Paper short abstract:

The paper questions whether actors from Africa can be regarded as anthropologists focusing on affective and bodily aspects of globalization often overlooked at universities. The aim is to explore performing art as a sensorial method of investigating the making and unmaking of differences.

Paper long abstract:

When Hal Foster wrote "The Artist as Ethnographer" in 1995, he focused on the differentiation between the self and the other, but he had the visual art in mind. African actors also use sophisticated techniques to reveal and transgress the borders Foster discusses, so it is fruitful to analyse the heuristic potential of performing art as well. Du to the fact that problematic aspects of globalization were noticeable very early in Africa, actors have been dealing with these phenomena since the rise of African film in 1960. They act the roles of Senegalese tirailleurs, cowboys, 419-fraudsters, prostitutes, bankers or migrants. They stage their bodies as "last locus in the perspectival set" of ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes and ideoscapes that constitute what Arjun Appadurai calls the "Modernity at Large". This allows them to explore the paradoxical cultural flows mentioned by the Indian anthropologist and to investigate affective and bodily dimensions of globalization overlooked by Appadurai. They provide not only ethnographic material as the title of Foster's article implies. By showing in films in a specific mode the un/making of differences they observed in reality, they depict theories of what they represent. The paper proposes a change of perspective: It presents actors such as Makhourédia Guèye, Zalika Souley, Nkem Owoh, Emile Abossolo M'bo and Aïssa Maïga as anthropologists of a globalized world and questions epistemological hierarchies.