Anatol

Art + Anth (a multidisciplinary conversation) Pt. 2

June 11, 2019June 12, 2019 AnatolLeave a comment

A dialogue between Rob and Anatol on multiple lives and multiple disciplines.

*In the present as were I still* (installation view), Anatol Pitt, 2017, Photo: Christo Crocker

A: How does your art training influence the way you think about anthropology?

R: What strikes me is that much of the theory, the general sensibility even, of contemporary art, and of avant garde history in general, is concerned with a kind of qualitative research of our basic humanity. I totally agree with what you’ve said just now, I went through all kinds of disillusionment with ‘art writing culture’ and even art itself, as it has become gutted of the spirit of the avant garde in general, I feel. But now that I’m firmly in an academic discipline, the social sciences even, I maintain now more than ever that literary, artistic, cinematic, musical and theatrical modernism remains the forefront of human knowledge. An absolutely brazen statement, but I think it’s true.

Someone who has paid close attention to (the right kinds of) art, literature, cinema and music culture and so forth in the mid to late 20^th century, has an innate sense of many of the insights of contemporary anthropology. That’s because artists don’t laboriously articulate the visions they have in analytical language, they use their imaginations to express what are in essence deep ontological insights. We the audience then allow ourselves to be impressed by these insights, in our act of viewing, or listening. Berger’s Ways of Seeing, as you know, is crucial in contemporary aesthetic theory and is now a few decades old, yet it has much to offer contemporary anthropology too, particularly in sensory ethnography and in some of the ‘ontological’ work of recent years.

But more than just the literature and theory around art and aesthetics, it is, as you say, just the ability to relate to artworks and to enjoy and consume artistic culture which I think has a lot to offer. As such, I think exposure to and a keen enjoyment of aesthetic cultures are essential for an intelligent understanding of the human and non-human world.

But the culture of writing is what we’re talking about here I guess. What do you think about disciplinary schisms?

*tanpura study #2 (sa, ma, pa in C#) (installation view), Robert McDougall, 2014*
*found ceramic pots, wiring, lights, SD speakers, cotton, television, DVD with sound*
*Pepperhouse Studios, KOCHI, Kerala, India 2014*
documentation video: https://vimeo.com/110229996

A: Schisms between disciplines or within disciplines? I do get frustrated by people not taking other disciplines seriously, or not trying to read very widely. I think a lot more people should have a better understanding of contemporary anthropology, but you can say the same about every discipline (be it physics, maths, law, geography, history, philosophy, gender studies, neuroscience, economics, biology etc etc.). I do sometimes worry about a lack of natural science literacy within the humanities and arts departments. I’m a big fan of interdisciplinary dialogue—though I understand that a lot of interdisciplinary research can lose the specificity or expertise that specific disciplines can bring.

Did you have a specific schism in mind?

R: I did in this context mean between art and anthropology, but yes I really agree that interdisciplinary dialogue is essential. I was talking this over with a visiting anthropologist recently, she was saying how another contemporary anthropologist was referencing something from Ancient Greece but got it totally wrong. Her husband is a Classics professor and realized as such, and they both remarked how pretentious it was, yet how no one seemed to notice because their/our anthropological peers aren’t expected to be versed in those kinds of studies. I went to a public Philosophy lecture here at Unimelb a few weeks ago on the subject of transformative experiences, and the visiting speaker, an esteemed Yale professor, seemed to be making claims in a parallel world where Arnold van Gennep’s rite de passage and Victor Turner’s subsequent work on liminality didn’t exist. It was in the same building as where I learned about those things!

In art school I guess we are really trained to try and look at everything, there are artists everywhere making work about everything, its amazing, and its common to meet artists who are experts in certain fields, and also common to meet artists who are real polymaths. They inspire me the most. But yes I find the lack of dialogue between philosophy and anthropology particularly fascinating, as if they are talking about different things – but that is a long historical story. This would include art history and theory, well versed in French philosophy, but often illiterate of anthropology – which I think has a lot more to offer, in so many ways. The artistic pursuit lends itself to anthropology and vice versa; art because of its imaginative and poetic ability to ask big questions, anthropology because of its basis in ethnography; the real world.

