conference
ANTHROPOLOGY AS ART,
ART AS ANTHROPOLOGY
Fieldworks: Dialogues between art and
anthropology: Tate Modern, London,
26-28 September 2003
There was much that was redolent of the field-
work encounter in the Tate Modern’s
‘Fieldworks’. Artists and anthropologists met,
listened at tentively to each other and, after
publicly offering considered responses,
retreated to the company of their respective
communities of which they demanded – with a
level of irritation which seemed, for many, to
grow over the course of the conference’s three
days – ‘What are they on about?’ Whereas for
the anthropologists the problem seemed pre-
dominantly one of incomprehension – a sense
of simply not understanding what the artists
‘said’ in their works, performances and occa-
sional exegeses, for a number of the artists
there was a manifest fear of exploitation based
on a perception that the anthropologists
‘wanted’ something from them that they were
far from clear they wished to deliver.
The structure of that encounter is, of course,
neither novel nor surprising (George Marcus
pointed out in his keynote address that artists
and anthropologists have made stuttering
attempts to talk for years). Ethnographers were
in the main looking for clear-cut answers as to
how art and anthropology relate, while a
majority of the artists had gathered to present,
and/or to witness, examples of a relatively new
form of performance art (‘fieldwork’) which
involved a more extensive sector of the social
in its enactment than had the gallery-based
performances which predominated in the past.
Neither group, I daresay (there were, of
course, exceptions), had come with the inten-
tion of actually engaging with the other, but
the system of moderation and the time offered
by most sessions for questions and discussion
forced dialogue to the fore. It was in the hard
work of those discussions, and in the questions
their questions engendered, that it seemed to
me the real fieldwork took place.
In saying this I do not mean to dismiss those
presentations in which artists and anthropolo-
gists actually collaborated to produce either art
works (notably Hugh Brody’s engagement
with Antony Gormley in making the film
Inside Australia) or performances generating
ethnographic insights (Neil Cummings and
Marysia Lewandowska’s provocative work
with Marilyn Strathern in the Bank of England
and the Tate). Neither do I mean to overlook
papers which talked of anthropologists
working with or on artists in the field (Annie
Brydon’s study of Icelandic artists), others
which demonstrated artists working with
methods which could be called anthropolog-
ical (Teresa Pereda’s presentation of
Argentinian and Spanish rituals), or even the
exceptional paper by Susan Ossman which dis-
ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 20 NO 2, APRIL 2004
cussed the art works she produced in the
course of her anthropological research. These
presentations, and numerous others, suggested
– as much by the nature of their failures as by
the calibre of their successes – that there might
be terrain on which artists and anthropologists
could meet and build.
As in the field encounter, it was the apparent
dislocation between the demands of the two
parties meeting that demanded investigation,
discussion and accommodation. Artists, I
would suggest, resist abstraction – they want
their art to show something immanent to the
event which forms its context – whereas
anthropologists, like scholars in general, want
to disembed from the event or series of events
a structure or process which can be told. The
different relation to the ‘object’ of knowledge
implicit in the distinction between showing
and telling is the crux of this seeming incom-
patibility, and for me it was Susan Hiller’s dis-
cussion of the relations of the artist to the
culture of the audience and of the audience to
the artwork which began to suggest ways of
overcoming this. Hiller, an artist originally
trained as an anthropologist, pointed out that
the ‘work’ the artist produces is generated
from a profound knowledge of the cultural
context out of which it is produced and in
which it is subsequently placed. This work
serves to make visible to its audience the con-
structedness of aspects of that context and, by
so doing, to ‘make strange’ features of its
world which in normal circumstances might
simply be overlooked. By stressing the labour
of (not always conscious) cultural analysis
which precedes the making of an artwork,
Hiller demystified some of the process of
artistic creation, thereby drawing artwork and
ethnographic study more closely together. In
emphasizing that art works by changing its
audience’s perceptions of the world it inhabits,
Hiller suggested – at least to me – that ethno-
graphies, whether texts or videos, should be
seen less as repositories of knowledge than as
machines for ‘making strange’ the givens of
their audiences.
Although this suggests that the work of
anthropologists and of artists (at least of artists
who engage in ‘fieldwork’) is far more similar
than initial impressions might indicate, it
leaves much still to be discussed. Hiller’s
model of knowing the culture in which and to
which the art work is presented does not work
so well when the artist (or anthropologist) is
presenting to one culture the work of another,
as the disquieting romanticism of some confer-
ence participants’ portrayals of cultural
‘others’ made clear. Furthermore, how can
ethnographies of one culture engage audiences
in another culture so as to effect a defamiliar-
ization of the latter’s relation to their own
everyday worlds? These are questions for the
future, and the future may reveal these to be
inadequate. By the second day of the confer-
ence, however, the necessity of such ques-
tioning was becoming apparent. ‘Fieldworks’
was work, but it brought some of its substan-
tial audience closer to attempting yet another
dialogue between art and anthropology. !
Glenn Bowman
University of Kent
glb@kent.ac.uk
AGENCY, DISCOURSES OF
POWER AND COLLECTIVE
REPRESENTATIONS
Socrates Intensive Programme 2003,
University of Vienna, 26 August-4
September 20031
In transactionist anthropological theory,
humans are social agents not overly con-
strained by structure and system. This
approach questions the unity of people, places
and culture long taken for granted in anthro-
pology, and challenges Durkheim’s concept of
‘collective representations’, meaningful sym-
bolic systems shared by groups but also repre-
senting them. Explicitly or implicitly,
‘collective representations’ are a fundamental
aspect of ‘culture’, be it in functionalism,
structuralism, or symbolic anthropology. In
recent years, globalization theory and transac-
tionism have stressed the importance of polit-
ical and economic power relations and the
discourses that accompany them, which per-
meate the construction both of group identities
and of individual agency.
Attempts to determine whether a revised
notion of collective representations was com-
patible with transactionism were put forward
by 12 researchers from Europe and the US
during the Socrates Intensive Programme 2003
in Vienna. Common to most presentations was
an understanding of society, culture and iden-
tity as highly dynamic.
Some contributions focused on single cul-
tural sites, teasing out aspects of structure,
power, agency and shared cognitive schemes.
Jean-Pierre Warnier presented the highly
diverse and centrifugal kingdom of Mankon in
the Cameroon grasslands, which is only held
together by the king and his ability to dis-
tribute life-giving and unifying substances to
his followers, seeking to draw in outsiders in
order to increase his power and even reaching
out to the bachelors who have migrated out-
side the region. Eric Hirsch studied landscape
and ritual among the Fuyuge of Papua New
Guinea and showed that the performance of
gab ritual revolves around the mutual chal-
lenges and recognition between hosts and
dancers/singers. Only in the ritual is the power
of the performers revealed, part of it stemming
from a timely introduction of innovative ele-
ments. Lawrence Taylor dealt with a group of
Mexican youth living in the towns of Nogales
on the US-Mexican border. Not territorially
25