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- Convenors:
-
Rachel Harkness
(University of Edinburgh)
Jennifer Clarke (Gray's School of Art, Robert Gordon University)
- Location:
- 303
- Start time:
- 15 May, 2014 at
Time zone: Asia/Tokyo
- Session slots:
- 3
Short Abstract:
We will trial ways of working that grow from engagements with the stuff of the world. How might the relation between academic inquiry and the knowledge it yields, particularly in regard to sustainable futures, be reconfigured by experimental approaches whose outcomes could include works of art?
Long Abstract:
Conventional research protocols expect the scholar to treat the world as reserve from which to draw empirical material for subsequent interpretation in light of appropriate theory. As an alternative, our panel will consider anthropologies which trial ways of working that grow from direct, practical and observational engagements with the stuff of the world. We approach theoretical thinking as embedded in observational practice: emphasising studying with things or people instead of making studies of them. This has long been key to anthropology; it is also central to arts practice, as it is to the contingent disciplines of architecture and design. This panel invites proposals which are equally concerned with such anthropologies with.
Forging Futures emerges from the Knowing From the Inside project at the Department of Anthropology, University of Aberdeen, Scotland. The aim of this project is to reconfigure the relation between the practice of academic inquiry in the human sciences and the knowledge to which it gives rise. Our method is distinguished by observation and experiment, the outcomes of which will include works of art or craft, performances and installations. Our aim is to promote a hope-full anthropology committed to enriching the lives of those with whom we work and rendering them more sustainable.
Contributions are sought which engage questions of thinking-through-making and forging sustainable futures. We are particularly interested in how these topics relate. What might speculative, open-ended approaches in anthropology look like? How can anthropologies contribute to forging futures that are environmentally and socially just?
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
This paper will explore particular ways of doing “anthropology with” in relation to the idea of an "ecology of practices" (Stengers, 2010). The paper presents my approach to working between art and forestry as a way of working with art and artists, and forests and forestry.
Paper long abstract:
This paper will explore particular ways of doing "anthropology with" in relation to the idea of an 'ecology of practices' (Stengers, 2010). While emerging through dialogue with other disciplines, specifically conceptual art and continental philosophy, the proposition here is one which engages fundamentally anthropological concerns, namely the ethics and politics of knowledge formation, by exploring some connections between method, questions of what constitutes knowledge (or knowledge formation) and the transformation of the researcher in the process. The paper presents my approach to working between art and forestry as a way of working with art and artists, and forests and forestry. It focusses on the notion of creative work as ethical work, described in this paper by way of in key encounters with contemporary ecological artists,and forestry designers in relation to specific places and ideas, making comparisons between anthropology and forestry as generative practices. The paper considers conversation, drawing 'in and from the field' as particular methods used to explore disciplinary boundaries, showing how the researcher actively creates a field of inquiry, and then follows it. In doing so, it explores what it means to work creatively 'with' ones counterparts. By discussing what art does, in ethical terms - as a praxis response to ecological crisis - it also opens out into broader anthropological concerns, suggesting what one such speculative, open-ended approach in anthropology looks like.
Paper short abstract:
This paper seeks to show a case of open-ended approaches in anthropology. Through the combination of text, image, and sound, the project intends to offer an alternative horizon destabilizing the binaries and boundaries established and maintained by conventional research practices.
Paper long abstract:
Based on the fieldworks conducted in Cambodia, Canada, and Japan, this proposed paper seeks to show a case of open-ended approaches in anthropology. For this, I make two attempts. First, applying the "speaking nearby" position practiced by Trinh T. Minh-ha in her experimental film Reassemblage (1982), I conducted observation, filming, and interviews in the three countries. The initial intention was to investigate how individuals of Cambodian heritage living in these countries sustain networks beyond borders through the application of technology, and what forms of expression using digital and non-digital media are actively practiced on a daily basis. The outcome of the study is a combination of writing, a film entitled The Art of Becoming, and performance within the created film. Such an attempt proposes an approach of applying multifarious angles and informs conceptualization and implementation towards the better practice of anthropologies, taking account of the significance of art, bringing criticality, and acknowledging the complex and diverse modes of being and becoming of people living in the globalizing times.
