In diesem Text wollen wir zum einen das Stadtlabor für Multimodale Anthropologie am Institut für Europäische Ethnologie der Humboldt Universität zu Berlin vorstellen und über unsere Projekte der letzten Jahre reflektieren. Zum anderen soll der Wert von mehr-als-textuellen ethnographischen Projekten diskutiert und das Spiel als multimodal-anthropologisches Format beleuchtet werden. Während in den Anthropologien, wie in anderen sozial- und kulturwissenschaftlichen Disziplinen auch, das Schreiben und der Text ausschlaggebende Wissenspraktiken- bzw. -instrumente sind, nutzt die multimodale Anthropologie bewusst eine Vielzahl von Modalitäten, um diverse sinnliche Formen der Wissensproduktion gezielt in die Forschung miteinzubeziehen. In der mehr-als-textuellen Ethnographie wird das Textuelle zu einer von vielen möglichen Formen der ethnographischen Praxis und bildet nicht dessen bestimmende Methode. Eine mehr-als-textuelle Anthropologie schafft somit neue Zugänge für die anthropologische Praxis – gleichzeitig bringt sie neue Einschränkungen und Schwierigkeiten mit sich. Im Mittelpunkt dieses Textes steht daher eine Herausforderung bzw. ein Dilemma, mit der bzw. dem wir uns bei unserer Beschäftigung mit multimodalen Ansätzen immer wieder konfrontiert sehen und welche viele unserer Kolleg*innen ebenfalls beschäftigten: Wie können mehr-als-textuelle anthropologische Projekte bewertet und institutionalisiert werden? Diese Frage hat sich bei unseren eigenen multimodalen Erkundungen immer wieder als dringlich erwiesen. Denn trotz der vielseitigen Inspirationen, die unsere jüngsten multimodalen Projekte bereitstellten, sorgen diese ebenso für Irritationen, denn auch hier blieb das Gefühl, trotz mehr-als-textlicher Werkzeuge, nicht alles erfassen, beschreiben oder festmachen zu können. Im Folgenden möchten wir die Frage nach dem ethnographischen Wert sowie die besonderen Herausforderungen bei der Auswertung multi-modaler Produktionen erläutern und diskutieren.
Gracias a la amable invitación de María Martínez, Maite Martín Palomo e Iñaki Rubio, en el marco del seminario permanente del proyecto “Mundo(s) de víctimas 3: Proyecto Vidas Descontadas. Refugios para habitar la desaparición social”, el próximo 15 de junio a las 11:00 estaré compartiendo mi trabajo en torno a: “Problemas de cuidado y el cuidado de los problemas“.
Para ello, revisitaré algunas publicaciones propias recientes (Care in Trouble & Anthropology as a careful design practice?) donde he estado interrogándome sobre la noción de cuidado como concepto y como cualidad de ciertas prácticas “cuidadosas” vinculadas al diseño. Esta indagación ha tenido lugar en un contexto de generalización presente de sus usos, no sólo en la jerga académica de campos como la antropología o los estudios de la ciencia y la tecnología (donde suelo habitar y pasar mi tiempo). A pesar de la relevancia de recuperar sus orígenes combativos e inclusivos prometedores en el pensamiento feminista, la expansión del cuidado más allá de los contextos de salud o cuidado interpersonal ha dado lugar a la aparición de un vocabulario político en toda regla, reivindicado en discursos muchas veces securitarios, trascendiendo a lenguajes institucionales del orden y el mantenimiento, así como alegatos etno-nacionalistas. A pesar de que esta generalización pudiera hacernos pensar en el éxito del término y la gran suerte de vivir en un presente más habitable, la violencia ambiente en que vivimos no parece augurar que esta popularidad tenga un fácil correlato en nuestra cotidianidad, ¿quizá como síntoma de un deseo o una aspiración evanescente? Antes que sugerir arrojar el término por la borda, me gustaría abordar los problemas de cuidado ante los que nos sitúan intervenciones sobre lo social en nombre de una aspiración cuidadosa que parecen tener claro lo que se necesita y cómo, donde la violencia efectiva también aparece como una violencia epistémica. Más allá de usos paliativos o vinculados a la reparación de órdenes existentes, quizá la única vía para que el cuidado no sea parte del problema, pudiera pasar por tratarlo como una práctica del cuidado de los problemas: un modo de abrirnos a los contornos de lo posible de frágiles ecologías de soportes, con conocimientos y maneras de hacer muchas veces relegadas al olvido, cuando no invisibilizadas, donde antes que vidas con contornos claros, la especulación de lo por venir participa de la ingente tarea de construir entornos para la vida plural en el presente (donde, muchas veces, antes que reparar o continuar, necesitaremos desarmar y tirar abajo). Una tarea que, en mi propio trabajo, ha ido vinculada a repensar la etnografía como práctica de diseño cuidadoso (de la que pondré algunos ejemplos vinculados a participar de colectivos de diseño activista desde el montaje de ecologías de documentación abierta, o el trabajo pedagógico para re-sensibilizar a profesionales del diseño urbano a que re-aprendan colaborativamente su práctica ante la radical presencia de quienes suelen hacerse cargo de sus designios). Esto es, una tarea donde el cuidado aparece no tanto como un concepto que clausura, sino como práctica emergente para las ciencias sociales, re-equipando o engendrando formas y dispositivos de indagación cuidadosa (atenta al cuidado de los problemas), para participar de la problematización conjunta de ecologías de soportes en condiciones de violencia ambiente.
