Experiments and possibilities of drawing in ethnographic work
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18537/tria.13.01.14Abstract
This article proposed to center ethnographic drawing as an innovative anthropological experimentation to renew the discipline and ultimately helps us better understand living beings.
As a practice that is corporeal, cognitive, sensitive, and at the same time speculative, we think of the act of drawing as an amplifying practice of ethnography. We define two ways, first in terms of the intrinsic elements of fieldwork (participant observation, embodied training of the ethnographer, memory, and reflexivity), and then as concerning elements that go beyond fieldwork that allow to potentiate it (multisensory experiences, shared imaginaries, speculations about the future).
This theoretical-methodological reflection is based on an ongoing academic experiment involving speculation, experimentation and ethnographic collaboration. A first publication in the forms of a book Ficciones Australes Volume 4: Speculative essays on the future (Núñez & Idrovo, 2021) was developed by students in the MA in Anthropology of the Contemporary and the research group KALEIDOS at the University of Cuenca.
We propose with this work a thinking experiment in creativity, experimentation, and interdisciplinary "traffickings", to complicate, enrich and decenter anthropological knowledge making.
Keywords: Ethnographic drawing, experimental methodologies, contemporary anthropology.
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