Xcol. An ethnographic inventory
Inventory
xcol is an inventory of the endless invention that is integral to any ethnographic inquiry. It takes as its departing point the idea that ethnography is an act of invention: Anthropologists, and ethnographers in general, have to invent how to investigate with others. xcol documents and curates the relational inventions produced by anthropologists with their counterparts. The inventory offers four kinds of inventions: fieldwork inventions for ethnographic inquiry (field devices), pedagogical methodologies and venues for the apprenticeship of ethnography (open formats), interventions towards the inside of the discipline of anthropology drawing inspiration from our fields of study (intraventions), and material experiments in anthropological practice at the hinges of the ethnographic (prototypes). Anthropologists, ethnographers and close companions are invited to join this open inventory.
Xpositions
This section inventories different texts sustaining and motivating the tasks of the xcol platform: conceptual positions driven by an experimental impulse (xpositions), programmatic essays, longer reflections and other contributions addressing relevant aspects of ethnographic inventiveness.
CfP | Bureaucratic reinventions: The more-than-market arrangements of public action
At a time when market logics have become the hegemonic operating rationale of many governments, urban bureaucracies seem to be undergoing a profound process of reinvention: from participatory budgeting or community involvement in policymaking to co-creation competitions and citizen laboratories that expand the range of knowledge and sensibilities in urban governance. These bureaucrats appear no longer as sinister machinic operators of Kafkaesque state violence, but as hopeful and flexible practitioners promoting many forms of public good. In what ways are these bureaucratic reinventions more conducive to the public good than the actions of the market? Also, what do these places mean for the ways in which we might study them?
Anthropology and ethnographic experimentation #EASA2024 PhD Summer School
Ethnographic experimentation is an anthropological response to the epistemic challenges of our contemporary world. Beyond traditional norms and forms of ethnography, there are all kinds of projects that experiment with forms of representation, fieldwork, and analysis. The ‘experiment’ emerges in all these ethnographies as a distinctive epistemic practice, different from observational activities that are the foundation for its empirical engagements. Experimentation is an opportunity to reconceptualise and transform the empirical practices of anthropology. This summer school brings together a programme exploring the analysis, characterisation, and design of ethnographic experiments, along with opportunities to try them in practice.
NEW EDITED BOOK! – An Ethnographic Inventory: Field Devices for Anthropological Inquiries
This book provides an inventory of modes of inquiry for ethnographic research and presents fieldwork as an act of relational invention. It advances contemporary debates in ethnography by arguing that the empirical practice of anthropology is and has always been an inventive activity.
SEMINARIO – La invención etnográfica: el arte de hacer preguntas relevantes
La serie de seminarios ‘La invención etnográfica’ presenta un conjunto de investigaciones que dan cuenta de los esfuerzos de antropólogos y antropólogas de orientaciones muy diversas por ampliar el repertorio de nuestros modos de indagación etnográfica. Cada uno de los proyectos que discutiremos presenta un dispositivo de campo que dispone las condiciones para pensar y construir problematizaciones con nuestras contrapartes. Tras cada una de esas investigaciones encontramos el esfuerzo denodado de antropólogos y antropólogas por formular preguntas relevantes para los tiempos que vivimos.
Ethnographic experimentation: Other tales of the field
Ethnographic experimentation refers to an ethnographic modality where anthropologists venture into the collaborative production of venues for knowledge creation that turn the field into a site for the construction of joint anthropological problematizations. Invoking the trope of ethnographic experimentation we aim at describing how anthropologists creatively venture into the production of venues of knowledge creation through processes of material and social interventions that turn the field into a site for epistemic collaboration: a site for the construction of joint anthropological problematizations.
Dispositivos de campo
Proponemos concebir la etnografía como un ensamblaje de dispositivos de campo: técnicas relacionales, dispositivos de registro… el concepto de dispositivo pretende llamar la atención sobre la espacialidad y materialidad específicas que demandan las situaciones etnográficas. Los dispositivos de campo son arreglos singulares que hacen posible el encuentro etnográfico, surgen de la inventiva relacional del campo y nos hablan de los mundos sociales investigados al mismo tiempo que dan cuenta del esfuerzo inventivo de las antropólogas por investigarlos.
‘Devicing’ fieldwork
We would like to intimate a mode of collaboration that is neither a constitutive condition of fieldwork nor a deliberate strategy informed by political and ethical commitments: Collaboration as an epistemic figure that describes how anthropologists creatively venture into the production of venues of knowledge creation in partnership with their counterparts in the field. In these situations, the ethnographic method is re-equipped with new infrastructures, spaces of knowledge production, relationship forms and modes of representation.