El programa de estos encuentros tiene por objetivo “crear un espacio común para la reflexión en torno a los Estudios Sociales de Ciencia y Tecnología (STS) y, en particular, en torno al papel de la tecnociencia en sociedades ‘más que humanas’. Este programa está diseñado con el propósito de fomentar el intercambio y la creación de redes entre investigadoras/es, diseñadoras/es y artistas de España e Italia, para compartir así sus investigaciones y desarrollos en este campo, contribuyendo además a ampliar la difusión de sus prácticas.”
La jornada estaŕa dividida en dos partes: en la primera, enfocada en experimentaciones en el campo de la arquitectura, participarán investigadores españoles como Tomás Sánchez Criado, que intervendrá online desde Berlín, o Miguel Mesa del Castillo, Ester Gisbert Alemany y Enrique Nieto Fernández, que acudirán a la Academia desde Alicante. Les acompañarán sus homólogos italianos Micol Rispoli y Gianluca Burgio; la segunda parte del encuentro se ocupará de la aplicación de la teoría del actor-red (ANT) a la pedagogía, y en ella participarán los investigadores italianos Asunta Viteritti, Dario Mangano y Alvise Mattozzi. A todas sus intervenciones les seguirá un debate abierto al público general. El evento quedará grabado y podrá consultarse posteriormente en el canal de Youtube de la Academia.
¿Cómo hacer posible la vida en las ruinas del capitalismo? Aunque en los tiempos devastadores que corren llevamos a rastras hasta nuestras hipérboles, esa es la pregunta que vertebra el libro La seta del fin del mundo: Sobre la posibilidad de la vida en las ruinas capitalistas de la antropóloga Anna Tsing. Un relato que captura el espíritu atormentado de una época donde el crecimiento y el progreso como los conocíamos han mostrado su cara más aciaga y tenebrosa. Pensado y escrito desde una sensibilidad etnográfica atenta a la complejidad de nuestro presente en llamas, recabando materiales e historias diversos, La seta del fin del mundo no es, pues, ni un recetario de soluciones baratas ni un ensayo que abrace el dulce láudano del apocalipsis.
Publicado originalmente en 2015 en Estados Unidos, la cuidada edición reciente de Capitán Swing es un artefacto tan embriagador (buen papel, imágenes en alta definición, letra legible, cartoné con altorrelieve, manejable y a precio asequible) y complejo como el original. Su gran hallazgo, también su elección más desconcertante, es el lugar desde el que indaga. A partir de un trabajo etnográfico de equipo realizado entre 2004 y 2011 en diversos lugares de la costa oeste de EE.UU., Japón, China y Finlandia, el libro analiza los complejos nudos entre capitalismo y ecología.
Tsing traza con gran detalle las cadenas globales de recolección, venta, estudio científico y experimentos en silvicultura para intentar cultivar, sin éxito, una rara seta que desata pasiones desenfrenadas en Japón: el matsutake, usado comúnmente como regalo o bien de lujo. Su interés por practicar una antropología de las relaciones interespecíficas en el capitalismo avanzado le lleva a desplegar un aparataje metodológico que privilegia unas “artes de la observación” para hacernos sensibles al funcionamiento de lo que llama “conjuntos polifónicos”: patchworks plagados de fricciones, antes que tejidos homogéneos, de los que el mejor ejemplo serían las relaciones interespecíficas de las que el matsutake pende. De hecho, como cuenta Tsing, el matsutake no es sólo un bien de lujo para los japoneses: un producto que condensa la nostalgia del otoño perdido y la vida de aldea, vector de la seriedad de las relaciones que se marcan con su regalo. Es, también, una forma de emergencia y supervivencia en la ruina forestal, en al menos dos sentidos, contenidos en las partes II y III del libro.