Art + Anth (a multidisciplinary conversation) Pt. 1

June 11, 2019June 12, 2019 AnatolLeave a comment

A dialogue between Rob and Anatol on multiple lives and multiple disciplines.

singled-channel excerpt from The Sokhumi Elegies, Robert McDougall, 2017

R: Both of us have backgrounds in Fine Art, which includes academic study of art history and theory, and anthropology. How and why did you decide each of these?

A: Well I grew up in a family in which art very important. My mum, brother and sister are artists. I actually got into art history through reading John Berger, who’s still one of my heroes (which reminds me that I haven’t read him in a while). Berger is also quite anthropological too, now that I think about it. Anthropology, as I mention in my bio, was kind of accidental. I had no plans to study anth originally but my girlfriend at the time was studying a 1^st year anth unit on the history of capitalism and globalisation (this was at UWA in Perth) that I ended up transferring into.

You went to art school first right? Do you see your art practice and your studies/research as separate or that they dovetail one another?

R: Yes, I did an undergrad in Fine Art and then an Honours year, took a couple years doing residencies and exhibitions and then started with anthropology – my work was becoming increasingly anthropological in nature. The Sokhumi Elegies (2017) was a large-scale work I made in Georgia and the breakaway Republic of Abkhazia, about the War in 1992-1993. It was made up of collaborations with my friends, and my partner at the time also – all refugees from the War. I did what amounted to a year of solid fieldwork, in the Caucasus and beyond. I started to think about anthropology as a personal discipline I could commit to around that time – although there’d been a buildup to it for many years.

Actually I would consider myself foremost an artist, and artist-as-researcher, and anthropology is an aspect of that. Then again I plan on an academic career in anthropology, incorporating insights from art, culture and aesthetics. Then again, I consider myself foremost a philosopher (but in the medieval Alchemical sense, not in terms of the academic discipline), and as such my artistic and musical work, and the anthropological work I am now doing, is all an aspect of that. Hopefully that pretentious idea is applicable to academic tenure…

Sergei Paradjanov, the Armenian-Georgian Tbiliseli filmmaker, once said in an interview his greatest inspiration as an artist was ‘love, God and ethnography’, I would say at some point I started feeling the same. But interestingly now with this anthropological study the involvement of aesthetics is limited, such that I feel in unfamiliar terrain.

What about you? Why do you think they assist each other, and do you think anthropologists should know about art theory, do you think artists should know about anthropology? Berger was and is a great place to start!

A: That’s actually a difficult question. Firstly everything I do is informed by studying anthropology, it really has changed my orientation to the world. But on a literal level I think my artworks are informed so many of my interests (my current works I’m making are very ‘archaeological’), and more often than not trying to connect a wide variety of material/data I’ve come across, as well as my previous studies.

For example I did a series a few years ago that created stark landscapes by close-up photographing drawings I made on Japanese paper, using paint and white charcoal (see image below). They are about the relationship between drawing and photography but the technologies of vision of landscape documentary photography and how you can construct images through the process of documentation. Yet the title of the series (and accompanying video) is Enfoldment, which came from my interest in David Bohm’s theories of quantum physics in the 1970s, in which he theorised space-time as inherently deeply connected holographically to itself.

TanDEM-X, inkjet print, Anatol Pitt, 2016

As far as if anthropologists should know art theory, I don’t know, but I definitely think that everyone should be more practiced in relating to artworks? I think art, at its best, can open you up to such a wide range of sensory experiences as well as many different ways of thinking about such a wide range of ideas. That’s a very clunky phrasing… I suppose I’m saying that the degree of freedom in art is good?

I love art because, on some level, it always exceeds language and interpretation. But maybe that’s just my excuse for not liking to talk about my own artwork ha.

Things We Wish We Knew in First Year: Reflexivity

June 10, 2019June 12, 2019 Anatol3 Comments

‘Reflexivity’ is about acknowledging the relationship between a researcher and their subject, and to what degree the researcher influences the outcome of their research (whether in social sciences or natural sciences) (Salzman, 2002). Within anthropology this requires reflecting on the biases and impact of the researcher, as an active social actor, in the field. Reflexivity, or the ‘reflexive turn’, in the discipline emerged out of criticisms of the supposed scientific objectivity of mainstream anthropology, primarily by postcolonial and feminist scholars in the 1970s and 80s (Salzman, 2002). The kinds of questions that reflexivity asks include:

To what degree does an ethnographer shape the actions of their informants?
In what ways does the history, and identity, of the ethnographer influence what they see as important (or see at all) in the field?
Are there things that researchers are unable to see in their field because of their gender, for example, or class?
Is objectivity possible? Or does it just reflect the views of the writer (historically white and European).
Does the attempt to achieve objectivity, or the authoritative voice, perpetuate power relationships between ethnographer and informants, and in doing so maintain colonial relationships?
Can writing truly describe a culture or social system?