The ethnographic invention
Ethnography is an act of invention. Anthropological inquiries always demand to invent how to inquire and how to relate to others, this is the central argument upon which xcol-Inventory has been built. But if invention has always been integral to the empirical practice of ethnography, the imperative to care for our knowledge practices should also involve to care for the inventiveness of our modes of inquiry.
The Lab is not Blah: Academic encounters, venues to re-train ourselves
Open formats are methodologies for thinking and doing together. Despite the relevance of the methodologies used to share knowledge, we usually resort to the most conventional formats: paper presentations, round tables, etc. This offers a collection of experiments with meeting formats as pedagogical spaces for the apprenticeship of ethnographic experimentation and encourages the need to document these ‘experiments’ so that they may travel, be learnt and reproduced elsewhere.
Antropologías multimodales: más que texto
La antropología multimodal propone un programa que especula con las formas posibles de indagación antropológica y que a través de gestos inventivos contribuye a renovar la relevancia del oficio antropológico. La reflexión que propone hace uso de la particular condición hipermediada de nuestra época tratando de superar la fijación disciplinar con lo textual para experimentar con las formas de representación, análisis e indagación. A través de ellos, los antropólogos se abren a nuevos lenguajes, formatos y otros modos de indagación.
Dar cuenta de la invención: una guía para abordar la descripción de los dispositivos de campo
Creemos que inventariar invenciones etnográficas en xcol requiere un género de escritura apropiado que será distinto de los formatos más...
Sensorialidad (y más): más allá del texto
La antropología ha consagrado la escritura como práctica paradigmática para la expresión de su conocimiento, pero el texto no es suficiente para dar cuenta de la complejidad del mundo. En tiempos recientes se desarrolla un amplio esfuerzo por experimentar con otros lenguajes y formatos para el conocimiento antropológico, así ocurre con la antropología sensorial y experimentos que se inspiran en los dominios del arte y las culturas digitales.
Colaboraciones antropológicas en la contemporaneidad
La colaboración es invocada en tiempos recientes como una figura relacional necesaria para el estudio de nuestro mundo. Las llamadas a la colaboración en antropología no son nuevas, pero sí resultan novedosas las articulaciones específicas en nuestra contemporaneidad, como los ejercicios de colaboración experimental a través de los cuales antropólogos y sus contrapartes construyen problematizaciones conjuntas.
Glossary
A vocabulary of ethnographic invention: The xcol glossary is a collection of fundamental words and terms offering a conceptual language needed to describe the inventiveness always present in the ethnographic endeavour. The xcol glossary is thus nothing else than an inventory of words needed to account for ethnographic invention. It also offers key terms to navigate the site and engage in the task of inventorying.
Inquiries
The xcol inventory is a research platform and an infrastructure for ethnographic inquiry. The Inquiry section assembles different elements of the inventory presenting explorations into relevant topics. These varied assemblages or bundles map out distinctive modes of inquiry, pedagogic programmes and experimental endeavours in ethnography.
Call for Inventions
We aim to inventory accounts of ‘field devices’: 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 accounting for these field devices in at least two senses: (1) fleshing out the context as well as the social and material arrangements put into practice in empirical situations; and (2) hinting at the particular modes of ethnographic inquiry they enable or make emerge. Here you can check the full content of the call, as well as examples and guidelines to prepare your proposal.
Ethnographic experimentation
How would an experimental fieldwork exercise look like? The ethnographic experimentation proposed here is a form of engagement that entails field interventions through material and spatial arrangements that enable the articulation of inventive ways of working together. A distinctive ethnographic modality for the production of anthropological knowledge, one that bear witness to an emerging sensibility that takes shape in those field encounters in which anthropologists devise the conditions to problematize the world with their counterparts.
Open Formats: methodologies for thinking together
Open formats are methodologies for thinking and doing together. Despite the relevance of the methodologies used to share knowledge, we usually resort to the most conventional formats: paper presentations, round tables, etc. This offers a collection of experiments with meeting formats as pedagogical spaces for the apprenticeship of ethnographic experimentation and encourages the need to document these ‘experiments’ so that they may travel, be learnt and reproduced elsewhere.
Antropologías multimodales
La antropología multimodal propone un programa a través del cual la disciplina se abre a la invención de formas de expresión y representación, de relación y producción de conocimiento a través de múltiples modos relacionales y representacionales que van más allá de lo textual. A través de ellos, los antropólogos y antropólogas exploran otros modos de indagación, se abren a nuevos lenguajes y formatos para expresar su conocimiento y son capaces de interpelar a públicos amplios y diversos.
Playing with method
How could games redevelop our repertoires of ethnographic representation and intervention? What vocabularies and considerations might allow us to unfold their full potential as relevant ethnographic or peri-ethnographic genres?