La parte II es un breve tratado de antropología económica que estudia el capitalismo de cadenas de suministro. Aquí se narra el proceso de lo que Tsing llama “acumulación de rescate”: los complejos procesos de creación de valor (como bien de regalo o de lujo) de una seta no cultivable, que crece donde nadie se la espera en antiguos bosques industriales depredados; una seta recolectada por diferentes agentes (nómadas, libertarios y migrantes) que viven “en los propios límites del capitalismo” (p.377), esto es, ni dentro ni fuera del mismo. Una cadena de creación de valor que tiene por origen una emergencia extraña de la vida, una aparición cuando todo parece perdido, en el otoño de nuestras ideas de progreso.
La parte III es un estudio de las complejas relaciones natura-culturales e interespecíficas en las que emerge el matsutake. Un relato que, antes que poner en el centro a al matsutake como especie, toma como unidad de análisis al “holobionte” del que es parte, así como sus relaciones de “simbiopoiesis”: esto es, la co-evolución y relaciones simbióticas, desde lo parasitario al apoyo mutuo, entre diferentes especies. En particular, el análisis se centra en explorar las “perturbaciones” y “diseños involuntarios” en la gestión forestal que permitieron y permiten la emergencia no diseñada del matsutake, vinculada a determinados árboles con los que co-evoluciona. Esta parte contiene, asimismo, un detallado análisis y loa del trabajo cuasi-activista de campesinos, científicos o gestores forestales implicados en la defensa del satoyama japonés, un territorio intersticial entre el bosque y el cultivo. Un trabajo de recuperación de ciertas lindes entre lo urbano y lo rural, que busca hacer viable una economía y modos de relación con el bosque alternativos. Una formación interespecífica o, mejor, un “paisaje activo” que opera, en el relato de la autora, como una suerte de “antiplantación”.
Lo que conecta ambas partes es la descripción de la precariedad existencial causada por la depredación planetaria antropogénica y, particularmente, capitalista (lo que se conoce comúnmente como la era geológica del Antropoceno). Y, más aún, el intento por mostrar distintos relatos que puedan inspirar otros paisajes activos que la sobrevivan. En ese sentido, La seta del fin del mundo desafía las historias lineales del progreso, así como los relatos conservacionistas simplistas. Parte de su complejidad radica en que sus historias crecen como las setas, alumbrando distintas “parcelas” o “retales” (patches) de los efectos interconectados, pero no unitarios de eso que llamamos el Antropoceno.
El resultado, por tanto, no es una oda a lo pre-industrial, el retorno a la naturaleza prístina y originaria, o el neo-ruralismo. Más bien la propuesta que nos hace Tsing es explorar qué capacidades de acción pueden hacerse existir en complejas situaciones ecológicas. Situaciones donde se mezclan los efectos de perturbación industrial, así como los resurgimientos simbióticos que habilitan posibles respuestas. Situaciones donde la agencia humana (a través de, por ejemplo, el cuidado, limpieza y uso del bosque) puede tener un papel relevante, pero no único. Como apunta Tsing:
“Los bosques campesinos de roble y pino han formado remolinos de estabilidad y convivencia. Pero a menudo tienen origen en grandes cataclismos, como la deforestación que acompaña a la industrialización nacional. Son pequeños remolinos de vidas interconectadas dentro de grandes corrientes de perturbación: seguramente, constituyen un buen lugar para reflexionar sobre el talento humano para poner remedio a las cosas. Pero también existe la perspectiva del bosque” (p.262)
En su “antifinal” el libro hace un enérgico alegato en favor de la ciencia abierta, abogando por la necesidad de abrir la producción del conocimiento a una multitud de colaboraciones “fúngicas” o rizomáticas (como las setas mismas), entre saberes académicos y populares. Esto es, la creación de un “paisaje activo” que permita el cultivo de saberes y prácticas no instrumentales: como el trabajo sin garantías de los bosques, con su paciencia y tiempos extraños, así como las relaciones interespecíficas a las que invita. Relaciones que a veces “no surgen gracias a los planes humanos, sino a pesar de ellos” (p.363) y que requieren ir más allá de soluciones utópicas prefabricadas o multiuso. A pesar de su compleja factura (es indudablemente un libro académico, denso y erudito) y su radical concreción en torno al matsutake, el libro nos invita a prestar atención a las complejas relaciones entre naturaleza y cultura.