Reflexive research has become the norm in contemporary social science, but how one goes about achieving reflexivity, as well as the relative weight of objectivity/subjectivity that is possible, is still a grey area to be negotiated by every anthropologist. There is an argument that ‘reflexive’ research can become narcissistic and self-defeating if it just consists of a subjective reflection by the researcher, (Madden, 2010, p. 26). Madden argues for a reflexivity that has a commitment to producing better research data (by factoring in the researcher’s effect on the field) while also dealing with the identity and socio-political position of the researcher:

“The overall point I want to make about reflexivity in ethnography is that, despite the strict meaning of the term, reflexivity is not really about ‘you, the ethnography’; it’s still about ‘them, the participants.’” (2010, p. 26)

References:

Madden, R., 2010. Being Ethnographic: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Ethnography. SAGE.

Salzman, P.C., 2002. On Reflexivity. American Anthropologist 104, 805–813.

For classic examples of ethnographic reflexivity see also:

Behar, R., Gordon, D.A., 1995. Women Writing Culture. University of California Press.

Clifford, J., Marcus, G.E., 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. University of California Press.

Geertz, C., 1988. Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford University Press.

Maton, K., 2003. Reflexivity, Relationism, & Research: Pierre Bourdieu and the Epistemic Conditions of Social Scientific Knowledge. Space and Culture 6, 52–65.

Rabinow, P., 1977. Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco. University of California Press.

Rosaldo, R., 1980. Ilongot Headhunting, 1883-1974: A Study in Society and History. Stanford University Press.

Sangren, P.S., 2007. Anthropology of Anthropology?: Further Reflections on Reflexivity. Anthropology Today 23, 13–16.

An Anthropology of Scientific Things

June 10, 2019June 12, 2019 Anatol2 Comments

A profile on Stefan Helmreich

Whether anthropology is an art or a science is a long debate (see Julia’s post here), but what can the anthropology of science look like? Anthropology and sociology of scientific research has an extensive history and now a lot of that research, along with the philosophy and history of science, falls under the inter-disciplinary category of STS, or Science and Technology Studies.

Bruno Latour is perhaps the most well-known science studies scholar within anthropology, with the book he co-authored with Steve Woolgar Laboratory Life: the Social Construction of Scientific Facts (1979), having been very influential in the social studies of science (and very controversial at the time, part of the so-called ‘science wars’. Latour and Woolgar argued that ‘facts’ both emerged from and only had meaning within social networks of people and institutions. Often simplistically portrayed as a ‘science-denier’ he now has taken up climate change advocacy to find ways of engaging the public with scientific knowledge (Vrieze, 2017).

Stefan Helmreich, a professor at MIT, is another important anthropologist of science whose research delves into human and non-human relationships, specifically through the lens of scientific research. He has written on artificial life—Silicon Second Nature (1998)—, marine biologists—Alien Ocean (2009)—, and most recently his research has been on waves: from a variety of points of view including from oceanographers, computational life scientists and audio-engineers—Sounding the Limits of Life (2016).

Speaking about waves Helmreich, in a 2014 lecture, says that he is interested in studying them as scientific things, in other words, things that simultaneously exist ‘out there’ but “cannot be separated from the formalisms describing them” (2014, p. 267). Because, in the ocean, it’s so hard to determine what a ‘single’ wave is, working with oceanographers, Helmreich sees that their understanding of waves is totally bound up in the representations, the computer models:

“Waves are mash-ups, amalgams of watery events, instrumented captures of those events, and mathematical portraits of those events, often described statistically rather than singularly” (2014, p. 272)

The waves that oceanographer’s are modelling are, in some ways, human creations at the same time as things in and of themselves. Particularly when ocean waves are of such importance in anthropogenic climate change, waves are inherently connected to human activities. In this way Helmreich proposes that waves have a history, intimately connected with human history. Even the scientific models of waves depend on an entire technological and social infrastructure of buoys, satellites, and computer models.

