What is Contemporary Anthropology?

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What is contemporary anthropology?Tarek ElhaikPublished online: 11 Dec 2013.

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ISSN 0256-0046/Online 1992-6049 pp. 784–79827 (6) 2013 © Critical Arts Projects & Unisa PressDOI: 10.1080/02560046.2013.867597

Response paper What is contemporary anthropology?

Tarek Elhaik

AbstractBuilding on an ethnography of contemporary art worlds and intellectual life in Mexico City, this paper re-evaluates the dominant concepts that form the so-called ethnographic turn in contemporary art, including the emblematic concept of ethnography. To the ethnographic turn’s largely sensorial, historical, people-oriented, cosmopolitan and postcolonial mode of attention, the paper juxtaposes another form of contemporary anthropological inquiry with alternate conceptual constellations and affective modes of research. The proposed contemporary anthropology affirms joyful pedagogies of the concept, cultivates modes of caring for assemblages, designs collaborative research mise-en-scènes that secede from national, diasporic and cosmopolitan geographies, and welcomes those risky creative acts that harbour untimely and non-organic modes of life. The stakes, the paper argues, are nothing less than the differential futures brewing in the contemporariness of contemporary anthropology and contemporary art.

Keywords: adjacency, affinity, assemblage, contemporary, conceptual pedagogy, intrusion

I love to argue with people who do not disagree with me too profoundly. And I like to laugh.

James Baldwin – Notes of a native son

This double issue of Critical Arts enables a series of re-evaluations of key concepts that have shaped the debates around the so-called ‘ethnographic turn’ in contemporary art. As the editors rightly observe in their reading of Hal Foster’s (1996) essay, the current regime of contemporary art and contemporary anthropology has gradually

Tarek Elhaik is assistant professor of Media and Culture, Cinema Department, San Francisco State University. tarekelhaik@gmail.com

Critical arts 27(6) 2013 layout.indd 784 2013/12/06 11:50:08

What is contemporary anthropology?

moved toward an intolerance of the communion of the two figures that have dominated both the modernist and the so-called contemporary period: the artist and the ethnographer. From the early 1990s, we have seen an intensification of an adversarial and a friendly relationship, and a multiplication of sequential series where these historical rival and complementary figures have traded places and accumulated misunderstandings. Ontologically posed questions began to proliferate and one mode of inquiry, in particular, has dominated the conversation by seeking to formulate the problem through hyphenating the artist–ethnographer relationship under the sign of the ‘sensorial’ and the ‘methodological’. The historical dialogue has now mysteriously been transfigured into these doubled-edged questions: What does the artist-as-ethnographer do? Who are his/her interlocutors? And vice versa: What does the practice of the ethnographer-as-artist look, feel, sound and taste like? Who are the beneficiaries of these dialogical processes of empowerment?

Intrusion

As a moving-image curator and a media anthropologist engaged and collaborating with contemporary art worlds in Mexico City, as a primary site, I have always been struck by the absence of references to the ethnographic turn. The latter is, in fact, seldom uttered by my Mexico City-based interlocutors, who too dwell in the very same affective and aesthetic landscape – the assemblage – we have come to call the ethnographic turn in the contemporary art world. We should perhaps learn from that silence and indifference. There, indeed, the ethnographer and the artist have simply been part of the project of Mexican modernity since the 1920s onward, since the primordial scene of the ethnographic turn. They are historical figures whose relationship has enjoyed a certain measure of continuity, the frictions notwithstanding. On the political front, these figures have always been part of a process of nation building and, more recently, part of a process that has generated what Mexican anthropologist Roger Bartra (1987) provocatively calls ‘a post-Mexican condition’. Something can indeed be learned from this long-standing relationship that has not generated the anxieties of the ethnographic turn. As the current editors observe, other traditions of anthropology do exist and we could learn a great deal from them. They have generated other figures with less rivalry, with less competitiveness, although certainly not without frictions. Like the editors of this double issue of Critical Arts, who provocatively set out to ‘open a new dialogue’, I too think something can be saved from these discussions. But we would have to radically question the concepts at work for the past 20 years. This will require not less, but more forms of intrusion. These emerging intrusions would enable us to relativise, and indeed bid farewell to, those contemporary forms of cultural relativisms that compulsively return us to a stylised engagement with the linguistic liminality of the figure of the foreigner.