Y es ahí donde el libro, en su vertiente más poética, nos sugiere rearmar nuestra imaginación ante las crisis en curso. ¿Quizá podamos inspirarnos en los valores ecológicos de las setas, así como en los proyectos de ciencia activista que el libro relata, como complejas formas de construir paisajes activos más vivibles y plurales? Donde la precariedad impera, quizá no nos quede más remedio que intentar armar muchas formas de relación fúngicas, pensando e interviniendo, desde nuestras parcelas, entornos y territorios, en los desastres en curso, aunque eso no sea garantía de nada. ¿Seremos capaces de crear paisajes activos, de muchos tipos, para sobrevivir al capitalismo y su destrucción planetaria?
House of Gossip is an open-source downloadable game (developed by the Stadtlabor for Multimodal Anthropology of the HU Berlin) that stages and creates the grounds for reflection on conflicts regarding housing and the different viewpoints in a volatile real estate market.
A first prototype of the game was developed – in collaboration with colleagues at the Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik (ZK/U) – in a hackathon together with MA students of the Studienprojekt “The only game in town? Anthropology and the housing markets in Berlin” (2018-2019) at the Institut für Europäische Ethnologie (HU Berlin), and showcased in the “Open Form neu denken” exhibition (organized by Z/KU at the Werkstatt of Haus der Statistik in October 25–27 2019). In the last two years we’ve been working on creating a downloadable and playable version of it.
Berlin, late 2010s, all across the city real estate is changing hands fast, the market is hot and many are investing, houses are revaluing. As it tends to happen, this situation has at least two different sides:
Scene 1
– “What about this building? Might you have found a good opportunity here?” – “It indeed looks nice, but have we explored if it’s in good condition?”
– “The architect sent me this report, look, all clear.” – “It certainly looks promising.” – “It’s time to act fast.” – “Ok, yes, let’s go for this house!”
Scene 2
– “Hi, how was your day?” – “Nothing special, yours?” – “I heard rumours, two neighbours speaking in the corridor: the building is finally going to be bought!” – “Yes, there was a letter in the mail, look”. – “But… What will happen to us? Will we have to move if they raise the rent?” – “We have to do something…” – “But we know nearly no one in the house.”
“When an apartment building is to be sold, every single alarm bell sets off for the residents. In view of the horrendous purchase prices, there is a danger of being displaced by higher rents or even conversion into condominiums.”
Rationale
House of Gossip is an open-source downloadable game that stages and creates the grounds for reflection on conflicts regarding housing and the different viewpoints in a volatile real estate market. In the game, you will have the opportunity to play either as a resident of the house or as a covert buyer, acting as one of the house’s residents.
In a process where no one can be certain about anything, gossip abounds: In the game you will have to gather information form alliances and find your way to save (as residents) or buy (as the buyer) the house! Think twice about who and when you want to share your information with!
During the course of the game you will repeatedly encounter your neighbours in the stairway to exchange gossip. Your main goal is not just to understand to whom you’re talking to, but also to perform in front of others and form alliances for one of the two competing purposes of the game: Buying or saving the house.
Those who manage to gather the necessary gossips will in the end win the game. Will the house community manage to resist or could the buyer succeed in acquiring the new property?
In order to build your own House of Gossip board game, you will need the following:
● Box A4 size or 23.5 x 31.5 x 3.7 cm ● Paper cutting knife ● Paper cutting board ● Ruler ● Glue suitable for paper and cupboard ● Printing paper (170 g/m2 and 200g/m2 or higher, eco-paper is advised) ● Ink jet or laser printer filled with black ink
Download the necessary game parts: ● Game Instructions ● Playing Cards ● Board/Box and Tokens
Print out the downloaded parts. You can print all part on the 170 g/m2 or higher eco paper, unless other is stated:
○ Game Instructions It is an A4 double-sided print. Fold it in three parts, following the dashed lines markings at the top and bottom of the paper.
○ Playing Cards It is an A4 double-sided print. Advised paper thickness for this element is 350 g/m2, but if you don’t have such paper, use the 170 g/m2 or higher eco paper. Cut the cards following the black markings on the sheet. In the end, you must have cards that are 59 x 92 mm big.
○ Board/Box and Tokens It is an A4 one-sided print. All the prints, except the file called “HoG_Staircase-Cutout_A4_ENG.pdf” can be printed on the 170 g/m2 or higher eco paper. The file “HoG_Staircase-Cutout_A4_ENG.pdf” should be printed on 200/220 g/m2 or higher eco paper. This will ensure the stability and longevity of the board. After all the parts are printed, do the following:
A. Glue the “HoG_Box-Top_A4_ENG.pdf” file on the top of your box. You can adjust it in the middle if the box is bigger than A4. B. Glue the “HoG_Box-Top-Inside_A4_ENG.pdf” file on the inner side of the top part of the box. C. Glue the “HoG_Box-Back_A4_ENG.pdf” file on the outer back part of the box. D. The files “.pdf” and “.pdf” need to be cut out following the black lines markings, while the dashed line markings are for folding (in order to have an easier folding, you can first use the paper cutter and applying not full, but medium pressure, prepare the paper for folding). For the more detailing step-by-step instruction on the staircase assembly, following the pictures (video, in case applicable).
