Paper short abstract:

Playing with the multiple senses of 'to draw', this paper takes a methodological focus. It explores what the evocative and open-ended qualities of art practice might offer to anthropological fieldwork and forms of recordkeeping.

Paper long abstract:

The question of how to 'do' participant-observation is one that has long preoccupied anthropology. Generally, it has been understood to combine various means of 'joining in' with forms of witnessing and scrutiny. Notes and interpretations on the process are recorded, mostly in words though also in photographs and film.

But what happens if we make drawings instead of notes? Could fieldnotes be replaced with fieldart? How would this influence the way anthropologists work and the kinds of knowledge we produce? How might we reflect on and use 'artistic' field recordings later on, when we seek to turn fieldwork into scholarship? Based on some experimental fieldwork in Nairobi and London, this paper explores what techniques usually understood to be part of art practice might offer to the anthropological fieldwork process.

Recent work in the anthropology of art, materials and things has foregrounded doing over meaning; agency over representation. In keeping with this ethos, I consider how this might translate into new modes of doing and recording anthropological fieldwork; methods that reach for the allusive, evocative and open-ended qualities of art practice, rather than the representational or explanatory narratives of conventional anthropological fieldnotes. Taking up ideas of knowing through doing (e.g. Marchand 2010), I also consider how this might shape post-fieldwork knowledge production. In this way, the paper plays with the multiple senses of 'to draw': not only the application of pencil to paper, but to pull along, to untangle, or to draw out - to illuminate or make manifest (Taussig 2011).