Tarek Elhaik

A few years ago, Mexican anthropologist and philosopher, Raymund Mier, wrote a quite fascinating and perplexing essay with the title: ‘El acto antropológico: la intervención como extrañeza’ (2002). There he posits the notion of anthropological intervention as a negotiation between a series of forces: despotic, intrusive, affective, methodological and creative forces haunted by the uncanny. In that scene, the anthropologist without motives, the anthropologist who constantly searches for alibis, finds him/herself operating in a terrain that frustrates our given research imaginaries, haunted by decidedly sticky binaries: strange/familiar, foreigner/native, outsider/insider, same/other, north/south, south/south, and that particularly sticky (and irritating) monad and universe of the postcolonial native anthropologist and its blackmails that go like this: a given national context can be approached as the site of its own deterritorialisation. This is as messy as it should be, so we all need a bit of patience. Now that we are beginning to make sense of the envy at work between contemporary anthropology and contemporary art worlds, now that envy is gradually being understood as an affect and effect to be left behind, we do not need to get angry or to be unduly proud either. We need to endure, and be imaginative conceptually. Whether we name this messiness a dispostif, an assemblage, a tradition, a discipline, a spectre or simply ‘fieldwork’, the anthropologist who is no longer seduced by Heideggerian place-based philosophy will begin to seek a line of flight, a fuga/fugue as Roger Bartra would have it. In this fugue, collaboratively and from a lonely place of reflection – methodological, affective and narrative – the anthropologist would have to accept his/her inevitable status as an intruder. The shift from being an étranger to an intrus, from being an extranjero to intruso, from stranger to intruder, are the very stake and risk that fuel the affinities and adjacencies of what comes ‘after’ the ethnographic turn.

The most promising direction is to be found not only in the work of those who engage so-called non-Western anthropological traditions, but in the work of those who assemble various anthropological traditions and recognise the ‘intellectual’ work that criss-crosses our field-sites, not simply the voices of those subjects and communities who are allegedly empowered through a politics of representation. There is always a subterfuge by which we think intellectuals are not objects of ethnographic attention, or that ethnography would be contaminated by their presence. This would therefore require from us another pedagogical horizon that would not only familiarise us with other anthropological genealogies (the Brazilian and the Mexican are quite fascinating, among many others), but would show how they are inherently interconnected, not only geographically but also conceptually. The so-called Western economy of departure and arrivals will be demystified (Bartra and Elhaik 2008; Clifford 1981; Lomnitz-Adler 1995, 2001) and thus will be re-assembled. And through this assemblage work we might encounter concepts that may or may no longer be useful. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1994) define a

concept as a zone of turbulence. We will then learn that there have been numerous zones of turbulence and ethnographic turns – Mexico and Brazil in the 1920–30s: these primary scenes of the ethnographic turn in contemporary art – but also that writing culture, experimental ethnography and the ethnographic turn are not necessarily analogical with and equivalent to one another. Ethnography as a concept is such a zone of turbulence. But it is not the only one at work in the multi-mediated relationship between art and anthropology. Perhaps the time has come to shift our attention somewhere else that is far from being given, as ethnography has been; something more imperceptible, something that does not return to haunt us as Okwui Enwezor and his team of curators-as-ethnographers would have it. Ethnography has always been a good object, to borrow from Kleinian psychoanalysis, and the ‘colonial encounter’ (Asad 1973) has not and will not exhaust the potentiality of anthropology. But, regardless of whether ethnography is perceived to be a good or a bad object, some of us have already moved beyond ethnography, towards an adjacent work that assembles conceptual affinities.1