Last July (22-23.07.2021) the Stadtlabor for Multimodal Anthropology of the HU Berlin hosted a workshop where we invited a wide variety of colleagues working in Germany, Austria and Switzerland (D-A-CH) to share and discuss their approaches to more-than-textual ethnographic practice.
The event–called “Anthropology beyond text? Experiments, devices and platforms of multimodal ethnographic practice”–took place on Zoom, and in the spirit of thinking more in depth how to value and evaluate multimodal projects, we recorded the conversation to think whether we could find a way of creating a good-enough summary that might allow us to continue thinking and discussing about it.
After different attempts, and thanks to the good work of Nelson Ari Wilhelm, we’re sharing it with the aim of fostering the expansion of such a conversation.
In the Winter Semester’s 21-22 Stadtlabor Online Seminar Series “The values of multimodal projects“, we aim to invite ground-breaking anthropological projects where multimodality features not just as an add-on of particular inquiries, but as a central mode of research and intervention.
At a time where the conversation around ‘multimodality’ is gaining momentum, we aim to discuss ‘the values’ of multimodal projects. By this, we mean two main things: The aim of our series would not just be to find the conditions to praise (‘valorise’), but also to appraise (‘evaluate’) multimodal projects. In a nutshell, we want this event series to be an attempt at creating the conceptual grounds for evaluating and institutionalising multimodal endeavours. Hence, to foster multimodal productions.
In particular, we wish to discuss the anthropological value of (i) dramaturgical / performance interventions, and anthropological approaches to (ii) exhibiting and curating. In opening up this space, we seek to highlight projects that we take as valuable contributions: not only to make them more visible but also so that these projects could help us in articulating their multimodal values, as well as inspiring others in their own work.
Not only we want to be able to learn from concrete multimodal approaches – the peculiarity of the media employed, the reasons for their choices – but we wish to create the grounds for a detailed conversation between projects of the same kind, touching upon criteria of anthropological worth.
Video-Summary
26.1.22 (3-5:30pm CET) – How to exhibit anthropologically?
1. Francisco Martínez: How to Make Ethnographic Research with Exhibitions
Francisco Martínez is an anthropologist dealing with contemporary issues of material culture through ethnographic experiments. In 2018, he was awarded with the Early Career Prize of the European Association of Social Anthropologists. Currently, he works as Associate Professor at Tallinn University and convenes the Collaboratory for Ethnographic Experimentation (EASA Network). Francisco has published two monographs – Ethnographic Experiments with Artists, Designers and Boundary Objects(UCL Press, 2021) and Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia (UCL Press, 2018). He has also edited several books, including Peripheral Methodologies (Routledge, 2021); Politics of Recuperation in Post-Crisis Portugal (Bloomsbury, 2020), and Repair, Brokenness, Breakthrough (Berghahn, 2019), He has also curated different exhibitions – including ‘Objects of Attention’ (Estonian Museum of Applied Art & Design, 2019), and ‘Life in Decline’ (Estonian Mining Museum, 2021).
2. Manuela Bojadžijev: Archive of Refuge
Manuela Bojadžijev, professor at the Institute for European Ethnology (HU Berlin) together with the publicist Carolin Emcke and in cooperation with the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), have created the Archive of Refuge as a digital place of remembrance where stories of flight and expulsion to Germany in the 20th and 21st centuries are preserved and reflected upon. The people who tell their stories in the archive tell of flight and expulsion, of torture, exploitation and deprivation of rights, but also of hope and happiness; they tell of home and exile, of belonging and new beginnings – and ultimately also show surprising, far-reaching perspectives on German history. The archive asks: What does it actually mean to seek refuge?
9.2.22 (2:30-5pm CET) – How to stage issues anthropologically?
1. Cristiana Giordano & Greg Pierotti: Affect Theater: Collaborations between Anthropology and Performance
Cristiana Giordano is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis. She received her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley. Her book, Migrants in Translation. Caring and the Logics of Difference in Contemporary Italy (2014), won the Victor Turner Book Prize for ethnographic writing (2016), and the Boyer Prize in Psychoanalytic Anthropology (2017). Her current research investigates new ways of rendering ethnographic material into artistic forms. She has been collaborating with playwright and director Greg Pierotti on a new methodology, Affect Theater, at the intersection of the social sciences and performance. They have created Unstories and and Unstories II (roaming), two 50-minute performances around the current “refugee crisis” in Europe.
