Refiguring Art and Anthropology,For Whom? A conversation with George E. Marcus and Fred R. Myers

We wanted to begin our conversation by asking about what we call here “the will to collaborate,” both among anthropologists in projects like Traffic in Culture, and among anthropologists and art world professionals. Since Traffic in Culture, George has written about this in terms of para-ethnography, in which anthropologists collaborate with “experts with shared, discovered and negotiated critical sensibilities,” including “those who are deeply complicit with and implicated in powerful institutional processes” (2000: 3,5). We recognize that current strands in the anthropology of art tend to rest upon collaborative processes with artists and, to much less of an extent, with other art-world actors. That stands in contrast with the call for independent ethnographies that you all made in the pages of Traffic. This special issue presents different perspectives on this question. We also reflect on how consistently Manuela [Ciotti] presents dense ethnographic moments that, she argues, would not have emerged out of a collaborative frame (e.g. Ciotti 2020). What in your mind are acceptable or productive forms of collaboration within this kind of ethnography? Is there anything particular about the art world versus other institutional forms that should shape our choices to collaborate or not?

I think Fred can speak with more perspective on the range of collaborations that have furthered an anthropology of art since the 1990s. Right now, I am intensely interested in a particular kind of collaboration that touches upon my continuous concern with the history of the character and form of ethnographic research in anthropology since 1980s/1990s critiques. That is, I have been thinking about the collaboration that evolves specifically from an anthropologist inviting an artist or artists into a planned or ongoing project of ethnographic research.

Usually, it is about creating an intervention, or ‘third space,’ within or alongside a project of fieldwork research. The stakes of such an intervention for fieldwork research dominated by contemporary versions of the classic ideology of ‘participant observation’ are quite high. Personally, I think of this in terms of how the various crafts that compose theatre, stage, performance, and film arts, and their professional habits and expectations of collaboration, might interact with the ethnographer's control over her data. In one respect, this concern is the inverse of the role of the anthropologist as dramaturg in theatre productions—here, how does the anthropologist, as originator and director of a project with stakes in research, participate in the use of ethnographic data intimately in its interpretations by commissioned or invited artists?

To put it a bit crudely, then, how much aesthetics can the data bear, as deeply invested in by the commissioning anthropologist with a history of long-term fieldwork? This is the anthropologist placing her ‘valuables’ in the hands of artistic cultures of production to which she has an uncertain relationship. Is she a commissioning producer? Concerned patron? Excited participant in a project which she has entrepreneured? How does the anthropologist participate in a culture of production that has a deep tradition of rules or habits about collaboration? Introducing mediating artists between an anthropologist and subjects creates a highly independent third.

Anthropologists producing (commissioning) art, so to speak, to further the development of ethnographic research might be seen as partly inverting the issues at the core of Hal Foster's much cited essay in The Traffic in Culture ‘The Artist as Ethnographer?’ Although there is considerable enunciated desire to assimilate artistic practice directly into ethnographic research methods, the question posed is not so much, “the Ethnographer as Artist?” Instead, there is the Ethnographer desiring the effects, practices, and work of Artists within research projects that s/he undertakes. There are norms, practices, and habits of collaboration in various arts that anthropologists should know about. Based on my own experience of collaboration with theatre artists—especially with stage design and improv dance performance—in the creation of an installation at the World Trade Organization (see Cantarella, Hegel, and Marcus 2019), I am interested in how the ‘lone wolf ethnography’ becomes collaborative (Boyer and Marcus 2020). The ethnographer may be a shrewd observer of arts’ culture, but when she wants to direct or access such artistry within an ethnographic research design, s/he needs a role other than ethnographic expert. In thinking about ethnographers’ collaborations with artists for ethnographic ends—meaning, those that are continuous with their research rather than those that produce forms, other than publication, for displaying their results—I am interested in who directs what, what the different forms and limits of authority are. I have been looking at the literatures, memoires, etc., on art collaborations of various sorts, but especially theatre and movie-making, and also at a very interesting literature on commissioning and its licenses and relations. My experience with the World Trade Organization performance stimulated my current focused interest on this category of art-anthropology collaboration, not to mention the broader implication of how art-anthropology collaborations might become the form for para-sites, third space productions, and adjacencies. Those forms were so much on the agenda of ethnographic research during the early 2000s (see Rabinow, Marcus, et al. 2008) and are now followed by more enthusiastic calls for the kind of multi-modal anthropological research that really does require a full critical reversal of Hal Foster's essay title question.