Affinity

On the one hand, there are those who cultivate an anti-pathetic relationship between art-historians, artists, curators and anthropologists, and who have made it more or less clear they do not desire the ethnographer and the artist to belong to the same sphere of existence. It is safe to say that Foster’s essay has (wittingly and inadvertently) generated and contributed to the expansion of this territorialised version of the ethnographic turn. On the other hand, there are those who would agree that contemporary anthropology and contemporary art worlds ought to remain distinct disciplinary fields. But the latter, to be sure, make exception for periodic overlaps only when those concerned pay strict attention to the ‘sensorial’ convergences in their respective modes of deploying the experiential and methodological registers of ethnography, understood as an emblematic figure of research. Whatever camp one leans towards, this affective economy of attraction, seduction and repulsion has generated one unfortunate consequence: the tropes of radical alterity and incommensurability have acquired greater force over the more interesting initial promises based on the ‘affinities’, ‘appropriations’, ‘hybridisations’ and ‘processes’ (Canclini and Montezemolo 2009; Elhaik and Marcus 2012; Marcus 2010; Schneider and Wright 2006; Taylor 1998; van. Dienderen 2008) advocated from the early 1990s onward. With this shift from affinity in affect and practice to the incommensurable cultural translations between Self and Other, the impetus of the experimental moment in the humanities (Fisher and Marcus 1986) was to be the first victim of these territorial wars. Experiments in aesthetic form have continued to thrive but conceptual experimentation remains to be desired.

Tarek Elhaik

This double issue highlights, although without directly identifying with, a ‘sensorial turn’ in anthropology as a parallel research agenda to the ethnographic turn in contemporary art. I would suggest we go one step further by underlining the dominant status of the sensorial research agenda, and by alerting ourselves that we should be worried about this reigning paradigm. In my view, it would be simply too risky to reduce the futures of the dialogue courageously opened up by the current editors to acquiescing to the sensorial and the sensuous as the ultimate ‘affinity’, meeting point, and zone of contact between anthropology and art. An ‘anthropology of emotions’ and a ‘sensory ethnography’ will not only fall short of overturning the Cartesian sovereign subject, but they will probably not contribute to re-enchanting our experience of modernity. Of course it is important to remind ourselves, as Jonathan Crary, Laura Marks, and others have done, of the imperial primacy of vision in Western modernity’s capture of the world and its attendant neglect of the haptic, the aural, and so on. But, the sensory mise-en-scène will always be haunted by two ghosts that are ultimately two sides of the same coin: it will claim the so-called non-Western, subaltern and sub-cultural practices as often occupying a more multi-sensorial, less ocular-centric subject-position while attempting, in the same gesture, to search for and redeem, in the present, a pre-visual, communal and artisanal state of affairs which the West has allegedly lost. Further, people/ethnos, autobiographical forms of subjectivity generated by colonial-repressive mechanisms, and the inter-subjective dimension of dialogical life will continue to appear to be the only point of departure. The image will be scorned and collective rituals will be praised. Digital techno-aesthetics and the indigenous will merge in sublime sparks and radiant mediations. Talk of an indigenous cosmopolitics and aesthetics will become more audible as the harbinger of a morally responsible future where particularising and universalising gestures are reconciled. Tragedy the first time, farce the second. We need to cultivate other forms of repetition, other uses of the iterative assemblages and conceptual stations that lie imperceptible on the side of the road of the ethnographic turn.

