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Paper short abstract:

This paper uses pedagogy combining arts-based research methods and enhanced modes of presentation developed in the Belgrade Fieldschool for Ethnographic Sensibility to explore affinities among training methods in arts, sciences and ethnography, and trace them back to Goethe’s “delicate empiricism.”

Paper long abstract:

Treating it as an art, anthropologists tend to let novices learn ethnographic fieldwork by the "sink or swim method." First run in June 2015 in Belgrade, Serbia, and now in its second year, the Fieldschool for Ethnographic Sensibility draws on sensorium training methods developed in arts (drawing, photography, music, acting and dance) to teach precisely the least codified, most art-like part of "ethnographer's magic" in a systematic way. Building on the initial moments of disorientation students experience in an unfamiliar setting (Belgrade), as well as their inability to speak the local language, we train them to become sensitive instruments for registering surprises, noting patterns in them, and transposing them into various media not limited to standard ethnographic description. We are concerned both with arts-based research methodologies and with art as an "enhanced mode of presentation and publication." My goal is to tease out some illuminating convergences among "sensibility training" methods in ethnography, arts and sciences. I will construct one possible genealogy that traces this "learning to become interface attentive to ever more subtle differences" (Latour) to Carlo Ginzburg's avatars of "conjectural science," Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes, and inserts them, together with Michael Polanyi, Gregory Bateson, Alfred Gell, as well as Simmel, Benjamin and Kracauer (as "botanizers of asphalt") into the tradition of "delicate empiricism" traceable back to Goethe the Scientist. I am particularly inspired by affinities between training young ethnographers and learning to render protein molecules as described by Natasha Myers in Rendering Life Molecular.