There are so many kinds of collaboration: there's the collaboration in the production of an artwork, there's the collaboration in the production of an exhibition, in the consultation on collections. And they’re very different kinds of things. All of them, in my experience, have been very informative and very illuminating. Reading through your papers, it seems to me that one of the issues is this: at what point in the process of circulation, production, reproduction, are you actively involved? In a lot of these activities, an anthropologist produces an artwork or collaborates with an artist in production. That's one kind of thing. I don’t know if Ruth's paper is a collaboration with indigenous actors. It's a response to indigenous theories of curation, addressed to the indigenisation of exhibition, and to moving away in response to the kind of criticisms that come from that. The issue about collaboration and complicity—which I think really is something that George has articulated most clearly—might be imagined to specifically refer to certain kinds of work.

One of the issues that's really not specific to art worlds—which is why I thought the framework of critical ethnography was of some value—is that you can’t be outside anymore. You really can’t be outside. And that involves a certain kind of reflexivity, and a certain kind of self-criticism, but also, inevitably, some kind of tension or friction between frameworks of understanding.

So, I don’t know whether there's a choice of collaboration or not. If you want to be there, if you want to be a part of it—certainly, with indigenous people in many places—you have to be willing to defer and to contribute. I think that it would be good to specify what some examples would be, and whether they differ from each other, and so on. But I think that the lack of distance of simple objectivity with these objects is part of contemporary ethnographic life anyway, or anthropological life.

Thinking of your pieces in Traffic, it's very hard to come across writing that approaches the art world in this particular fashion. I don’t know whether to attribute this to the collaboration modality that is prevalent on this side of the Atlantic. But I would say that the question of independence that comes out in your pieces—that collaboration, independence, critique trio—is almost like an endangered species.

I’ve just written an anthropology of art review for the Annual Review of Anthropology, with Eugenia Kisin (2019), and, personally, I find that people have continued to privilege the high value of art as an arena in which to act.

Anthropologists are somewhat less critical of the art world than many participants, like Nancy Sullivan [whose writing appeared in Traffic]. They participate in it from a protected position of tenure, or from an academic area of separation, but I think that they don’t question adequately the value-category of art. George and I have come at this from different ways, but for me the anthropology of art is an ongoing discussion of the category of art and its significance in the social world. And I don’t find that as being part of their discussions. They might want to say, “oh, it's so interesting, these artists are making the same kind of criticisms of the world as we have….” Fair enough. What does that mean? Where is the venue for that? You know, why do we care about what the people at Documenta think of average Australians? What's the critical practice that that's involved in? And so, they’re not looking at the specificity of these regimes of value, and institutions, but they want to be in it in some way, and some take it for granted, even if they want to use it to say something valuable and good. In my more limited experience of that world, it's much more prevalent in Europe than it is in the U.S. I mean, I can’t tell you how many books from Bloomsbury that I have seen. So, I think the interesting question is why is there so much of this in Europe and not here? What's the difference, right?

There's a very easy answer to that, and that's state funding for the arts, which gives a real incentive to do that kind of work. That also explains the kind of sociology of art that you get in Europe, which is really tied to the art market, to studies of patronage. We have a more rarified meeting of art and anthropology in the U.S., where people recognize each other as being invested in analysis of phenomena that are out there in the world. My piece takes the new interest in infrastructure as an example, but climate change or capitalism would be the two paradigmatic examples, I think. And, the idea is that these are research techniques that go around harder, social-scientific ways of getting at these questions. There's a search for an alternative method, or an alternative sense of scale at which to address the problem. The different points of meeting between art and anthropology in Europe and in the U.S. are part of the reason why Manuela and I wanted to do this project.