My point is that it is ultimately radical alterity that, alas, continues to be the point of departure and that has now come to normatively organise collaborations between artists, anthropologists and curators. Under the collaborative regime of contemporary research-led practices between art and anthropology, it is ultimately, for better or for worse, the anxiety generated by the concatenation of incommensurable worlds that has ‘inflected the notion of culture with the quality of hysteria’ (Povinelli 2006: 236) and has led the ethnographic turn into such an impasse. Alas, rather than opening new vistas and problematisations, this impasse implicitly returns us to a place that still distinguishes between West and Non-West, and from which we have to choose between ‘conceptual-abstract’ and ‘sensorial-material’ modes of conducting life and research. I believe this double issue opens the possibility to be perplexed

about how hermeneutical and phenomenological debates continue to underwrite our problematisations. This conundrum is the direct effect of our attempts to decolonise contemporary anthropology and contemporary art worlds. It is a sign that decolonisation and its gestures of reversal and hybridisation are not inherently conceptually productive, even if they might be liberating at the level of subjectivity and on some political fronts. It is unclear why and how a sensory-ethnographic orientation would enable, simultaneously, the decolonisation of the categories of the ethnographic turn, the poststructuralist desire to unseat the sovereign subject and the question of the author, and the geopolitical reconfiguration of artists’ and anthropologists’ mise-en-scènes. It is simply unclear why and how, today, the value of the sensory should be the order of the day, and the ethical mode framing the relationship between art and anthropology. Moreover, such an ethos and mode of research attention often results in us weaving webs of significance, in which the experience of the ethnographer-artist-community relationship emerges as the sole object of inquiry. Indeed, it becomes cathected and thwarts the very process it values. I believe we need to create and invent other concepts.

It seems this double issue of Critical Arts is actively and painstakingly trying to find a line of flight within this conundrum. And it achieves this by bringing some of these questions to light, by shifting our attention from art-objects to processes and practice-led research. And while I am less hopeful than the editors who placed their faith in practice-led research under the sign of the sensorial, I welcome, wholeheartedly, their rigorous attempt to search for sites where the futures of these discussions are already being hosted. The vignette section, for instance, that punctuates the academic articles, signals fissures, sites of intense reflection and experimental forms of composition that have been inherited from the ‘montage’ (Marcus 1994) practices of experimental ethnography. In addition to interrogating, from a pedagogical perspective, the ‘normative conceptions of what counts as literacy’, these trans-medial vignettes enable us to navigate the affinities ‘between book and other media forms’ (Rutten and Soetaert, this issue). With these small gestures, this issue also reminds us, with deep affection, that experimental ethnography ultimately exceeds the terms of the debates shaping the ethnographic turn in contemporary art.

Far from being mistaken for a Habermasian ideal speech situation or facile cross-cultural and interdisciplinary alliance-making, the reconfiguration of affinity as an object of inquiry in its own right generates interesting frictions. First, it is my provisional understanding that present-day anthropological practice points to emerging assemblages and research strategies that have complicated 1) geopolitical determinations such as north–south, south–north, north–north, south–south, a schizophrenic mise-en-scène that ought to be welcomed; 2) the common-place relations of alterity that have historically linked anthropology, ethnography and the artistic territories of so-called ‘Non-Western cultures’, namely colonialism,

Tarek Elhaik

nationalism and cosmopolitanism; 3) the relationship with avant-gardist affectivity (enthusiasm, anger, stridency, rage, pride, wonder) through curatorial-cinematic and documentary practices that are beginning to secede from Third Cinemas and the figure of the revolutionary militant; and to 4) an increasing cultivation of affective and ethical forms of a-nationalist life. This double issue demonstrates that the rapport between contemporary anthropology and contemporary art ought to aim at evaluating and producing other cartographies by extending its dialogue and reaching out to interlocutors who are debating and engaging more or less similar questions – curators and media artists in particular. In light of this, there could be a salutary shift in the kind of media-anthropology-art we practise, from a concern with processes attached to radical alterity and forms of cultural otherness to processes that insist in finding and creating minor differences out of the family resemblances at work in the practices of those who affect us and who, in turn, are affected by us. As Chokri Ben Chika and Karel Arnaut eloquently note in their essay:

