Xpositions

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?

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.