Don’t forget that when we did the volume, in 1995, the basic modality of anthropology had been critically explored. So, the specialty of the anthropology of art had been one thing, and the critique of anthropological methodology another. They intersected in the ‘90s. I do think that there is still a question about the form of anthropological production, but that it's not just about ethnography--that played itself out. Now it's really about other forms, that are evolving and for which discussions of collaboration serve as a generic framing. I am particularly interested in the idea that artistic practices can inform the production of ethnographic research through yet unexplored norms of collaboration.

With productions in the field of research that require the skills of artists, but are anthropological projects, you never get into a debate about what's anthropology and what's art. It all comes down to how you communicate what you are doing through different kinds of practices and habits of working together. I think these are spaces where art and anthropology materialize in hybrid form. Nora Taylor's Dahn Vo piece is about what that kind of art could do in the space of anthropological inquiry, and Ruth Phillips’ piece is about the reconstitution of the museum, within art markets and spaces, and the reclamation of anthropologists’ interests in its former subjects. If we’re talking about the anthropology of art, that's one thing. If we’re talking about the relation of the work of artists to the work of ethnographers, and their purposes, as a resource for methodological innovation, that's another. And as I indicated, it is the latter arena that preoccupies me.

I think that Traffic in Culture has been read from two points of view. For many people, it's an authorization for what George had already articulated in Writing Culture. I have seen references which have very little to do with anything substantive in the book except to mark it as a moment in which anthropologists and artists could work in common, or at least share forms and sensibilities (although that was decisively contested in Foster's essay, which is perhaps the volume's most influential).

There is that thread of it, about experiment, which is there, but is really drawn from the earlier work George had been doing. And then there's another part of it, which is probably more mobilized by me, which is the life of the category of art, internationally, nationally, and so on, which I think is a legitimate object for study, ethnographic or otherwise. That flows from the experience of that category as an operative institutional framework for people making their way in the world in various respects, indigenous people and otherwise.

But there is another part. When we got involved with Traffic in Culture I remember calling George and saying, “I can’t believe this: every time I go to an art school, all I find on the bookshelves is theory.” And I know these guys don’t read much, right? But they’re reading huge amounts of stuff that I wouldn’t even assign to my graduate students because it is so demanding. What is this for them? How could they do it? So, it's kind of like, “Hey, George, this is your area—I know you have some idea about this.” That's where this started. And we tried to work our way out from that. I think the abstractions that emerge from the book's introduction have lives of their own, in certain respects, productive and not. I say to myself, “that's really intelligent, that's thoughtful.”

What we shared was this sense of the unexamined assumptions and grounds that participants were bringing to this work. For artists, it was their avant-gardism, and for anthropologists, some kind of naive ideas about what art was, which were very far behind or outside of what artists were doing. So that was a big part of it.

But the collaboration, if we come back to that question…. In the world that I live in, do research in, there are so many activities of artists coming to indigenous communities to engage in projects of collaboration. And they really are very similar to what you both have described, in India, where artists of some significant social standing and cultural capital try to engage with sectors of society that they want to empower, and sometimes appropriate from. But it's one thing to apply art practice to critique the society; it's quite another to examine the imagination of art as a space of critical engagement itself embedded in a history of assumptions and questions. In other words, these collaborations may not be decolonized enough, if you will, to ask about the embeddedness of this framework in a longer history of value.

And yet, the papers in the issue are quite focused on the adjudicative practices of non-western actors within the art world--in a way, they do all think through the question of decolonization, even if from different directions. For us, one question was how these cases can push us to reconsider how culture is “trafficked” in the present? In part, I was motivated to ask this because the art world in which I work is so different from the art world that was described in Traffic. The art world in which I work is a fairly seamless set of global institutions for Indian art. It's really complicated and hierarchical and built upon the history of various categories of art, but there is not the sense of a real separation between the West and the rest

Not to derail this, but Karin, what is your position in relation to Manuela's argument against collaboration?