In spite of its limitations, Foster’s compact article acutely evokes the complex imbrications of art and anthropology in dealing with issues of cultural identity/alterity and location/position. His two points of critique on the pseudo-ethnographic stance of certain artists appear indeed fundamental. First, Foster rightly questions the idea of radical alterity by arguing that in a profoundly globalised world people’s lives and ‘liquid’ cultures are deeply enmeshed across ethnic, national, linguistic, etc. boundaries. Second, Foster addresses the question of reciprocity through selfing and othering and warns against the danger of blind projection of the self into the other or, indeed, the implosion into self-absorption. (this issue)

As we know so well, difference is not diversity emerging from a partitioning of the neocolonial and postcolonial order, nor is it a diasporic longing for one’s lost identity amidst multicultural democratic landscapes. Conversely, the concept of affinity, and life lived as encounters and connections between affinities, is not similarity, identity-politics and an imperative to decolonise via the usual categories of ethnicity, race, gender, and so on. I believe if we return to cultivating an ethics of affinity and persevering through the constellations of affinity generating and generated by our fieldwork mise-en-scènes we will assuage and perhaps even move our attention to another scene – a real scene of alterity beyond the affective, geopolitical and disciplinary dimension of envy characteristic of the ethnographic turn.

I believe this tendency to cathect on radical alterity has resulted in a complex affective and moral landscape that has coalesced around a single emotion: envy. The point is not to eliminate desire, but to see desire as the work of affinity, and affinity as the work of desire. On this particular point, I side with Foster who (in his

engagement with Clifford) rightly put the finger on an intractable economy of envy. I would also add the issue of jealousy to this affective equation. In a 1972 Current Anthropology dossier appropriately titled ‘The anatomy of envy: a study in symbolic behavior’, George Foster (ibid: 168) incisively observes:

Envy stems from the desire to acquire something possessed by another person, while jealousy is rooted in the fear of losing something already possessed. In schematic form both emotions involve a dyad, a pair of individuals whose relationship is mediated, or structured, by an intervening property of object. The intervening object may take innumerable forms, such as wealth, material good, the love and affection of a human being, or it may be intangible, such as fame, or good reputation. The mediating property is possessed by one member of the dyad: the other member doesn’t possess it, but wishes to. It is this desire that creates the feeling of envy in the latter person, making him what I shall call the ‘envier’.

Foster’s point raises the idea that the ethnographer and the artist, and their respective guardians and custodians, might be approached usefully through a competitive and symbolic axis, as figures of the ‘envier’. It should by now be clear to us why the relational mode generated by these debates has clustered around a form of life lived enviously, and why ‘ethnography’ has emerged as one of those objects that cause both envy and jealousy. A poetic and romantic answer would be to say that perhaps it is as mysterious as the form of circulation at work in a Kula ring; that the ethnographer is a gift of sorts that generates these obligations, impossibilities to reciprocate; that ethnography is larger than both the ethnographer and the artist who compete for recognition, exchange and circulation, always in excess of the scene of intervention which both artists and ethnographers are participating in. In addition to a classic anthropological answer, it would perhaps also not be unwise to propose a geopolitical one, linked to the rise of postcolonial studies as an alteration of the terms and conditions under which ethnography has come to be desired, mourned, abjected, sacrificed and transfigured. Under this symptomatology, ethnography would function as a Lacanian object or a Kleinian bad-object, a Batallesque part maudite/accursed share inherited from the violence of the ‘colonial encounter’. Perhaps it is so, as implicitly suggested by some of the contributions in this issue.

But if we were to adhere to the classic ethnographic interpretation and the postcolonial ethnographic/documentary paradigm we might never address some of the more serious damages, indeed ‘turn offs’2 generated by these debates. As is becoming evident, the ethnographic turn has produced more existential and conceptual prison-houses than we had anticipated. I have taken the liberty to think of a series of problems we all ought to think about. What follows should be read less as a set of moral prescriptions than options facultatives (Deleuze 1995: 100) that ought to be discarded if not useful to the reader. They have been useful to the author of these lines in a moment of difficulty in which ‘ethnography’ as an ideal came into

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crisis and into question, in a moment of difficulty through repeated attempts to think and live with the exhausted conceptual repertoire of the ethnographic turn. I believe some of these can be assigned the status of damage to thought.

