Since starting to work alongside an artist and a designer, I’ve become more aware of ethnographic practice inflected by art and design. There seems to be a growing number of institutional spaces, degree programs, courses, workshops and books devoted to exploring different combinations of art/design aesthetics and ethnography. While audience and aims vary, one can’t help but wonder what it means for there to be a kind mushrooming of art/design inflected methods and outputs (Design Anthropology, Anthropology Design, Design Ethnography, Sensory Ethnography to name a few and see for instance a last year’s ANTROPOLOGY + DESIGN series on Savage Minds). While visual anthropology has an extended history, and anthropologists have long been interested in the intersections of aesthetic and cultural production, is there something of a “visualisation of anthropology” (Grimshaw & Ravetz 2005) underway? Is an attention to art and design in anthropology ‘new’ or simply new to me? For those of us not designated as ‘visual’ anthropologists, are we being asked/invited/demanded to engage with different modalities for fieldwork and scholarly output?

I decided ask an expert. Keith M. Murphy is an anthropologist of design. His new book Swedish Design: An Ethnography is just that. It is a rich description and analysis of how everyday things (furniture, lighting) are made to mean through processes of design within the context of larger cultural flows. Like some of the iconic objects he describes, Keith’s writing is sharp, uncluttered and politically aware.

In addition to researching and writing about design, Keith experiments with how to harness design modalities to anthropological and ethnographic practice. Through the Center for Ethnography at the University of California, Irvine, Keith and George Marcus host occasional events called ‘Ethnocharettes’. An ethnocharrette is described as a collaborative session of intense activity in which design thinking and methods are used to interrogate and explore ethnographic concerns. Their most recent installment was in March. I was fortunate enough to be there and do what anthropologists do best: hang out, watch, listen, and ask questions.

I reached Keith at his standing desk in his Long Beach home via FaceTime. Our conversation tacked back and forth between the particulars of the ethnocharrette exercise and his speculations on why ‘the visual’ and borrowed modalities from art and design seem to be growing new roots (routes) in anthropology. It was less of an ‘interview’ and more of an ongoing conversation we have been having for the past year or so. I re-assemble our discussion over two posts and invite you to join the conversation.

Before I arrived in California, Keith described the ethnocharrette to me as “this thing”. The ambiguity of his shorthand reflected the changing form of the event since its inception. A charrette is a common activity in design disciplines. Keith described it as more than brainstorming, less than consequential. It is inherently collaborative. Whereas a classic brainstorm involves individuals tossing out ideas and then selecting ones to choose, a charrette is designed collaboratively create by bringing things together.

The impetus for the ethnocharrette experiment came partly from Keith’s own exposure to design thinking in his research, through an earlier pre-doctoral internship at Sapient, and from working briefly as a member of the COLAB team at Syracuse University. Since Writing Culture, George Marcus has increasingly been interested in exploring the appeal of design and the studio as a legitimate form of experimentation in association with fieldwork projects. Keith was upfront that as a pair they have been willfully sidestepping the issue of whether the charrette model is for pedagogy or ethnographic practice. It has always been done in the context of pedagogy (graduate student training), however they have found the boundary between pedagogy and practice blurred by students themselves. Some of the techniques introduced pre-fieldwork end up being independently taken up by students as they move into their analysis and writing.

The most recent iteration involved students bringing ‘ethnographica’ related to their projects. They were instructed to bring ‘things” (texts, images, objects, sound files) that were easily displayed and shared with others. They were in groups of three to five and had each selected a theorist to think through their materials with. Phase one of the charette involved students giving brief introductions of their materials and then laying out ‘pieces’ of their selected theory on post-its. The culling for simplified parts and constraining them to a post-it is an attempt to disturb anthropology’s penchant for the complicated. “If anthropology had a tombstone it would say ‘its complicated’ ”, remarked Murphy. The charette is designed to extract information from materials before deep thinking. This slows down the desire to ‘complicate’ and take better stock of what is.

Once the theory pieces are up, students are invited to ‘read’ each other’s materials. The ethnocharette works against the normative model of anthropological production where singular people are doing work on singular projects. Instead of having students trained to think as individuals first, collaborators later, the charrette model introduces co-thinking earlier in the academic process. Of course there are long lists of successful collaborations from our field, yet individual projects continue to be favoured and rewarded. In the exercise, students relinquish sole ‘ownership’ over their materials and see the variety of ways in which they can be read. Again, post-its keep track of pieces.

