Inquiries

Meetings are, together with papers and books, perhaps the quintessential mechanism for the circulation of academic knowledge. Anthropology has recently recognised the need to explore other ways of sharing our knowledge and thinking together. What if we explored and documented our open formats, that is, our ‘experiments in meeting’?

How would an experimental fieldwork exercise look like? It’s as if the ethnographies of recent decades devoted to the study of new media, technoscience and global organisations were offering us, or even were forcing us, to reconsider the form and norm of ethnographic fieldwork. Evoking here ‘experimentation’ or ‘the experimental’ is not an act of rupture with method, but rather an attempt at renewing the descriptive vocabulary and the conceptual language of the tales of the field of our ethnographies.