References:

Helmreich, S., 2014. Waves: An anthropology of scientific things. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4, 265–284. https://doi.org/10.14318/hau4.3.016

Vrieze, J. de, 2017. Bruno Latour, a veteran of the ‘science wars,’ has a new mission [WWW Document]. Science | AAAS. URL https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/10/bruno-latour-veteran-science-wars-has-new-mission (accessed 6.11.19).

Ethics of applied anthropology

June 10, 2019June 12, 2019 Anatol1 Comment

The Human Terrain System (HTS) was a US military program that ran from February 2007 through until September 2014. Growing out of a ‘cultural turn’ in the US military, it enlisted social scientists, including anthropologists, to provide cultural knowledge during the counterinsurgency war in Iraq and Afghanistan (Forte, 2011). The argument was that cultural information would be used for military occupations anyway and, by at least engaging with the military, anthropologists could give better information for the military. This could lead to less violence by the military because of better understanding of how local cultures work (2011, p. 150).

While the program was greeted with favourable press at first, it quickly started receiving major criticism, particularly from anthropologists (2011). The American Anthropological Association (AAA) released statements stating that the HTS was incompatible with the AAA’s code of ethics on a range of fronts. In the end, partly because of the efforts of the AAA and others, there were very few anthropologists in the program.

Understandably a very large number of anthropologists were horrified by the concept of ‘embedded’ ethnographers working within the US counter-insurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Particularly given how the discipline sees itself in the wake of the Postcolonial and Marxist criticisms of the discipline in the 60s and 70s: that it was a ‘handmaiden’ to colonialism & imperialism (Forte, 2011, p. 150). While the relationship between anthropological research and colonial administration within colonised countries has been well documented, the complex relationships between anthropology and the military-industrial complex are not as widely discussed.

David H. Price is an American anthropologist who has a series of books looking at some of these varied connections, in the US context, from World War I and through the Cold War. Especially during the two world wars, there were anthropologists who were actively involved with the national intelligence organisations, including as spies, language instructors and strategic analysts (Price, 2008). During the McCarthy era of the Cold War (1940s and 50s), anthropologists were targeted and put under surveillance by the FBI, creating a difficult atmosphere for activist or radical anthropological writing (Price, 2004). As the Cold War developed, more subtle relationships between the CIA and anthropology evolved (Price, 2016),

In Cold War Anthropology (2016) Price discusses what he calls the dual use of anthropology, which has long been a term known to natural scientists (particularly chemists and physicists) in which ‘basic’ research is often used for military and commercial uses, and vice versa. He argues that such interconnection, witting or unwitting, is often not talked about in the case of anthropology. While he discusses one example of a CIA agent going undercover as an anthropologist in the field, a lot of the influence came through the funding opportunities that were shaped by Pentagon and CIA funds, often as gifts to universities channelled through ‘front organisations’ or well-known ‘neutral’ philanthropic organisations. Funding structures can easily shape the kinds of research being undertaken, sometimes to the advantage (or not) of the CIA and US military. In fact the AAA’s first code of ethics was developed in the wake of the ‘Thai Affair’ in which anthropologists contributed to counterinsurgency operations in Thailand in the 1970s (Price, 2016).

Obviously not all anthropologists were involved or complicit in the manoeuvring of the CIA and the Pentagon during the Cold War, but it is a good reminder that the political economy of knowledge production can have profound influences on academic research, including anthropology.

References:

Forte, M.C., 2011. The Human Terrain System and Anthropology: A Review of Ongoing Public Debates. American Anthropologist 113, 149–153. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1433.2010.01315.x

Price, D.H., 2016. Cold War anthropology: the CIA, the Pentagon, and the growth of dual use anthropology. Duke University Press, Durham.

Price, D.H., 2008. Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Neglect of American Anthropology in the Second World War. Duke University Press.

Price, D.H., 2004. Threatening anthropology: Mccarthyism and the FBI’s surveillance of activist anthropologists. Duke University Press, Durham.

