool for "controlled equivocation", allowing multiple, incompatible meanings to coexist without collapsing into relativism. Ultimately, the lab explores spirituality as a collaborative methodology that opens space for fiction as narrating reality and generates tools for future fieldwork or teaching as conversation starters and elicitation devices.