Marcus: What I miss most after the Writing Culture discussions of the 80’s is access to the materials and processes that have produced the very interesting kinds of books and films that followed this period of critique. I find that I want to know a lot more about the research process in order to discuss what the films or books are about. But this is by no means a call by me for a return to the kind of fieldwork accounts and stories that led up to the Writing Culture debates. Indeed, given the immense changes in technologies of communication and media since the 1990s, the ethnographic text or film no longer seems to be the most relevant or cogent object to which the Writing Culture questions about representation should be directed. Those questions are still of key importance but they should now be embedded in all the diverse operations that are performed and transacted in the name of the classic term- fieldwork.

Fieldwork is something other today than the means to ethnography (conceived as a resulting book or film for the archive, library or most public reception possible). It encompasses a variety of forms of composition of research material that not only deserve their own expressions, both inside the intimacies and specificities of fieldwork but also alongside it as well as performances, productions, and collaborations with varying levels of reception in mind. Research today requires strategizing and imagining its own receptions, of which the originating disciplinary community is just one. The problem of representation is thus organic to the fieldwork process itself. This is not exactly a new insight, but new scales and technologies of communication have pushed the thinking about this problem into the terrains and relations of the process of inquiry itself, for which Malinowskian style stories of self-other, ethical reflexivity are no longer adequate.

Yet, it is precisely this process which is most opaque today. We need forms, experiments with forms, alternative and performative modes of conducting research to constitute theoretical and other kinds of discussions of anthropological problems. These discussions need to be part of the same ‘stuff’ of the world that ethnography is about, which requires the means, the forms, to turn the collections and materials of fieldwork today ‘inside out’ for more diversely constituted audiences. Current explicit concerns in anthropology about collaboration and public anthropology, I think, are symptomatic expressions of this tendency to move beyond mere textual outcomes and to create forms for engagements with ethnography in process.

My own personal evolution in this direction since Writing Culture is marked by the mid 1990s essay on the emergence of multi-sited ethnography. This was before the expansion of the internet, but it did envision, in a tentative way, a terrain in which fieldwork could no longer be what it used to be. At the same time I became interested in certain projects of installation and conceptual art that involved inquiry similar to fieldwork in their production. In a sense, these projects encompassed the sorts of alternative forms for thinking, performing, and discussing ethnographic inquiry while doing it that I believe is so important today. In a designed way, installation and performance art projects embed the product of inquiry within its doing. While I don’t think ethnography is or should be the same as these art movements, my attraction to the latter captures something in terms of practice that I think ethnographic inquiry is lacking and needs very much.

Finally, the development of my post- Writing Culture position, so to speak, is very much informed by the conditions of teaching research to ethnographers-in-the-making today. The orthodoxies of method and the independent mindedness and ambition of bright apprentices create the productive frictions in terms of which new (and necessarily authoritative) forms for the production of knowledge within ,as well as out of ,the contemporary conditions of ‘doing fieldwork’, can be designed. And, yes, for me, the notion of design (with borrowings from design thinking and pedagogy, which is a vast academic and professional industry in itself) has become a convenient and so far congenial category with which to think about the introduction of new forms into the venerable practice of fieldwork that collapses theory work and problem-defining into it and deepens it. Once I found its use for me, I discovered the term design, like collaboration, has been appropriated, almost with viral speed in recent times, to reconceive decoratively or more substantively the knowledge making practices in a range of disciplines and enterprises today. The Center for Ethnography, that I founded at the University of California, Irvine, has become a main venue or lab for me to explore these post-Writing Culture issues, at first around the fashion (or unfulfilled passion) for collaboration today, and now around the notion of design which incorporates the desire for collaborative solidarities of research.

Marcus cont’d:

Having given this background, I would ask you to develop a similar account of your travel through post 1980s anthropology, ending up with an explanation of your development of curatorial practice, which I presume is a form of research and representation combined that expresses your passing through training in fieldwork/ethnography and its mixture with your film and media scholarship. It is just such mixtures that best express, perform, and further this condition of producing anthropological knowledge after Writing Culture.