Greg Pierotti is a theater artist and assistant professor of theater studies at University of Arizona. His plays, including Unstories, b more, The Laramie Project, and The People’s Temple, have been seen in venues around the world and translated into over a dozen languages. He is a recipient of the Humanitas Prize, the Will Glickman Award, the San Francisco Critics Award, and has been nominated for an Emmy, a New York Drama Desk Award, and the Alpert Award for outstanding individual contribution to the theater. He and Cristiana Giordano investigate the intersection of ethnographic and theatrical research and production methods.
2. AnthropoScenes: Linking participatory methods with theatre to imagine sustainable futures
The Project AnthropoScenes is run by a group of people from interdisciplinary human-environment research and the Theatre of the Anthropocene. Competences reach from hard science to pop-up theatre. We aim to involve diverse publics in debates about water futures and bring two questions: Can multimodality help to balance divergent logics of science and theatre? What are tips and tricks to move beyond the usual suspects? Jörg Niewöhner (anthropology), Pauline Münch (science communication) and Frank Raddatz (theatre) will represent the team.
Questions we want to raise
1. What were the reasons to choose this peculiar approach, media or art form? What relation do these forms bear to specific ethnographic fieldwork studies or particular anthropological modes of inquiry? What were your aims in exploring this multimodal form?
2. What have been the knowledges you’ve needed to become acquainted with to use these media/forms? What does anthropological research and knowledge production become when shaped in this particular form or using these devices? Also, how could we critically reflect, as anthropologists, on the affordances, promises, challenges and predicaments of the particular devices of your multimodal ethnographic engagement? In a nutshell, what are the promises and challenges of this form for anthropological inquiries?
3. What effects have your multimodal form of choice had on the people you were working with: your interlocutors, your peers? How could we learn to appreciate and value these effects: that is, what contours of anthropological practice are being delineated in what your multimodal explorations made emerge?
4. Have you been able to document your project, in what form? What have been the main challenges or difficulties in doing so? Who have you addressed in doing so: that is, who are your audiences, publics?
A more informal conversation on these issues, with questions and comments from the hosts and the audience, will ensue.
How can our modes of ethnographic inquiry respond to the challenges of the day? Amidst rampant planetary and health crisis revealing our worlds’ constitutive vulnerability, it has become more urgent than ever to open up speculative spaces to make emerge the possible. We think that this invocation needs to go hand in hand with a speculation of the many possible forms of ethnographic practice. A challenge that, in our opinion, needs to acknowledge and animate the intrinsic inventive condition of ethnography.
This is our point of departure: Ethnography is an act of invention. By that we mean that anthropologists invent the relations allowing them to inquire with others. Sadly, these forms of inventiveness that is part and parcel of ethnographic inquiries are rarely accounted for and shared. xcol, an ethnographic inventory invites ethnographers to join this inventorying endeavour.
The inventiveness that permeates the modes of anthropological inquiry takes expression in very different socio-material techniques: ranging from digital infrastructures used in fieldwork to novel modes of documenting through drawing or very diverse forms of relationality. We call these field devices for they devise the socio-spatial and material conditions of fieldwork.
Any anthropologist has faced in their fieldwork the challenging circumstance of forging out of nothing relations with complete strangers in an unknown situation. Ethnographers draw on the forms of relationality they already know and the guides and norms of the ethnographic method they have learnt. But this knowledge is never enough. As any experienced ethnographer very well knows from their own field experience, there is no script for social life and no sufficient method to guide the construction of relations in the field. Hence, anthropological inquiries always demand inventing the modes of relationality allowing anthropologists to investigate with others (whoever they are).
The starting point of the inventory assumes that besides, or rather beyond, the conventional conceptualization of ethnography as a ‘method’ we may conceive it as an act of invention. The language of creativity, improvisation and invention is seldom, if ever, present in the anthropological accounts of ethnography. Our proposal goes against this state of affairs, positing a different conception that signals out the always creative and improvisational nature of ethnography.
The xcol ethnographic inventory is a curated open-source digital archive seeking to document and display this endless invention integral to any ethnographic inquiry. In our first Call for Inventions (CfI) we are particularly aiming to inventory accounts of ‘field devices’: to insist, the inventive social and material arrangements undertaken, created, made or repurposed in the course of doing fieldwork with others.