Basically, I live the opposite of Manuela's argument against collaboration. I work as an art historian, write primarily in an art historical way, working off years of ethnographic research in which I have done things like written the memoirs of a gallerist, curated shows, participated in gallery publications on artists, etc. I am totally complicit and totally implicated. I write about that implication in book-length works, but otherwise I tend to simply inhabit the position of critic, curator, etc.

I am thinking of what you Fred said earlier, ‘You really can’t be outside,’ I am also totally ‘inside,’ even too much….I am not opposed to collaborations per se, it is simply about what you are asking of a project. My position is that the art world is not only populated by artists, they are only a small though important fragment of it. I am interested in understanding this world holistically, through anything that it produces, inhabits, and represents. On one occasion, I have argued about ‘impossible collaborations’ (Ciotti 2020) because I am simply unable to single out and collaborate with something or someone out of this whole, and in particular if I want to understand non-humans. So both Karin and I are ‘in there’ in lots of different ways, simply differently. So, for example, for me whatever happens at the museum, whatever happens at an event, if I am not interested in that particular artist or object, then I don’t pursue them. I think that illustrates very clearly the difference. I have a net and I go and fish and…

and I swim in the ocean…

and you know exactly what fish you want to catch.

Yes, in part, because I am interested in figuring out what kind of fish—meaning, artistic work—will thrive in that environment.

I write about anything that comes my way, but as I said, it's the art world that I am interested in, and when I think of collaborations as becoming a sort of ‘ethical normative’ in anthropology, I feel I want to swim upstream, away from the norm!

This is kind of a foreground/background issue, anyway. To understand those contexts that Manuela is describing, you’re going to be interested in some artists, whose histories and trajectories illuminate different dimensions of them. The inhabiting of this can be more or less focused.

In writing about Western Desert acrylic painting, I have to do both. I am one of the principal recorders of the information about this art. I don’t think of that as morally good or bad. In some ways, participating is a very productive way of understanding what barriers there are, what categories are operative, what practices people have, where things get turned down, why judgements are made, and so on. So that's very interesting.

In response to the question of whether this isn’t the same artworld as it was then, I think that that is also an interesting, but not unproblematic question. That is to say, everybody is now interested in what biennials and art fairs are doing, and the crucial nature of the internet, and making access for people to buy paintings, and all of these dimensions of that world, so one shouldn’t imagine that a specific analysis made 20 or 30 years ago would apply without change to this moment. But, the articles in Traffic do identify some crucial institutions. You could ask, well, what about the critics of The New York Times? Does that really matter anymore? Or how much does that matter? Well, I can tell you it matters a lot for some work.

You need to understand that the reception of art isn’t a magical physiological response, but that it's mediated. A lot of curators understand this very well, and they’re fighting like crazy to get a journalist to come to the show. So, the practicalities of that world can also be analyzed more specifically. It's not a simple matter of racism or hegemony in a simple way. It is a question of the positioning. Just as it always was, as it was for abstract expressionists. They needed people too.

That kind of research requires time. Being able to be in places. And it requires access—to get a collector to talk to you. So, for me, how does that happen? That happens because I am kind of an ancestral figure, close to the early moments of this art movement; I have some kind of cultural capital: I knew the painters. That gave me access. If I were a graduate student when I started this and had just said, ‘Oh, I really am interested’—they wouldn’t have time for me. Right? I mean you have to earn your way up. For you, Karin, you’re the head of an art department; so, bring her in! Right?

Yes.

I can see very well how, given career biographies now, one immerses oneself in art worlds. But the stakes for anthropologists and the anthropology of art in the way you’ve just described it are constrained and limited. You could see how someone could grow into it. But for it to constitute its own sphere of question asking, I think it's highly problematic. It really is a traffic in art and culture, and living somewhere in between. And for certain people who have career trajectories or biographies like yourself, Fred, you began in the traditional mode of studying an Aboriginal people--what was personhood and emotional life, essentially. And then, the traditional subject of anthropology became no longer possible to represent in the way that we knew it.

But it actually has remained relevant to the understanding of this art movement.