Damages

• Damage 1: The non-Western as authentic and political by virtue of resisting the colonial legacy. This point is an extension of Hal Foster’s warnings. As a result, the so-called non-Western is often erroneously equated with so-called peripheral modernities (both ‘West’ and ‘non-West’, Latin America, specifically, often occupies an ambiguous position in this uneven geography of desire and abjection).

• Damage 2: It is often assumed that the economy of departure and arrivals generated by ethnography’s mise-en-scène is systematically linked to a cultural critique of the anthropologist and the artist’s ‘native’ cultural context. It unduly reduces and attaches life to the past and to one’s alleged cultural background. The migratory tales of the anthropologists and the site-specific artists are always thought to operate along the usual national and diasporic coordinates. Our models are too reflexive where they ought to be refractive, as well. A perilous logic dominates our teachings and mise-en-scènes. We ought to cultivate another logic: I study Y not to enact a cultural critique of X where I am from, but to do something with Y, yet to be formulated, that will be named Z. X is not bracketed, mourned, and a source of colonial guilt. Self and Other, and their blurring, are no longer useful points of departure. We are monads living in assemblages, more than subjects living in nation or region X.

• Damage 3: The cathexis on the poor, the subaltern, the minority, the undocumented migrant, and generally subjects whose lives have been understood through Agamben’s notion of ‘bare life’ has not only neglected the tradition of anthropology of intellectuals, of cultural experts, of scientists, and of other subjects who occupy powerful institutional positions. The anthropological tradition of beginning from below has also created a new mode of life and research with reckless moralist implications for both anthropology and art. In this context, very little attention has been paid to those powerful mediators of ‘envy’ and ‘jealousy’ in contemporary cultural life – the curators who have entered the conversation from multiple standpoints and agendas, who curate and care for our lives (Elhaik 2014). Surprisingly, little has been said, in general, about the powerful curators-as-ethnographers who have taken on the task of public intellectuals and have institutionalised the debate, at times opportunistically, I might add. La Trienale at the Palais de Tokyo is an example of a flagrant display

of institutional power that not only blurs Weber’s initial recommendation that science and politics remain separate vocations, but also as a case of abuse of the post-‘writing culture’ moment.

• Damage 4: It is compulsively required of anthropologists and artists to frame their work in geographic-territorial terms: ‘a study of this and a reflection on that in nation X.’ Geographical location, usually defined in national terms, has dominated our creative horizons. What if artists and anthropologists met around a different horizon: an assemblage in which ‘ethnos’ is not the point of departure?

• Damage 5: Critiques of the culture concept (Bartra 1987; Bartra and Elhaik 2008; Gupta and Ferguson 1992; Povinelli 2006; Rabinow 1996, 2003) have been met with an intensification of culturalist-oriented responses. We have not yet learned from the serious critique of the culture concept. Damages 4 and 5 are intimately linked and will be the ones most resisted. A combined critique of both ‘ethnos’ and the ‘culturalist’ traditions of Franz Boas is yet to take place (Rabinow 2011). This will be the most contested terrain.

• Damage 6: Cosmopolitanism is often understood as the other of nation or the other of the province. Cosmopolitanism is no less complicit with ‘culturalism’ than nationalism or provincialism. We have to invent new concepts in order to grapple with the force of our vertiginous detours in multiple modernities. By elevating cosmopolitan anthropology (from below or above), we risk reducing our intellectual and artistic labour to the project of ‘provincialising’. Has the time not come to invent another concept for our engagement with increasingly complex forms of power no longer hinged on subaltern/coloniser and provincial/cosmopolitan relationships? An answer to this would not be to seek ad nauseum for ever more peripheral sites as points of departure, for more resentful attempts at ‘provincialising’. Rather, we ought to abandon these, the way we ‘abandon’ (Philips 2006: 24) a psychoanalytical process when it is no longer useful or has led us into unproductive impasses. One can indeed do much with an impasse, and the ‘ethnographic turn’ has become such a conceptual dead-end.