What we have in mind are texts of at least 2000 words accounting for these field devices in at least two senses: (1) fleshing out the context as well as the social and material arrangements of particular ‘field devices’ as they are put into practice in empirical situations; and (2) hinting at the particular modes of ethnographic inquiry they enable or make emerge.
We particularly welcome texts experimenting with genres in between recipes or instruction manuals and ethnographic descriptive accounts.
In the spirit of what we call ‘care review’ xcol, an ethnographic inventory commits to publishing all proposals we would receive, whenever they might be ready to be shared: hence taking care to bring them to fruition and working together with interested xcolars in their writing in subsequent months.
Contact info
If you wanted to submit or discuss an individual contribution, but also, if you thought about organising with us a workshop on inventions (an inventathon) around some of these topics, please do not hesitate to contact us here: inventory@xcol.org
El Seminario Internacional Arquitectura y Etnografía es un espacio de intersección y encuentro para quienes estudiamos el espacio y el sentido. Entre la arquitectura, la antropología, la geografía, el urbanismo y la sociología nos sentamos junto al fuego para pensar nuevas formas de abordar los fenómenos territoriales. ¿Cuáles son las relaciones entre etnografía y arquitectura? ¿cuáles los alcances y desafíos de las nuevas tecnologías y métodos de investigación espacial? ¿de qué formas distintas disciplinas pueden encontrarse ante un mismo objeto de estudio? ¿cuál es el rol de los sentidos en la epistemología de lo socio-espacial? En ese terreno acampamos.
Si en su primera versión el seminario se centró en el dibujo como herramienta que posibilita estos cruces disciplinarios y metodológicos, el segundo encuentro amplia su mirada hacia otros mecanismos y sensibilidades, incluidos sonidos, imágenes y biografías situadas, con invitados internacionales diversos, y de trayectorias innovadoras y rigurosas.
Organizan
Facultad de Arquitectura, Diseño y Construcción, UDLA José Abásolo, jabasolo [arroba] udla.cl Ricardo Greene, rgreene [arroba] udla.cl info@arquitecturayetnografia.cl
Colaboran
Núcleo Lenguaje y Creación UDLA AriztíaLab Revista Bifurcaciones
Together with Ignacio Farías we are convening the workshop Towards a multimodal urban anthropology for the upcoming biannual conference of the German Association of Social and Cultural Anthropology(DGSKA-Tagung 2021, “Worlds, Zones, Atmospheres. Seismographies of the Anthropocene”) that will take place (online) September 27-30, 2021 at the University of Bremen.
More-than-human approaches in urban anthropology have convincingly contributed to rethinking the plurality of modes of knowledge, the assemblages and the kinds of actors that constitute our cities. But what do these conceptual interventions do to our ethnographic modes of inquiry? This workshop starts from the assumption that beyond a change in conceptual repertoires, decentering the all-too-human object of urban anthropology might require a multimodal transformation of our ethnographic practices, in at least two ways: Firstly, since the ‘observation’ of more-than-human entanglements requires more than taking part in social situations, what are the conditions in which we could appreciate and learn to be affected, attuned and concerned with a wide variety of phenomena and processes, ranging from atmospheric and ecological to multi-species and/or socio-technical? How would our practices of note-taking and field-working be affected? In contexts where fieldwork becomes an active co-production of situations, we invite contributions reflecting on multimodal transformations of fieldnotes, practices of rapport / friendship / interlocution and correspondence. Secondly, to the extent that these often-experimental collaborations involve more-than-textual devices for ethnographic description and conceptualization, we would like to explore the anthropological potentials of current displacements of the media and modalities of ethnographic accounts. In a context where collaborations with art and design are becoming a common practice, we particularly welcome contributions that reflect on the intervention these devices entail for the project of urban anthropology.
Participants & abstracts
Graphic Ethnography and Experiments in Urban Anthropology (Andrew Gilbert, University of Toronto Mississauga; Larisa Kurtovic, Univ. of Ottawa)
In this presentation, we draw upon our graphic ethnography project to explore the affordances of sequential art for urban anthropology. Our research investigates an unprecedented victory by industrial workers in the northern Bosnian city of Tuzla, who occupied and preserved their privatized and bankrupted factory and were able to restart production. We propose that the graphic medium offers unique ethnographic potential for capturing and communicating the openly experimental and collaborative nature of the workers struggle, offering important insights for an urban anthropology “understood as operating within an open system, as an open system, and as the study and production of open systems” (Fortun 2003). In particular, we explore graphic ethnography’s capacity to materialize and render tangible a broad urban sensorium, to evoke how the social multiplicities of cities can be turned into a political resource, and to harness the imagination and participation of readers in ways that keeps ethnography as inventive and open-ended as the urban worlds that it evokes.
