Amanda Ravetz

The ethnographic turn - and after: a critical approach towards the realignment of art and anthropology.

The ethnographic turn has been the focus of recent debate between artists and anthropologists. Crucial to it has been an expansive notion of the ethnographic. No longer considered a specialised technique, the essays of Clifford and others have proposed a broader and more eclectic interpretation of ethnography – an approach long considered to be the exclusive preserve of academic anthropology. In this essay, we look more critically at what the ethnographic turn has meant for artists and anthropologists. To what extent does it describe a convergence of perspectives? Or does it elide significant differences in practice?

Why drawing, now?

This article takes the question ‘why drawing, now?’ as a speculative way to enter the debate on the relationship of art to different understandings of community. Drawing offers a paradox around the place of art in society. Drawing can be thought about as a traditional medium that yields an individually focused interior exploration. It has also performed a social or ritual role historically, in different times and places. Imagine a public event to which participants are invited to draw. There is a large, single sheet of paper or drawing surface and the offer of different drawing implements. Participants respond by drawing with their own style and understanding of what drawing is. The accumulation of individual marks and imaginations make up a whole, in as far as the surface drawn upon is singular and brings these individual productions into one space. Imagine the same shared drawing surface, held up around the edges by a group of participants. A drawing emerges through the marks of an inked ball rolling across the flexible moving surface. In this scenario, the drawing traces – literally marks – the emergent relationship of one individual to another through the shared activity. Both scenarios are possibly very familiar activities in participatory art practices and each offers a different way of imagining community. In both, the act of drawing is pivotal to shared activity. The first assumes that community can be constructed by bringing a group of individuals into the same space and activity. Many of us are enculturated to think that it is individuals – singular units – that make up society. The second, however, suggests that community as already present can be made visible through the drawing activity. Our exploration draws on a period of a collaborative practice-led experimentation, in particular a three-day research workshop involving drawing and writing. The aim was not to focus on what the results ‘looked like’ as art products, an approach that arguably fails to reveal the knowledge underpinning art’s appearances. Instead we set out to create the conditions for experiencing community through drawing. We found that drawing, in its most intimate relationship between maker/viewer, surface and mark, evokes a world to come, a world in formation rather than pre-formed. This revealed the need for careful scrutiny of the ways in which community itself is imagined. Our offer to the practice of participatory arts is to question deeply held assumptions about what community is rather than to propose new forms of access or techniques that can be transferred from one situation to another.

Seeing the wood for the trees: Social Science 3.0 and the role of visual thinking

Social Science is increasingly called on to address “grand challenges”, “wicked problems”, “societal dilemmas” and similar problematiques. Examples include climate change, the war on drugs and urban poverty. It is now widely agreed that the disciplinary structure of academic science, with its journals, curricula, peer communities, etc., is not well suited to such trans-disciplinary, ill-bounded, controversial issues, but the ways forward are not yet clear or accepted by the mainstream. The concept of a next generation paradigm of “Science 3.0” has emerged through work on sustainability systems analysis, and for this multiple channels for learning, thinking and communications are essential. Visual thinking in its many forms (from technical representation or mapping, to photography or video, to design or illustration, to fine art) can bring to the table tacit and “felt” knowledge, creative experience and links from analysis with synthesis. This paper first sketches the contours of a Social Science 3.0, and then demonstrates with examples how visual thinking can combine with rational argument, or extend beyond it to other forms of experience.

Drawing with a camera? Ethnographic film and transformative anthropology

Drawing has emerged as a recent focus of anthropological attention. Writers such as Ingold and Taussig have argued for its significance as a special kind of knowledge practice, linking it to a broader re-imagining of the anthropological project itself. Underpinning their approach is an opposition between the pencil and the camera, between ‘making’ and ‘taking’, between restrictive and generative modes of inquiry. This essay challenges this assumption, arguing that these elements in drawing and filmmaking exist in a dialectical rather than a polarized relationship. It highlights particular insights that follow from a dialogue between written and film-based anthropologies and links them to broader debates within the discipline – for example, debates about ways of knowing, skilled practice, improvisation and the imagination, and anthropology as a form of image-making practice.

Improvisational Attitudes: Reflections from Art and Life on Certainty, Failure, and Doubt

This Special Issue draws together diverse projects that nonetheless share approaches to the improvisational. The authors are artists and researchers from across the domains of visual art, music, and anthropology. They discuss work situated in Belgium, England, Scotland, USA, Mexico, Germany, and India. Their reflections cut across different sites in which practices of improvisation have traction and therefore meaning. They draw on methodical skill and knowledge, arguably the domain of certainty. At the same time they are open to a state of mind in which the next moment is truly indeterminate.