Yes! But perhaps it is possible as this sphere that reaches into artworlds, as Ruth Phillips discusses. So, we’re dealing with anthropologists who have deeply embedded themselves in the decolonizing critique of the discipline. A place for this study is in indigeneity—as a concept and an idea and a social movement—which is all very much constituted in art worlds. Then there are critiques of those worlds… of those subjects as they’re reidentified in art world cultures. Anthropologists are pulled in because they have an interest and a disciplinary record of transformation and self-critique.

The anthropology of art used to be much more focused on objects, on what these objects were. Anyone who was teaching it would have to talk about African art, about Oceanic art and they would have to be really good at it, almost like an art historian, with the authority to discuss these objects. The career trajectory of training for that is probably a little different. But one of the things that has not gone away—and there's a sense of this in the introduction to Traffic—are these linkages that underlie and underpin how things are made to happen in the world.

So, there are two things to say here about the anthropology of art. One, it's very low status in terms of getting jobs. Somehow anthropologists think that it's trivial, that it's not really where the important things are happening. Second, there's an anthropologically interesting question that it is a significant part in the world. And so, it's a desirable and interesting thing for anthropologists still to do, to ask the question of “How does this stuff get made? How does it come to be?” What we often share, then, with artists—even when we’re suspicious of them—is this sense that this work can and should be important. Right? Or some of it can and should be important. And I do think that promoting the legibility and value of various kinds of activities has been a classic anthropological position. Here's the move: “Nobody thinks very much of this, but… here is the backstory. This is much more important than you would think it is.” That is the attraction. I don’t think that typically a sociologist does that. People want to bring them to visibility. And that is complicity.

That's why Alfred Gell's piece was so irritating to me.

Sorry, you have to explain: exactly what is it about Alfred Gell's piece that you find infuriating?

It is the piece, and not Alfred, that irritated me, and not because I didn’t find it enchanting. What bothered me was that Alfred was an absolute aesthete of the highest order and then he talks about “methodological philistinism.” But I think his knowledge of art and probably art theory is more illuminating than he let on.

And… as I read it, the claim of philistinism, to disregard “aesthetics” or “art”—it's totally inverse of who he really was, or perhaps more correctly the basis on which the article draws.

He wrote that piece, “Vogel's Net.” Did you ever read that piece? It was a review of an exhibition in which Susan Vogel had put a hunting net from Africa as an artwork. Alfred says that it's a mental map. It's a “trap.” What is it? So, it's… I think we are talking about “conceptual art.” He's already gone down the road to conceptual art. He completely hid his tracks on this, at least it appears that way to me. Alfred was absolutely brilliant, famously so, but in one autobiographical essay, he characterized himself, at times, as a provocateur. The essay is quite in accord with what was happening in contemporary art. It was not like in the old art worlds, like anthropologists had been doing, “Oh, beautiful object; wouldn’t everybody in the world like to see this beautiful African mask?” No! The real art in the 1990s is this: mental maps and conceptual articulation.

This thing, which has come to be seen as the anthropologist telling the artworld how they ought to think about art, was already embedded in conceptual art. That was a part of the “traffic in art and culture” that I have continued to see.

There is a footnote in Traffic that says, “well, we don’t really talk much about objects.” Except that in your piece, Fred, the object is all over the place. Do you see it as a bifurcation? A moment in which things really split, where there is a certain kind of anthropology of art that focuses on the object, and another that does not?

There was an actual bifurcation, but I don’t accept it. When I write about Aboriginal art, I want to discuss its effectiveness and its performative qualities. And so, at least for my research, I think there doesn’t need to be this separation. To some extent Nick Thomas tries to refuse it. I think there is a third way to do the anthropology of art, which is the experimental part, which is the third part. So, there's the artworld, the object, and then there's the relational aesthetic experience.

Alfred's argument, which is inspired by his intersection with Melanesian studies and Marilyn Strathern, got recruited to a kind of mystical efficacy [agency] of the object and the new materialism. People were very interested in that and also to some extent imagining that these objects are living, persons. I don’t think people always think very carefully about what Alfred Gell was actually doing. They are really taken with something else about the life of objects, such as the Enlightenment separation of nature (things) and culture (humans). But there are so many threads here. In fact, David Freedberg's interest in the “power of images” (art), on iconoclasm and censorship, took him down the path of neuroscience.