Learning from outside: grasping and representing multiplicities. The case of pedestrianized Times Square (Santiago Orrego, HU Berlin)
This talk is divided into two parts. The first one presents the highlights of a multi-situated and multimodal ethnography of Times Square in New York City and its processes of pedestrianization from 2009 to 2017. But more than just telling the story of how that location was assembled, the idea was to try to translate the particularities of a multiple spatiality, as well as the resources and situations involved in its production, somehow, into epistemological devices and multimodal artifacts that could enrich the way we make ethnography of public spaces. The intention of experimenting with multimodal methods was to design strategies, as well as artifacts, for better capturing and representing the convulse and the effervescent world outside. The second part of the talk will focus on some of those epistemological devices and multimodal artifacts by discussing how they were constructed, the rationality behind them, their uses, and scopes. The way for enacting all those matters will be presenting the methodological strategy carried out along this whole ethnographic work, and that can be described as a process of “learning from” a specific location, pedestrianized Times Square.
Archival entanglements: Multimodal research, teaching, learning in urban anthropology (Aylin Tschoepe, University of Basel)
As a site of selective public or private memory, a collection of evidence in material and immaterial form shaped by various power dynamics, and a metaphor for holding data, the archive is central to the mediated production and understanding of archival bodies as agents and mnemonic devices. Archives offer a lens to grapple with questions of temporality, materiality, technological possibilities, and accessibility to different ways of knowing. I understand bodies and spaces as archives, not least through cultural practices of memorizing and forgetting, categorization, valuation and visibility. I am drawn to the archive in its complexity of objecthood and agency and focus on four main aspects: first, the archive as artefact holds particular knowledges and memories in the context of power and valuation, and can consist of various media and formats from material to digital. Second, the archive can be inscribed onto human and non-human actors. Third, as storages of data, archives may be part of a network with archival instruments that inscribe experiences and practices such as those of a cultural, social, performative, sensory, or aesthetic kind. Fourth, the archive is an actor itself, and it can contain further archival bodies that are also “quasi-objects” (Latour 2005). As actors, archives are also witnesses, equipped with transformative powers toward shaping the future of larger temporal and spatial networks in which archives operate and are entangled.
Doing urban anthropology with a dog. Reflections upon ethnography and knowledge production in context of a more-than-human research entanglement (Elisabeth Luggauer, University Graz/University Würzburg)
This paper reflects upon multimodal ethnographic modes of being in a field of urban contact zones (Haraway 2008) or urban assemblages (Farias 2011) between humans and street dogs in Podgorica (Montenegro) as a multispecies research entanglement of a human and the dog Ferdinand. It points out how through the grounding ethnographic technique of jointly claiming urban space as a „humandog collective“ (Hodgetts 2018) 1. the presence of the mixed-breed dog reveals urban discourses and politics about street dogs and owned dogs as well as about cleanliness and dirt, 2. Ferdinand’s spatial practices make contact zones/assemblages between humans and street dogs recognizable for the human researcher and therefore open up concrete research settings for deeper investigation, and 3. our presence as a multispecies research team has also turned this project into a contact zone between different knowledges and discourses on human-nonhuman order policies in urban spaces embedded in different cultural and political contexts.
Discussant: Indrawan Prabaharyaka (HU Berlin)
Questions for our joint exploration
The question we would like to approach collectively in our workshop is how do particular multimedia/multimodal devices enable or hinder particular descriptions, conceptual understandings or ways of remaking what the urban is or could be. This not only means what features of the urban they enable or make more difficult to do research upon, but also whether our understandings of the urban remain the same after inquiring multimodally. Put differently, what kind of an urban anthropology emerges out of these multimodal engagements? That is, what would a multimodal urban anthropology be?
With these questions in mind, when creating the sequence of presentations for the session we have paid special attention to the particular ‘devices’ (be they field devices, representational devices, or both) there are stake, with the intention to discuss the multimedia layers that have paved the way for a question around the multimodal in anthropology. Hence, there is a transition from the visual/graphic to the digital, then to more material aspects like the archive and the multi-sensory as well as the collaborative (perhaps a genealogy in which the problem of multimodality presented itself in recent anthropological scholarly work?). But whereas the first two (Gilbert & Kurtovic + Orrego) emphasise visual means of representation (comic/graphic novel and exhibition artefacts), the last two (Tschoepe + Luggauer) discuss multimodal strategies of research in the field (through archives, and in the company of dogs). Perhaps this might enable a discussion on when and where multimodality happens, and how this affects the research process.
