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Anthropology in the Arts (I of II)

© Valerie Borey

One of the most critical issues in anthropology today is that of cultural representation. If we consider that the role of the anthropologist is (loosely) 1) to do fieldwork in a select culture and 2) convey the texture of what he has learned in the course of that fieldwork to a naïve audience, then it should not take long for us to arrive at the conclusion that much of what we know about culture (in either the specific or general sense) is largely dependent on our ability as readers to reasonably access meaning within the analytical or descriptive texts produced from that fieldwork.

Traditional ethnography has generally found its center of gravity in the literary community. Anthropologists do their fieldwork, take notes, and eventually write books about their observations of Hmong communities in Wisconsin or nomadic life in the Sahara. As writers, anthropologists struggle and hesitate over clusters of words and do their best to anticipate the impact of these clusters upon the implied connections between things cultural. However much effort is expended in this communicative strain and groan, many contemporary anthropologists are forced to concede that readers also enter into ethnographic texts with a reading glass full of their own experiences elsewhere, similar or dissimilar, that tend in themselves to lead a train of thought towards one conclusion or another, independent of the author's will.

As the social sciences have become increasingly aware of the seepage of meaning-making activity between writer and reader, a parallel influence has crept into the field: the blurring of traditional genre distinctions. Academic monographs of a civilization, which once dominated anthropological literature, now float alongside a vast array of experimental approaches to understanding and communicating some of the key concepts involved in cultural life. Ethnographic film, photography, theatrical performance, and even web-based applications (for an example, see Urban Tapestries) are emerging as legitimate and innovative methods in the study and representation of human cultures. In fact, experimental approaches such as these have sometimes even exceeded the expectations of traditional ethnography, in the sense that they have been able to draw out meanings and voices that had heretofore remained invisible or undefined in strictly academic traditions.

What many of these emerging ethnographic forms share in common is that they draw their inspiration from the often gestalt orientation of the fine arts: painting, photography, film, theatre, dance, and so forth, all of which are directed towards alternative "ways of knowing and understanding". The influence, indeed, has been mutual as artistic form reaches out to embrace a new complexity of awareness in the human context.

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