Elhaik:

To me the Writing Culture debates invoke a very specific register: that of a formative moment full of promising directions, conceptual and methodological. In this sense, the path had already been paved for those of us who arrived to anthropology through the privileged theoretical hindsight afforded by the unfolding of more than 20 years, the usual conceptual delays across disciplines and the detours of previous anthropologists in multiple modernities. Some of the questions raised during the discussions of the 1980s in anthropology have been fully addressed and worked through, others are still open to revisions, modifications, and reformulations, while some concerns ought simply to be discarded and laid to rest. In other words, the after-life of Writing Culture ought to be approached as an expansion of roads taken and not taken after the 1980s, and that have led us to formulate anthropology as the art of posing good questions while strategically and creatively designing fieldwork mise-en- scenes. These questions ought to have a chance for a viable and generous future while retaining a concern for the singularity of the anthropological project and its mode of production of knowledge in this expanded field. One of the fascinating aspects of the debates surrounding the Writing Culture upheaval was to not convert this concern for anthropology’s singularity for a disciplinary border patrolling. So my debt to Writing Culture takes the form of a care for preserving this ethos. This sense of continuity should not be in conflict with our passionate search for new models of conducting and conceptualizing research.

I should add I began my formal training as a cultural anthropologist in the late 1990s, that is to say, at the very moment when the Writing Culture paradigm had already acquired an uneasy Janus-like situation. By then, the initial revolt had been both institutionalized and relegated to the background in the face of pressing, global political issues that would intensify in the post 9/11 era. So, for some of us at least, the point of entry into anthropology—the post-Writing Culture moment—was not so much a question of modernity vs. post-modernity or the production of experimental ethnographies and research projects only aiming at de-centering and de-colonizing the categories of Euro-American Modernity. What mattered instead was the careful handling of a tense balancing act between the political-epistemological and the formal/experimental/ontological. This productive zone of friction between the epistemological-political and the ontological-experimental, in passing also a legacy of the various historical avant-gardes, need not be couched neither in the idiom of cultural authenticity nor as a blind post-cultural turn towards neuro-aesthetics or science studies. What is required, in my view, is a return to and refashioning of the geopolitical economy of departures and arrivals of cosmopolitan modernism(s) and the discrepancies it introduces between the humanities, the sciences and art. And so far this is proving to be the most difficult task at hand, a task eloquently addressed—in relation to the emergence of new fields of inquiry in the 1990s such as new media, finance capital, biotechnology—in your recent collaborative dialogue with Paul Rabinow³. For instance, the amount of controversy triggered by the shift in focus from subaltern subjects to elites and experts—or the shift from ‘other’ to ‘counterpart’ as you recently put it—can be seen as a symptom of the tension at the heart of this balancing act. My fieldwork on/with avant-garde film and contemporary art curators in Mexico City as well as my own film curatorial practice certainly requires walking on eggshells through this minefield.

I became aware of these concerns after reading—first, as an independent film curator and years prior to pursuing a Ph.D.— both Writing Culture: the Poetics & Politics of Ethnography and the collections of essays Visualizing Theory⁴. Both became instant reference books and manuels d’instruction. The latter was heavily informed by the critiques of representation initiated by the former, in particular the interrogation of the Ethnographer’s voice of authority characteristic of classic ethnographic cinema but also of the limits of the mixture of strategies of self- representation and collaborative work so celebrated in post-1990s indigenous media. Conversely, Writing Culture had drawn much from film and media studies, had radicalized the rather conservative subfields of visual anthropology and the anthropology of art (slowly blurring them in the process and shifting attention away from the so-called radical alterity of non-western art and cultural forms), and inaugurated a shift towards a search for alternative forms of composition beyond the monograph and the classic ethnographic film. The radical constructivism of experimental ethnographic texts and films of the 1980s and 90s spoke directly to my unrepentant inclination toward the constructivist aesthetics and montage strategies of experimental and avant-garde cinemas and media arts from the 1920s onward, and the experimental documentaries and the Brechtian, political Cinemas of the 1970s. In this sense, this specific link between modernist visual arts and the modernism of anthropology—a profoundly political connection—was re-refashioned, almost overnight, by Writing Culture. I am thinking here of your Montage essay to which we could return. But this remains a marginal gesture in the discipline. One could indeed write the history of the multiple mis-encounters between avant-garde cinema and media, theories of montage and Writing Culture. Had it been done around the discussions during the 1980s, anthropology would have not only de-territorialized its own historical legacy but it could have ‘shown’ how it could itself be a de-territorializing force tout court.