Next, students look at the bits of information they have co-produced and think about how they might sensibly cluster. They can re-arrange and combine them in ways they see fit. Keith describes this as ‘structured non-thinking’. The process asks them to physically relate to materials in different ways. Instead of solely cultivating habits like sitting, thinking, attacking, the charette has people standing, moving, touching and seeing things differently. The groups I observed related to the task in different ways. Some had highly tidy rows of like terms, others had stacks of ideas, while one group was determined to extract from us the ‘correct’ way of proceeding.

Phase two of the charrette asks participants to take what has been assembled and re-present it in light of the process. The idea is that if Phase I is a process that compels the participants to let go of their pre-conceived commitments to their field sites and ethnographic materials, and to find otherwise unnoticed connections between their individual field sites, Phase II is  intended to push students to create something — a rough material or conceptual prototype — that could account for these new connections in unforeseen ways. Theory is important here, too. Each group worked with a specific theorist, and tried to incorporate those ideas into their prototypes as glue that held the disparate projects together. Again some groups quickly set about creating, while others waded through possibilities with some uncertainty what could/should be done. Keith sees this hesitation as part of the ‘ideology of creativity’ that design rests on. Design assumes everyone is creative, whereas many anthropologists assume they aren’t creative. In fact, there are explicit discourses against creativity. The charrette is meant to interrupt some of these [stereotypes] to push the boundaries of what anthropology can be, while not oversubscribing to ‘creativity’ as inherently valuable (sellable).

Here I objected. My migration to anthropology from sociology/ applied linguistics was precisely my sense that there was space for creative scholarly practice and that corners of the discipline were staunchly uncommitted to a sharp divide between art and science. If anything, I remarked, I over estimate my creativity. He reframed. The question is perhaps less about if you are creative, but rather what opportunities do you have to manifest creativity? He had me there. While I have been fortunate to be part of Ethnographic Terminalia in the past, most creative projects have been taken on through art-based residencies rather than academic ones.

I still wanted to push the issue of creativity. The analysis seems gendered. Many women anthropologists take on creative modalities (literary ethnography, creative non-fiction) and while they find an audience in the Real World, they can sometimes seem ‘niche’ in mainstream anthropology. Keith acknowledged that there is a difference between certain kinds of aestheticizations and the regimes of value they find themselves circulating in. Broadening what it means to be ‘creative’ as an anthropologist is about understanding stylizations (creative non-fiction, or jargon laden prose) do stand for themselves as inherently valuable. Rather the question must be asked, what are you attempting to do? Who is the audience? What’s the goal? Ethnocharrette is just a part of a longer conversation that students’ work will be in over the course of their training.

Our own conversation moved to the bigger picture. Later that week, he and I would join a larger group of faculty and advanced graduate students for a Productive Encounter led by anthropologist Christine Hegel and set designer Luke Cantarella. We would be making use of design exercises to think through Doug Holmes’ work on central bankers. Perhaps as a result of my own training, I was inclined to ask the question, ‘why this, why now?’ Why are these modes of thinking/ practicing anthropology appearing? Our conversation continues in my next post.

In the middle of the teaching term, summer is the far away season where you imagine that all of your academic, and possibly creative, writing projects will get off the ground. It is an oasis over the desert horizon. When summer finally arrives, you realize the large, luscious lagoon you imagined is more like a puddle. Desperate, you dive in anyways. The reality of the academic summer is that we continue to have competing demands on our time. We rush off to the field. Our families have a heightened sense of entitlement to interact with us.  Kids aren’t in school. We are faced with duties left undone in the scramble to get through the term. Those of us who are junior, or precariously employed, are likely packing and moving (again).

According to every “how to” book on successful academic writing, waiting for big chunks of time to advance intellectual projects is ill-advised. Instead, consistent short bursts are the way to cultivate a long and successful publication record. Through various experiments, I found this to be true. Nevertheless, most of us stay committed to a substantial amount of summer writing. We have to. Savage Minds has been a supportive space for thinking and talking about anthropological writing. In this first guest post I want to open a conversation about summer writing and sketch out my plan for the coming month as guest blogger. 

