International workshop "Experimental collaborations Anthropological engagements with art, activism and technoscience"

Venue: Intermediae (Matadero Madrid)

This workshop gathers for discussion a set of anthropological fieldworks that in their engagement with art, science and activism push forward the methodological limits of participant observation in ethnography.

Anthropology has historically consolidated its ethnographic practice of knowledge production around the figure of participant observation, a social and epistemic situation that requires social involvement during fieldwork while at the same time demand a detachment and distance to observe the social worlds under investigation.

Drawing on a set of ethnographies carried on in Africa, America and Europe, the workshop explores modes of doing fieldwork whose form of engagement in the field overflow the notion of participation and whose form of knowledge production cannot be properly characterized as observation. The anthropologists describe their ethnographic fieldworks as forms of ‘experimental collaboration’.

The figure of experimental collaboration intends to describe a mode of fieldwork that is carried on in collaboration with our counterparts in the field through the articulation of instances of epistemic experimentation. It is a mode of doing ethnography that is adjacent, complementary or even substitutive of participant observation.

The figure has a twofold goal. It intends to be a descriptive notion for certain forms of ethnographic fieldwork and it proposes a research and pedagogic program aimed to intervene in current forms of ethnographic practice and learning.

Organized by: IH-CSIC and Intermediae