I would like to return, if we can, to the idea of the anthropology of art as being made up of small people dealing with small problems. In fact, I see contemporary art itself reacting very strongly against that idea of art as unimportant by arguing art's importance in terms of its power to address society. I am really interested in the ambition that I see in both disciplines, in thinking about anthropology as a holistic discipline and contemporary art actually claiming holism for itself.

Considering that I was trained by Fred to think about the category of art, I see contemporary art finding the boundaries of its old categorization to be far too small for the claims it wants to make. It wants to make claims to knowledge that go far beyond what it did before.

There is the redemption of the anthropological subject. Indigenous studies, which Ruth Phillips discusses, is one of the only places for anthropologists with a deep and serious interest in studies of indigenous peoples to go, where it is ideologically tolerable for them to be. There are very few spaces to develop that kind of commitment and interes—one of them is art worlds. I don’t think that that's a popular one, although it's one of the most interesting because the price of admission is more than just activism. It's actually an arena of deep theoretical and scholarly discussion, and so it has a high entry point for anthropologists. But I see these as alternative ways to keep continuity and anthropological interest So that's one thing. If you’re really interested in the career transitions of people our age—or even younger people—then the art option is a way of sustaining a certain disciplinary continuity for anthropology. I am not saying that people make the choice of A or B, but art world ethnography offers a research domain in which the traditional anthropological subject has been reinvented for our times.

Many people were discussing, in the early 2000s, the question of the anthropology of the contemporary, or what might be the language of an anthropology of the contemporary. The current basic rhetorical form of anthropological discussion is the present-becoming-future—a kind of anticipation. And it seems to me that the art world favors this discourse of futurism, or at least speculating on what is emergent. Anticipation of the future relocates… it legitimates the temporality of anthropological discourse about its subjects. Art is one field of concern that does that. It's somewhat different from the idea that art is about materiality or about the production of material objects. Art always deals with materiality. But it's the temporality that art enables that attracts stylistic changes in anthropological discourse.

The current desire for multi-modality in anthropological research practice at present, and the idea of actually producing ethnographic work in different formats and different genres, has very little to do with anthropologists becoming interested in art worlds, at least in a scholarly informed way. It's an interest in borrowing. Sometimes it's very agile and is informed and curious, but its interest is in accessing a form or forms in order to reposition the anthropological subject in ways that conform to this interest in the not-present, the otherwise, etc. So, in this way, anthropology has become aestheticized in recent years. There's a performative dimension to our work which should not just be delivered in discourse or analytics or the frameworks of expertise. You know, we can scorn this development, saying that anthropologists are not artists—they’re wanna bes in some way. But really, they want to operate in a different genre and frame than current rite-de-passage training requires. Later projects in contemporary careers inflect so much toward informed or imagined aesthetic practices.

We have on our faculty at University of California, Irvine (UCI) a former NYU doctoral student, Sherine Hamdy, who was previously a professor at Brown University and is a pioneer in producing graphic novels from ethnographic research through quite entrepreneurial collaborative projects. In a very applied way, she is exploring the traffic in culture when multi-modality is in vogue. She produced her first project (Hamdy et al. 2017), through engaging highly talented graphic art students at the Rhode Island School of Design. She took them to Egypt and through their own eyes and hands they created visual stories that paralleled an earlier ethnographic project. Sherine invited them to visit UCI for discussions. They were extraordinary in explaining how micro-observed behaviors—what would have had ethnographic counterparts before—were thought through by them visually. I think that it was exciting for them, but it was really exciting for us. I thought, wow! there is something extraordinarily fresh in this evolution of the ethnographic project. This is the traffic of art and anthropology from the anthropology end, but outside of the world of art-world professionalization. What it requires is that you restructure the social relations of art production, and you have to become the director, in some way. This is a specific challenge of collaboration that I discussed at the beginning of our discussion as my current preoccupation…getting art to work for anthropological ends, and winding up with mixed outcomes and tensions that reinvent the emblematic form of anthropological inquiry…artfully!