During my PhD, I spent an enormous amount of time reading books on how to write dissertations. The best advice came from my supervisor. She said, “you learn to write a dissertation by writing a dissertation”. Touché. Although this phrasing makes me cringe, writing is a practice. Writers of various stripes advocate for a daily routine of some kind. Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way, popularized the term ‘morning pages’. This refers to three stream of consciousness pages written first thing every morning. Anthropologist and author Kirin Narayan gives similar advice. She writes daily, often describing a single event that stood out for her from the previous day. Sagely, she does this before the flood gates of email open. Humor essayist David Sedaris, whom I consider an almost-anthropologist of white American culture, has kept a diary since September 4th 1977. He has missed fewer than a handful of days in his chronicles of everyday life. Clearly daily writing has served many people well.

For some, a daily practice gets linked to a quota. Sometimes it is a time quota, a page quota or a word count. This can quickly lead you into challenge territory. Challenges are public (sometimes personal) commitments to specific a task over a period of time. For instance, Academic Writing Month (#AcWriMo), a spin on NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), is a virtual goal setting and check in space for PhD students. Those satisfied by word counting may already know of the site 750 Words. This site gives you space to keep a running daily conversation and prompts you every day. It ‘analyzes’ your entry. Last week it seems I was often angry and extroverted. Have you tried such challenge structures? Are they simply stress inducing? Or do they help you?

Last summer, I became extremely curious about a growth in ‘challenge cultures’ more generally. I decided to make a challenge of writing about challenge culture for 30 days. Intuitively, I called that series #30daychallenged. It took me 196 days to complete the challenge. I’ll tell you more about my anthropological foray to the self-help arts, specifically what they might teach us about language, culture and cognition, another time. I am bringing up challenges because they wed writing practice to community, a second element of successful writing. Comments I got from friends and strangers while I was #30daychallenged shaped my thinking, led me to key literatures and connected me to people doing related work. It helped turn a curiosity into a veritable project.

When I agreed to blog for SM for July, I had this grand idea I would pre-write some very compelling pieces about very important topics and would become the anthropological equivalent of very Rich and Famous (e.g. not sharing a hotel room at the AAA). I had a vision of my writing style: it would be broody and bright a la Lauren Berlant with a dash of whimsy a la Ruth Behar. I was certainly not going to fall back on my trademark style which is the “Hot Messay”. These are the delusions conjured in the middle of the winter while teaching 3/3 on the snowiest campus in the United States. Now seeing the puddle for what it is, I must fall back on all of the advice I read about writing (often in lieu of writing) which is to write often and share ideas early. 

In the coming month, I am leveraging the exploratory nature of the blog genre to describe a recent ‘visual turn’ in all dimensions of my anthropological practice. Over the past year, art and design inflected ideas and methods seem to demand my attention. This includes aspects of my research methods and output, teaching strategies and ‘encounters’ with colleagues’ work. Be advised I am not a bonafide Visual Anthropologist. I sincerely appreciate  and admire this subfield and acknowledge the time and experience that goes into developing the expertise. I haven’t had a path that included this training. That said, I’ve had to grapple with art and design (often on its own terms) in ways I’d like to think/write about here. I do hope you’ll join me and share your summer writing/making projects and challenges. I thank you in advance for the space to practice in community.

In my last post on Bauman and Briggs Voices of Modernity I explored their argument that Boas’s notion of culture makes it seem like a prison house from which only the trained anthropologist is capable of escaping. In doing so, however, I only really presented half of their argument. The book has two interrelated themes: One is a Foucauldian genealogy of the concepts of science, culture, race, language, and nation (as seen through the rise of folklore studies). The other is a Latourian exploration of the construction of folklore as a science. This is done by exploring how oral traditions were turned into texts, and thus evidence of traditional culture (however that was defined). Aubrey, Blair, the Grimm brothers, and Schoolcraft were each faced with hybrid oral texts whose own modernity (as contemporary documents) belied their perceived scientific value as authentic remnants of ancient cultures. For this reason the texts underwent tremendous alterations, if not outright fabrication, by these scholars in order to make them suitable for their own purposes. The book traces how these processes of entextualization were shaped by each scholar’s concepts of science, culture, race, language, and nation.

So where does Boas fit into all of this?

One of the legacies of earlier folkloric traditions was a view of contemporary oral traditions as little more than the decayed remnants of a once great culture. Although Boas was able, partially as a result of his linguistically inspired view of culture, to criticize evolutionary perspectives that placed contemporary indigenous people in the past, he still seems to have shared some of these views.