Elhaik cont’d:

How can we deploy, today, anthropology’s de-territorializing force? First, by continuing the historiographic operation of recuperating previous media experiments that had re-situated art/anthropology engagements, such as those of classic experimental ethnographic experiments of Maya Deren in Haiti, Miguel Covarrubias in Bali, and Sergei Eisenstein in Mexico, or more broadly what James Clifford had called Ethnographic Surrealism. Then, in a second moment, the task at hand is to mediate anthropology’s radical constructivism via the dispositifs of new technologies of communication, installation art, digital video, web-art, but through a gradual break with the Malinowskian scene of encounter and classic ethnography’s reliance on the trope of alterity. This break has already been inaugurated by Trinh T. Minh- ha’s work in Senegal and Japan, Francys Alys in Mexico, Isaac Julian’s in Martinique. While the radical constructivism of Writing Culture gave expression to the trope of alterity in fascinating experimental ethnographic texts and films during the 1990s, our post-Writing Culture concerns ought perhaps to be mediated through other modes of interplay of tropes and forms. Curatorial practice came to me as the most obvious experimental form to mediate my research on cosmopolitan modernism in contemporary Mexico. This interplay of cosmopolitan modernism (the trope of affinity instead of radical alterity) and curatorial work (form) operates as both a mode of production of anthropological knowledge and a complex framework of reception. Moreover, curatorial work is an inter-medial research and spatial practice that involves not only the movie-theater, the site of modernity par excellence, but also the white cube of the contemporary art museum or the independent artist-run space. This double spatial location requires that we re-evaluate hand in hand the alliance between the ‘ethnographic’ and the montage of avant-garde cinema almost established by Writing Culture and the futures of the ‘cinematic’ in the age of installation art, new media, etc. By framing it thus I try to harness the potentials of installation for a pedagogical use in anthropology. Curatorial work is therefore a permanent movement in/out of anthropology, back and forth between the university classroom, the movie theater, the site understood as an aggregate of detours in modernity, and the white cube.

Marcus:

Perhaps we can develop our exchange by unpacking further two themes that you capture in your statement: “The interplay of cosmopolitan modernism (the trope of affinity rather than radical alterity) and curatorial work (form) operates as both a mode of anthropological knowledge and a complex framework of reception.” First, as you indicate, affinity hearkens back to the appeal of “montage effects” in the hopeful discussions of the 1980s about experiments in ethnographic writing and film (my own essay ⁵on montage and writing ended withacallfor “ethnographics”). Today, the possibilities of montage in theory and practice seem finally to exceed the limited sense of modes of producing ethnographic texts and filmmaking. They seem to have more to do with the performances and forms of doing research, distinctive of anthropology, that are still governed by the vague but professionally emblematic term, ‘fieldwork.’ What are these possibilities? And, could we say more about the form that you are developing—curatorial practice? If ‘radical alterity’ is both the milieu and what is to be explained by fieldwork, then is it the case that ‘affinity’ is the milieu and what is to be explained by curatorial practice? Curatorial practices involve the kind of performances that are characteristic of installation and conceptual art (and one reason that I have been interested in studying their resonances through the 1990s with the diverse ways that ethnography seems to be produced now under the rubric of fieldwork).

Let’s take up curatorial practice, first, and then the possibilities of montage within it. Are you inhabiting, as a fieldworker, a well understood form among your particular subjects— art worlds and their elites—as an ethnographic modus operandi, or are you inventing a form of anthropological investigation appropriate to your problem? If so how is curatorial practice as fieldwork, or its surrogate, different from curatorial practice as an art world professional modality?

