Paper short abstract:

What will it take for anthropology to take on hands on making and doing as a way of crafting concepts. Drawing a leaf from doing toddler theatre, this paper argues how the anthropological can be a play of material in conversation where the conceptual emerges in the interstices of doing and making.

Paper long abstract:

What will it take for anthropology to take on hands on making and doing as a way of crafting concepts. Drawing a leaf from my work as a toddler theater maker, which is essentially about crafting a concept through material and weaving a narrative through the tangible, I want to argue how the anthropological can be a play of material in conversation at its own pace where the conceptual emerges in the silences and interstices of doing and making. In my current work on a new play “Stories in Half”, actors repeatedly weave vertical and horizontal threads in warp and weft, alternating with red, black and white. While warp invites a weft to follow, we realise how each undone act of weaving is a story told in half, waiting to be finished. It is in the act of weaving halfway that we begin seeing stories of a city emerging – a city in its inherent transformation, potential and growth. The unspoken silences in the act of weaving become a story of how we live the city and how the city houses us or not while remaining a promise to weave our lives with. For this panel, I want to share the process of this work, hopefully both in the spoken and the animate to think through the pedagogical potential of anthropological thinking and ask if there can be a doing of anthropology in the classroom, rather than solely studying or imitating from texts and concepts?