Boas was particularly interested in what he considered to be traditional speech. This quest for the archaic and authentic related to form as well as content; Boas summarized his agenda as an attempt “to rescue the vanishing forms of speech”

This rescuing entailed some of the same reconstruction that earlier folklorists were guilty of. In some cases, such as Blair, this entailed the wholesale fabrication of supposedly traditional folktales. In others, such as the Brothers Grimm and Schoolcraft, it entailed heavy editing and embelleshment (although they each did this in different ways and for different reasons – discussed in depth in the book). Boas, however, was even more concerned than his predecessors about establishing the scientific credentials of his work. But his vision of fieldwork as science usefully served to hide some of his entextualization practices from public scrutiny.

Fieldwork became a complex set of practices that had to be mastered through professional training; like owning an air pump, controlling access to this pedagogical process enabled Boas and those he trained to regulate the obligatory passage points that provided access to cultural knowledge. The analogy begins to break down, however, in that the air pump was designed to produce public knowledge, to open scientific work to scrutiny by groups of observers. Fieldwork placed the locus of observation far away from the center. Since people’s perceptions of their own cultural patterns are shaped by secondary explanations, Boas does not deem “natives” to be credible witnesses.

Here is where the questions of anthropological authority discussed last week become important, for while Boas is famous for having worked closely with indigenous scholars, even going so far as to give them credit for published work, the actual manner in which the texts were constructed still reveals some of the same discomfort with the hybridity of these texts that was shown by his predecessors. To understand this argument we need to know something about one of the scholars most closely associated with Boas, George Hunt:

George Hunt was the son of a high-ranking Tlingit woman and an Englishman who worked for the Hudson Bay Company. Hunt was raised in Fort Rupert, a stockaded outpost and Hudson Bay Company station that brought together not only Kwakwaka’wakw but also English, Scots, Irish, French-Canadian, Métis, Iroquois, Hawaiian, Tlingit, Tsimshian, and Haida… Hunt was perceived as a “foreign Indian” by the Kwakwaka’wakw, and he never considered himself to be Kwakwaka’wakw; he often re-ferred to his wife’s relatives as “these Kwaguls.” At the same time, Hunt’s noble descent brought him high status, particularly after he married a high-ranking Kwakwaka’wakw woman. Hunt’s rank afforded him exposure to forms of knowledge and discourse owned by elite lineages, and it granted him a strong social position by virtue of the high-ranking lines’ dominance of trade and indigenous–white relations.

So how did their collaboration work?

Hunt did not take down material by dictation, but rather listened to the rendition and then went home and reconstructed – and thus re-entextualized – the discourse; after he had written the text in its entirety in Kwakw’ala, he added English interlineations. As he rephrased the materials in the written version, Hunt wrote in what Berman (1996) refers to as “an authentic Kwakwaka’wakw speech style formerly used in the myth recitations,” even when his consultants are likely to have used less archaic styles. Hunt attempted to locate and document speech styles that he deemed to be particularly traditional and authentic; regarding some of his texts on cooking, Hunt wrote Boas: “These will show you the oldest way of speaking.”

One of the implications of this is that Hunt, as the “native informant” allowed Boas to sub-contract and legitimate the work of re-entextualization, effectively brushing the dirty work associated with creating these texts under the carpet. So while Bauman and Briggs want to give “credit where credit is due” and praise Boas for sharing authorship with Hunt on the title page (see the image at the start of this post), they have reservations about how Hunt’s authorship was framed.

The voice that Boas sought to authorize, however, was not that of George Hunt qua individual, not in terms of the particular features of his complex, hybrid social position. Rather, Boas downplayed Hunt’s background, including his multiracial ancestry in characterizing Hunt as speaking “Kwakiutl as his native language.”

Boas needed Hunt to give scientific authority to his texts, but in order to construct that authority he had to downplay the true hybridity of Hunt’s background.

Foregrounding the cultural and historical complexity of the texts and the circumstances surrounding their production would have challenged the way that Boas was constructing their authority – as a voice that could speak for “Kwakiutl customs” in their entirety… By giving the impression that members of Kwakwaka’wakw communities spoke no English, Boas greatly increased the monologicality and monoglossia of the texts and removed another sort of important evidence with respect to their rootedness in colonial contexts.

So, while Boas deserves credit for granting Hunt co-authorship, we can still question the manner in which he did it and even his motivations. None of this is to play a game of “gotcha” with Boas, but to get us to think critically about our own practices of entextualization and our own contemporary mechanisms of granting ourselves anthropolgical authority.