Elhaik:

As a literary, aesthetic, and political trope, affinity is meshed with complex histories of cosmopolitan modernism and debates on modernization that do not lend themselves to easy categorization: the affinity between the primitive and the modern; the affinity between the classic trope of ritual and contemporary performance arts in the collaboration between Victor Turner and Richard Schechner; the mimetic encounters with alterity that have generated fascinating intersections between the historical avant-garde and the social sciences during the 1920s and 30s in Paris, Mexico City, New York, Sao Paolo; the political affinities fueling transnational modes of solidarity and resistance against neocolonial orders, as for instance in the context of the South-South discourses and ideological horizons of the post- Bandung and post-colonial eras that have generated the politico-cinematic experiments known as Third Cinemas. But the trope of affinity, as I deploy it, stands in a productive tension with the trans-cultural paradigm and consequently ‘affinity’ ought to render un- tenable the conflation of anthropology only with the version of the cross-cultural conceptualized out of North/South ethnographic mise-en-scenes. The milieus generated by the connection of affinities ought to initiate, if not the undoing, at least a questioning and remaking of the trans-cultural⁶. This is an enduring tension of cosmopolitan modernisms and indeed the problem I try to address through my curatorial work. But this is an open process: one can therefore establish and deploy relations hinged on affinity in myriad ways, and generate, consequently, alternate experiments with form through those relations.

Elhaik cont’d:

Let’s take the fascinating example of Michel Leiris, a staple of the Writing Culture debates and of the recent ethnographic turn in contemporary art. With Leiris, we are confronted with an instance of mimetic relation in a cross-cultural scene of encounter that generates an affinity between the practices of the Cultural Other and the conceptualization of the practice of the anthropologist. This affinity is hinged on a fracture structural to the emblematic ‘before/after fieldwork’. As is known, Leiris saw an affinity between the ecstatic ceremonies and trance rituals he studied as an ethnologist and his scene of writing haunted by ungovernable ghosts. Via a mimetic relation to alterity, Leiris makes a distinction between ‘experience poetique’ and ‘etude ethnologique’, between ecriture and the social sciences. This example from the cosmopolitan modernist repertoire has been important to me, both positively and negatively. Negatively, to understand my own curatorial work as 1/ not a question of ecriture/writing (that is, writing culture) only, 2/ a form only partially derived from the curatorial practices of my interlocutors, and 3/ not a return to the unproductive question of whether anthropology is art or science. Curatorial work, as I deploy it, does not lead up to a search, after the completion of fieldwork, for a strategy of textualization that translates a scene of alterity. Positively, curatorial work is still ethnography: it requires the continuous invention of new descriptive and performative levels that are distributed asymmetrically through various tools one might call multi-media (radio interviews, the web, video loops, film introductions, text, audio commentary for a dvd collection). My understanding of the trope of affinity calls upon another register, that of the double agency of the anthropologist-as-curator, of the passage from the status of an independent film/video curator collaborating through film programs with various institutions (film festivals, public art events, Societies for Film and Media Studies, cinematheques) to that of a cultural anthropologist fascinated by the legacy of cosmopolitan modernism and its entanglements with experimental ethnography (in Mexico until now, elsewhere in the near future). The passage has also a temporal dimension: the anthropologist-as-curator operates within a longer cycle and time frame than the professional curator. Unable to curate one show after another, I tend to repeat for two or three years the same program with slight variations (different titles, re-assembling of cinematic material, rewriting of program notes, etc) in dialogue with a given site of reception. So in this sense, curatorial work is also a form of site- specific intervention.

NOTES:

(1) Assistant Professor of Anthropology (Rice University at the time of publication – currently he is Assistant Professor of Media & Culture (Department of Cinema, San Francisco State University)
(2) Chancellor’s Professor of Anthropology (University of California, Irvine)
(3) Paul Rabinow & George E. Marcus with James Faubion & Tobias Rees. Designs for An Anthropology of the Contemporary, Duke University Press, 2008.
(4) Visualizing Theory:Selected Essays from V.A.R. Ed. Lucien Taylor. New York: Routledge, 1994. In film studies the work of Laura Marks, Catherine Russell, and Fatimah Tobing Rony has equally helped me locate the ‘experimental’ between ethnography and the cinema.
(5) Marcus, George E. “The Modernist Sensibility in Recent Ethnographic Writing and the Cinematic Metaphor of Montage.” Visualizing Theory:Selected Essays from V.A.R. Ed. Lucien Taylor. New York: Routledge, 1994. 37-53.
(6) One direction I find extremely useful is Laura Mark’s Deleuzian formulation of inter-culturality as the meeting of sensoria that may of may not intersect. But even there a difficulty remains: to think about the trans-cultural as more than mere encounters between national or diasporic subjects: a form of minorization that passes between both national and diasporic subjects.