• Damage 7: Intrusion and exoticism are often viewed as figures of aggression and as effects of the immunological paradigm of the foreign body, even for those who critique these paradigms. Rather than eliminating these from our modes of living life, we ought instead to perhaps cultivate them as figures which are generative of promising differences. To remove intrusion from our vocabulary would only increase some of the irreversibly cultivated values of mutual understanding. I have suggested elsewhere (Elhaik and Bartra 2008) a scene of ‘mutual intrusion’. Exoticism, on the other hand, is more complex and would require to be thought of in tandem with the question of intrusion. One cannot police the modes of

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fascination of artists and anthropologists, lest we encourage the more pernicious moralism we might find in a world without intrusion and exoticism.

Adjacency

Rather than a sensory-oriented fieldwork that would merely add flesh and emotions to ailing living bodies, and to a politics of visual representations in crisis, I would suggest instead the counter-intuitive strategy of pausing for a second and initiating what Paul Rabinow (2003, 2011) calls ‘assemblage-work’. It is a singular form of work, from a position of ‘adjacency’ that is urgently needed if we are to generate a matrix in which both anthropologists and artists can cultivate new thought-habits through which they will care about the conceptual interconnections and affinities with which they are bound and unbound.

The goal of an anthropology of the contemporary is identifying, understanding and formulating something actual, not by directly identifying with it or by making it exotic. It seeks to articulate a mode of adjacency (Rabinow 2003: 43).

This zone of adjacency – a zone of neither ‘intense proximity’ nor intense distance – would initiate a different kind of dialogue between the conceptual practices of contemporary anthropology and those of contemporary art. In that zone, anthropologists, artists and curators intrude, intervene, defamiliarise and repeat the mise-en-scène of a vocation that has been forgotten: to extract concepts from our contemporary affective, moral and aesthetic landscapes, concepts that have a chance at a future, concepts that are very much alive but beyond the usual living organisms and subjects to which the ethnographic turn has accustomed us. Indeed, ‘assemblage-work’ does not assume that ethnography is the only research mode of existence of the anthropologist, and consequently that anthropology is a de facto humanist or people-oriented practice. It begins with iterative assemblages in which the human/ethnos/people occupy only a position alongside non-human and anti-humanist practices. Indeed, the problem of the ethnographic turn is the question of the social and the categories of the social. The ethnographic or documentary turn is an effect of a strange compromise – a humanitarian compromise. To persevere in categories as ‘community’ and ‘social life’ is to be complicit in two things: in anthropology, it is a sign of a Faustian bargain in which anthropologists and ethnographer-artists or artists-as-ethnographers cling to social formations and their most visible expression – communities, subjects and rituals made visible through a conjugation of over-determined categories that have a particular intensity in so-called multicultural democratic contexts: gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, and so on – to evade the residual positivism and overall anti-art sensibility of anthropological thought. The banalisation of the social finds its most perverse expression in something like this: you want to do art, do it on the terms of the social only, i.e., people-oriented, community and indigenous-oriented art. Ultimately, the outcome is neither art or

anthropology, nor the production of a radical in-between: just practising guilt – a guilty art and a guilty anthropology. It is from this compromise that the relationship between anthropology and art ails. It is its symptom.