At NYU, We train students to do film (and also, for some, radio or photography), so visual media are one genre of this kind of work; there are others. Quite obviously many anthropologists are involved in a range of projects of a curatorial style, of exhibitions and other aggregations of knowledge into visual form. Perhaps this is more common than is acknowledged. The whole notion of such a project-based production of knowledge is very like what is undertaken in art. It has a beginning and an end. It has a product, for which they have to think through a whole range of selections. Sometimes, it's a museum. It's made possible by the nature of media now; it's easier to get around. People seem to want to do that, both for those communities, but also to bring those communities into contact with the place where the anthropologists are, and so on. I think I am suggesting that what might seem to be “traditional” exhibitions of objects were never just that, but were (and are) more like other forms of aesthetic, collaborative performance. For me, the exhibition of Aboriginal paintings should be understood as performances of Indigenous presence and knowledge, interventions into public spaces, and sometimes—perhaps—as “gifts” exchanged with the large society. I like to think that, despite my irritation with Alfred's methodological philistinism (a rejection of simple aesthetics of perception), this view is quite in tune with his argument for objects (art objects) as vehicles of establishing social relations.

Something that I hear in what you both said about anthropological work, I think also has to do with the change in art, in which many artists now are working across artistic disciplines. Just as an artist pushes a concept into a particular formal direction, an anthropologist might hit the limits of ethnographic writing and find that dance is actually the form in which the concept might be best explored. That is a real similarity between experimental anthropology and contemporary art practice.

I think it would be helpful to give some tangibility to experimental anthropology in comparing it to other things. It is certainly a learning activity for people and I think that many of the forms are somewhat transitory. That is a good thing for the exercise of learning, for they can be surpassed or left behind along the way. I am very taken by how you asked me to talk about holism, but I think about the opposite of holism, which is like the universe in a grain of sand. The idea is to pick a point and to move out from there. I think a lot of people welcome projects that are doable and manageable, right? I mean here is something I can do. Okay, I have two kids. I can’t go and spend another six years…

Yes, that's true.

In fact, it's often not possible and even not desirable to spend another year. The film that I made (see Deveson, Myers, and Dunlop 2014) was a project like that. It started as a repatriation project—to bring this film material back to them—and then, I thought, wow! there is something else here, and people loved it so on.

I think it wouldn’t be bad to try to theorize these more focused projects not as being in competition with other kinds of anthropological work, and not even simply as alternatives, but as companionate to them. It is like, if you have an exhibition, one week you invite a sand painting person, and the next week you have a monk, and then the week after that, maybe have a curator. You know what I mean? You’re adding on, as we know that no one perspective is adequate.

So, one last final question: if we choose to “refigure art and anthropology” for today, for whom would we be doing so? And what might that look like?

I was going to say this. After reading Ruth's paper, and some of this discussion, I actually… I don’t care about disciplinary boundaries.

[laughter]

I really don't care. I think they can be very distracting and it's very tiresome. We can certainly identify people who are emerging from a certain history, but I think a lot of scholars are just going ahead and basically taking from where they can. Anthropology isn’t a singular “thing” anymore, really, if it ever was. You know, I regretted that we had to cast the book in that way. Because to keep resurrecting disciplines is reproducing this problem, even though it probably doesn’t matter to most people.

I think the real issue is, how do we want to think about something in the world that is characterized as thing called ‘art’? What are the separations that set it up? To cast it as we did is to hitch our wagon to the art star, in a way, because the art people don’t care that much about anthropology. It's a lower-status activity. So, it would be better to find a way to acknowledge some of the questions in ways that don’t return to that strategy.

In the recent piece in the Annual Review, Eugenia Kisin and I said that it seems that for the last 30 years the anthropology of art has been dealing with the collapse of modernism. There are people who are trying to hold to the standard of art history—to hold their ground. Well, that ground is secured by certain kinds of things. But I think the idea is to address the question of art in the world. Who is speaking about it, and what can we learn about it, and where we are, in respect to those activities. The boundaries of these practices are not stable anymore. So, I would start with a statement of instability or reorganizations of discursive and non-discursive practices.

