Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses how ethnography and art can engage in practices of analytical action in face of new predicaments emerging on both fields. The collection from a regionalist museum near Lisbon is used to exemplify how anachronistic art works can trigger new engagements between the two disciplines

Paper long abstract:

In the famous essay "On Ethnographic Surrealism" (1988) James Clifford refers to ethnography as an hybrid practice, stretching the boundaries of a scientific empirical research technique to make it grasp the artistic field and its typical early XX century attraction for the 'exotic'. For him this interaction, more than a shared empathy between intelectual fields, was the result of a "general cultural predisposition". Thirty years passed and we are still dealing with the fluidity between art and ethnography, knowing already that radical transformative predicaments have emerged on both arenas. How can this empirical research technique we call ethnography maintain its efficacy in face of an art field that expanded beyond its once recognisable limits becoming "fuera de sí" and "pósautónoma" (Canclini 2010)? And how can anthropology survive the void of generalised cultural narratives that fed for so long the ethnographic account? Is Tim Ingold's manifesto on the death of ethnography (2014) a signal of a paradigmatic closure for both practices - art and anthropology? Or are there new possibilities of engagement and encounters between the two fields that go beyond narratives of (cultural) representation creating effective devices for action (Sansi 2015)? This paper aims to discuss these possibilities in a very specific context - the Museu Malhoa - a regional museum 80 km from Lisbon where the instituciolanized art works (Groys 2017) are embed in a representational anachronism that incites for urgent intervention and action creating an exciting environment of new synergies between art and anthropology.