Secondly, borrowing the concept of "blurred genres" presented by Clifford Geertz (1983), I intend to merge the boundary between art and social science by incorporating text, image, and sound in the study. Through the combination as such, this research project shows what is in-between the written text, the visual material, and the oral her/his-story, and intends to offer an alternative horizon destabilizing the binaries and boundaries established and maintained by conventional research practices.
Paper short abstract:
Like architects and designers, anthropologists are entering a world of technological savvy and messy ethical boundaries to be reshaped and stretched. This is the moment to rethink and adapt creatively to this new situation.
Paper long abstract:
Not even anthropologists' bodies end at their skin. When Appadurai claims that "the problem of voice (speaking 'for' and speaking 'to') intersects with the problem of space (speaking 'from' and speaking 'of')" (1988:17), I would add the problem of gaze as seeing 'through' − e.g. using an object like a 3D tool to envision a situation, scenario or place − and seeing 'for'. Who or what is doing the participant observations in an anthropological situation? Is it the anthropologist solely, or do we "become with many" (Haraway 2008) - cameras, smart phones, human and non-human participants in the field?
To ask as Haraway does, "Why should our bodies end at the skin or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin?" (2000:87), enables a reexamination of the discipline's fieldwork practices, at a time where fieldwork - with its focus on networks, hybrids, multi-sites and collaboration - is not what it used to be. The poignant question to ask in any analysis of social life, for both practitioners and academics, is "what do you not see from your standpoint?" George Marcus invokes this moment as a time of transition especially regarding the design of research, "for which anthropology does not yet have an adequate articulation" (2009:19).
Like architects, anthropologists are entering a world of technological savvy and messy ethical boundaries to be reshaped and stretched. This is the moment to rethink and adapt creatively to this new situation - not to scream in anguish or hide in dark corners from monsters that sometimes happen to be ourselves.
Paper short abstract:
This paper questions the role of drawing in understanding the world around us. Often derided as a visual medium, it can also be argued that drawing is an alternative form of knowledge, but what kinds of understanding are actually produced?
Paper long abstract:
This paper questions the role which drawing has in the production of knowledge. As one of many inscriptive practices, drawing has several components such as pictorial, instructive, descriptive, geometric or projective.
Key to understanding any drawing is an understanding of the underlying convention. Every form of graphic representation, however abstract or pictorial has rules which can be understood both by practitioners and viewers. It is this component of drawing which challenges the claims to knowledge made, and which must be interrogated in order to reinstate the place of drawing in our depictions of social life-worlds.
This paper will describe urban marketplaces in Seoul using three key drawing conventions: plan, section, and axonometric. What can be learnt about these vibrant socially constructed places, under threat of gentrification by the deceptively simple act of drawing them?
Paper short abstract:
The paper focuses on a shopping district (shōtengai) in central Japan in which young craftspeople and artists are being encouraged to open their own shops in partnership with ageing merchants and property owners to realize new forms of succession for moral economies of neighbourhood sociality.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines the contemporary plight of Japan's shōtengai, traditional urban shopping districts that have long been synonymous with moral economies of neighbourhood sociality. In urban and peri-urban communities throughout Japan, demographic aging, economic stagnation, and shifting retail and consumption patterns have resulted in the widespread transformation of these once-bustling spaces into shuttered and silent shop fronts that have become symbols of nostalgia for a lost sense of organic community. Ageing merchants and residents alike are increasingly faced with a generalized sense of an ending that resonates in individual lives and collective imaginings. Yet the subjective immediacy of this crisis is tempered by the objective reality that life must go on for those who remain, and that new patterns can emerge where others have passed into memory. Drawing on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in central Japan, I discuss the experience of a shōtengai that is attracting nationwide interest as the focus of concerted efforts by young artists, private sector merchants, and civil society organizations as an experimental model for generating an alternative youth economy based on monozukuri, the Japanese concept of "making things well". Two conclusions are drawn. Firstly, I argue that this partnership between the private and public spheres complicates analytical models of civil society as the "nonstate, nonmarket sector" in Japan. Secondly, by exploring the implications of novel practices of succession for contemporary discourses of local identity, I suggest that a focus on the creative potential inherent in entrepreneurial and craft-based innovation offers a window into myriad communal futures.