2021 Meeting Grounds: Art and anthropology in the Everglades

The spaces where humans, plants, and animals intermingle are rich junctures of mobility, sensuality, and impressions that together evoke a sense of place. Visual anthropology can help interpret these humaNature events—where dichotomies and divisions are blurred, and lived experiences of multispecies mingling are brought to the fore through emerging practices that apply experiential and experimental devices. Attending to emotional textures of intimacy, soundscapes of multiple species, and embodied, sensuous ways of knowing that do not privilege solely the agency of human actors, nor rely primarily on a linear narrative and didactic logic, the academic-artistic endeavor that I discuss in this article—and demonstrate in its accompanying short video, Senses of Silver River—is aimed at bringing feminist, decolonial ways of knowing the world to the forefront (cf. Collins; Harrison; Trinh). Toward this effort, I propose a methodological intervention that I call evocative ethnography, which favors a sensorial realm to explore, interpret, and share a sense of place. [evocative ethnography, feminist

Journal of Media Practice, 2002

This essay focuses on Raptor’s Rapture (2012), a video by the Puerto Rico-based artists Allora & Calzadilla that relays a performative encounter between three figures: a musician specializing in prehistoric woodwinds, a 35,000 year old flute carved from the wingbone of a griffon vulture, and a live bird of the same species. This is one among a handful of pieces by contemporary artists that moves beyond the purely human-focused to engage what we might call the worldly. More precisely, these artworks illuminate entanglements between the human and the nonhuman as they unfold in time, signaling a dual rethinking of humans as natural—one among other species and surroundings—and nature as historical. In some cases, archaeological or geological time scales are invoked to this end; in others, it is a turn to matter or the nonhuman animal. (In Raptor’s Rapture, all of the above come into play.) At potential risk in this upscaling or transference of registers is the elision of crucial questions about various inequalities among humans; indeed, it is clear that environmental crises typically reinforce or exacerbate preexisting disparities between the rich and poor, the enfranchised and disenfranchised. Rather than addressing ecological or political ecological issues per se, however, the work discussed here trades a topical approach for one that operates in the realm of affect, or even the existential, suggesting that—in light of our immersion in an environmental catastrophe too big to apprehend— it is through probing the (indistinct) edges where human and worldly meet, that we might begin to feel our way.

The Art of Anthropology / The Anthropology of Art brings together thirteen essays, some of which were presented at the March 2011 annual meeting of the Southern Anthropological Society (SAS) in Richmond, Virginia. Collectively, the essays in this volume explore not only art through the lens of anthropology but also anthropology through the lens of art. Given that art is a social phenomenon, the contributors to this volume interpret the complex relationships between art and anthropology as a means of fashioning novelty, continuity, and expression in everyday life. They further explore this connection by reifying customs and traditions through texts, textures, and events, thereby shaping the very artistic skills acquired by experience, study, and observation into something culturally meaningful. In The Art of Anthropology / The Anthropology of Art, contributors revisit older debates within the discipline about the relationship between anthropology’s messages and the rhetoric that conveys those messages in new ways. They ask how and why anthropology is persuasive and how artful forms of anthropology in the media and the classroom shape and shift public understandings of the human world. The papers in this volume are organized in four groups: Textual Art, Art Valuation, Critical Art, and Art and Anthropology in Our Classroom and Colleges.

Contemporary Art and Anthropology. Oxford: …, 2006

Visual Ethnography Journal, 2018

This article contributes to today’s discussions on the collaboration between art and anthropology and the necessity for ethnographers working with art to expound on their methodological process. The article discusses the application of contemporary ethnographic practice on portrait-painting in the specific institutional setting of New York City’s American Natural History Museum (AMNH), as a way to reflect on the norms and politics of representational forms and relations between the ethnographer, the ‘informant’ and the public. It reflects specifically on a curatorial experiment in which I took part, invited by the collective Ethnographic Terminalia at the AMNH, within the framework of the annual Margaret Mead Film Festival. The experiment involved installing a pop-up painting studio in the main hall of AMNH where I, as both a social anthropologist and a realist artist, would paint the portraits of two anthropologists over the course of three days. The experiment was to publicly expose the process of depicting a live human-being on canvas and examine what it might involve in terms of doing visual ethnography. The location of the AMNH for this experiment is significant because of its historical status as an authoritative place for displaying human cultures and their natural environment since the late 19th century. This article talks about the experiment in light of current discussions in anthropology on the transformation of the discipline as a co-production of knowledge utilizing multimodal approaches.

American Anthropologist, 2011

The International Handbooks of Museum Studies: Museum Theory, 2015

This chapter explores the dynamic relationship between contemporary art and anthropology from multiple perspectives. In recent volumes specifically investigat- ing the relationship of contemporary art and anthropology, the focus is primarily on the capacities of both art and anthropology to represent social worlds,and there is surprisingly little discussion of the border zones and aesthetic frames that define contemporary art as a specific material genre and institutionalized practice.

2008

This article considers the creation of visual field notes as part of the process of conducting fieldwork. By means of drawing and related activities, anthropologists immerse themselves in a field-based, generative process that engages them, simultaneously, in the acts of thinking, seeing, and doing. Insight and understanding emerge in the course of producing marks on a page that have iconic and indexical dimensions. The indexical potential of drawing(s), in particular, is noteworthy as visual signs stimulate connections between the world “out there” and issues in anthropology and other disciplines via culturally recognized signifiers. This path to understanding by visual means is never entirely predictable but nonetheless vital and creative. With theoretical inspiration drawn from the fields of anthropology, art, and education, this article is based on the experience of producing a set of visual and verbal field notes as part of a college field study trip to the Yucatan.