Could we imagine a form of adjacency to the social, rather than an immersion in social formations and their communities? This certainly has affinities with the ‘nearby’ which Schneider (see first themed issue) respectfully mobilises from Trinh T. Minh-ha’s writings and film-work. But the anthropological design and its attendant assemblage-work I have in mind here would frame ‘alongside-ness’ through a different formulation of power – one that does not begin with the question of who is speaking on behalf of whom, or designing curative and dialogical approaches to unequal relationships found in the field, nor with an obligation to attend to unequal power relations along the lines of a Gramscian model from below. Assemblages do not speak and we cannot identify with them, but they nonetheless enable us to produce another sense amidst dominant capitalist forms of relation, modes of mediation, and patterns of territorialisation. We ought, perhaps, to think of ways of being adjacent to our humanist conception of what anthropology is. It would require greater effort to think conceptually, to think in such a way that we muster the ‘non-organic power of life’, to borrow from Deleuze (1995: 143). In order to prevent us from sacralising both bare life and the living body, we perhaps need to free ourselves3 from the humanist, dialogical and phenomenological inclinations of the ethnographic turn and its social compromises.

In a recent work, the artist Ursula Biemann (2014), for instance, incisively shifted her attention to the very difficult problem of irrigation and water supply in Egypt. By focusing on the hybrid ecology of water she is not deploying the usual politics of recognition in communities ailing from shortages, but rather, she is setting out to frame a complex assemblage around what she calls ‘Egyptian chemistry’, that obliges us to shift our attention from postcolonial to posthumanist matter. Similarly, the anthropologist and artist Fiamma Montezemolo (2006: 315) has framed the concept of ‘bio-cartography’ to map the affective and conceptual economy of intrusion – the non-subjective assemblage – at work in the In/Site Biennale between Tijuana and San Diego, highlighting the assemblages and iterations between curatorial practice, strategies of self-representation and self-exoticisation by local artists, and the dubious traffic of Otherness of artists-as-ethnographer across a bi-national site. Why are we so shy to take assemblages of human and non-human forms as objects of study, and be nearby assemblages rather than those whose voices we allegedly have to hear and care about? A care for assemblages might be colder but more effective in helping us understand how ‘subjects’ and living bodies ail, collaborate and resist. This ‘assemblage-work’ is one way of naming the capacities at work between anthropology and art, one way of enduring the impasses and damages caused by the categories and exhausted concepts of the ethnographic turn.

Tarek Elhaik

Many of the essays in this double issue work with such assemblages, but there is a problem at the level of naming ‘it’, conceptualising ‘it’ beyond merely bringing in powerful theoretical frameworks while acting-out mere personalist and moralist deference to the people and practices studied. The ‘it’ is the third person infinitive, the Nietzschean ‘non-historical cloud’ and the ‘diagnosis of becomings’, in the sense of Deleuze, and above all depersonalisation beyond moralism. We ought, perhaps, to cease to confuse our obvious sympathy for and solidarity with those who belong to disenfranchised communities, on the one hand, and the task of finding elsewhere the tools required for thinking about the concept of the ‘contemporary’ that binds contemporary anthropology and contemporary art under the ethnographic turn, on the other.

1 Some of this conceptual work is currently being carried out, for instance, at the Anthropological Research on The Contemporary at UC Berkeley (http://anthropos-lab.net/); through the empyre online conversations (http://empyre.library.cornell.edu/); through the curatorial and critical experiments generated by the Mexico City-based curatorial laboratory, Laboratorio 060 (http://www.lc060.org/lc060_f4.html).

2 The very semantics of ‘turns’, as generative of the ‘new’, are indeed very problematic. We might want to consider thinking about the notion of ‘turning’: turning one’s back, turning away, turning toward, or just turning without a sense of direction. I thank Kriss Ravetto for this observation.

3 ‘Free ourselves’ is not used here in the sense of liberation. It is employed in the Foucauldian double sense of s’affranchir and franchir: an attitude and ethos of ‘crossing’ the conceptual and experiential limits constituted by the ‘blackmails of modernity’. Adjacency is precisely that form of crossing.

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