When George was talking, I was thinking that a lot of anthropologists are interested in culture making. They’re interested in points of activity in which things are being redone. That makes artistic work and artistic practices very interesting, because people are making more culture. So maybe there should be a notion about culture as an activity. And boundaries are more about these things as objects. If you look at the Raymond Williams's classic work on Marxism and Literature, then you would see these as artificial separations of human activity. So, I would try to move back, saying where do these separations come from? How do they come to be? That's why artists are interesting, and why what they do in relationship to us is interesting.

And, George, what are you going to say?

The one material artifact that is created in all careers of anthropology is an accumulation, an archive of field notes. I am thinking that one of the interests in art and anthropology—in a deeply intimate way, and from the anthropological perspective—is how the ethnographic, professional expression, whatever the fads and fashions were in the times that anthropologists were writing, is never adequate to what's most rich in those originary and dutiful and fantastic archives. That these archives in some ways, truth be told, are quite…

Sparse. [laughter]

New students are still trying, in their own way, to create those kinds of archives. Who knows what they wind up with, though, because they really are totally private. You can insist on looking at them, but, generally, it is not ‘in’ to do that. But all careers are, in some ways, based on judgments like, ‘I collected well; or ‘I have not lived up to whatever it is I collected’. All of these insecurities are there, unspoken.

I am bringing up this issue because I actually think that the anthropological interchange with artists, in working with artists, and with thinking through arts, in some ways goes back to these unarticulated promises. It may sound a little nostalgic, like an escape route for the responsibility of anthropologists, but actually I don’t think so. Are they actually doing justice to whatever it is in those archives? So, it doesn’t call forth more personal writing, about what one did in field work. In some ways, it's inexpressible but that there is an idea about the potentiality of that expression. So, call it a particular kind of enduring anthropological—forgive the term— humanism. That's what draws reserve, intellectual resources to doing projects with arts or artists. And to the assumptions about what anthropologists think about who artists are, and on what terms they can work with them. Again, Sherine Hamdy has been both exemplary and entrepreneurial in this regard.

I think this dynamic of the anthropologist as a secret sharer, and these archives of field notes that never get exposed… this has something to do with the period of the critique of ethnographic writing. But that became regularized, became baroque. And, you know, people write very wonderful ethnographies according to different standards now. But there's still all this secret sharing, which I think is unique to anthropology because of the sacralization of the idea of fieldwork and the archives that come from it. And I do think that this discussion of anthropology's interest in art resonates most personally with these private archives of untapped surplus knowledge—ideas unexploited but that powerfully resonate unresolved. When anthropologists try to influence artists in collaborative work that they commission, it is not resolved details that they are trying to influence in artistic interpretation of their collaborations but the irresolutions for a particular symbolic purpose. For example, as an ethnographic commissioner of artistic performance, does that performance in its own styles and logics fulfil its ethnographic potential? Only the ethnographer/interpreter can say. How to influence the interpretive beauty of a performance toward the thick description it suggests? Geertz redux, here, as instigator of artistic effects and performances!

When I’ve interacted with artists and I’ve tried to influence them to perform something ethnographically it's been thrilling to see the unresolved aspects of a research project come alive in other media. To perform something that's ethnographically cogent, for me, requires me to be able to express to artists what that is. I must say, I’ve often been disappointed by what they’ve absorbed, my own communicative failings stipulated, because they’re not interested in ethnographic facts but ethnographic things that work for them as artists and performers. If you play what results back to subjects in ‘third spaces’ of performance (through installation, dance, film etc.), then, as I said the stakes are quite high for the continuity of ethnography as a research enterprise. That is what we discovered at the WTO. So, to end where I began, in my first comment—this traffic in culture—this incorporating artists into projects and the ‘ragged edges’ of collaboration that it generates—has been extraordinarily rich. For me personally it is what the anthropology of art in all of its variety and scholarship is for. There is here a nether world of collaboration between art and anthropology that can never be fully resolved by writing or performance. It remains, finally, traffic.