Embrace the Serpent: Representing Anthropological Relationships

June 10, 2019June 12, 2019 AnatolLeave a comment

Embrace of the Serpent is a 2015 film by Colombian director Ciro Guerra that shows two anthropological journeys into the Colombian Amazon. It cuts between two timelines, 1909 and 1940, to show two journeys up the Colombian Amazon by Western researchers Theo and, later, Evan—who are based on ethnologist Theodor Koch-Grünberg and ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes. In the film, the two journeys are connected through the single character, Karamakate, a shaman and their guide. Karamakate is one of the surviving members of a fictionalised tribe, who have access to powerful medicinal plants, that Theo believes he needs to survive. The film blends Amazonian mythology with the diaries and writings of the Koch-Grünberg and Evans Shultes, depicting these journeys from the indigenous point of view as much as the explorers’. In an interview Guerra says that,

in order for the film to be true to that [the indigenous point of view], I had to stop being faithful to the “truth” because, to them, ethnographic, anthropological, and historical truths were as fictional as imagination and dream, which for them was valid. (Guerra, 2016)

Guerra worked with local indigenous communities in the writing and production of the film and, after the film’s premiere in Venice, it was screened a number of times in the Colombian Amazon. The film is spoken in nine languages, one of which, Ocaina is only spoken by sixteen people, and Guerra says that it was a powerful experience for them to see their language represented on the screen (Guerra, 2016).

Embrace of the Serpent, while a kind of parable or mythological story, gives a complex depiction of field relationships between the two social scientists and their indigenous interlocutors. They are characters that are sympathetic to the indigenous Amazonians, with Guerra on stating that Koch-Grünberg was, “the first to refer to the indigenous people in humanistic terms as the people of the Amazon” (Guerra, 2016). And they are shown in a very good light in comparison to the other Europeans of the film, who are either missionaries or rubber barons. The gravely ill Theo travels with Manduca, who is local and loyal to Theo because he payed out Manduca’s debt to the rubber plantation. Yet both Theo and Evans, as characters, have a ‘dark’ side to them, they are conceited and can’t full empathise with the local tribes and, at times, their attempt to extract knowledge without considering the indigenous perspective emerges.

In one scene, a tribe that Theo has visited before, and seems to be on good terms with, steals his compass. He confronts them and grabs one of the children pushing him to try and get it back.

Karamakate: You’re nothing but a white
Theo: Their orientation system is based on the winds and the position of the stars. If they learn how to use a compass, that knowledge will be lost.
Karamakate: You cannot forbid them to learn. Knowledge belongs to all men. But you can’t understand that, because you’re just a white.

Here Theo’s obsession with maintaining the purity of ‘traditional’ local knowledge turns into a form of paternalism, in which he feels he knows what they should want or need better than they do.

Embrace of the Serpent skilfully balances the complexity of representing historical anthropological research. It depicts multiple relationships that developed and change between the characters, as individuals not just archetypes, throughout these journeys. Manduca and Karamakate are not simply victims, rather they choose to help the white interlopers and, for good and bad, feel like these researchers were their best shot at telling their stories to the colonisers and capitalists that were destroying their communities.

Guerra doesn’t shy away from the uncomfortable actions and opinions of the researchers, and yet, these relationships are never ‘black and white’. Well, in a literal sense, they actually are because the film is shot using black and white 35mm film. The decision to shoot without colour was originally inspired by seeing the old daguerreotype photographic plates, which were “devoid of exuberance and exoticism”, and then going to the Amazonian jungle Guerra realised that colour film couldn’t begin to really represent the multiple colours there (Guerra, 2016). It also has another effect, which I found shone through when watching the film:

“[W]hen I talked to the Amazonian people, I realized that with black-and-white images there was no difference between nature being green and us being something else. Every human, every bird, every drop of water is made up the same in black and white so it was perfectly coherent. ” (Guerra, 2016)

References:

Embrace of the Serpent 2015, video recording, Ciudad Lunar Producciones, Colombia. Directed by C Guerra

Guerra, C., 2016. Embrace of the Serpent: An Interview with Ciro Guerra [WWW Document]. Cineaste Magazine. URL https://www.cineaste.com/spring2016/embrace-of-the-serpent-ciro-guerra (accessed 6.9.19).

Empty Signs / Quotidian Ruptures

June 10, 2019June 12, 2019 AnatolLeave a comment

Visual anthropology is a broad area of anthropology that encompasses the study of visual systems, the use of (audio)visual tools to do research, and these tools as ways of representing the research (Banks, 1998).

Historically visual anthropology pretty much equalled ethnographic film, but more and more researchers use photography, film and drawing to think about and to represent the field site. Anthropology is still heavily text-based and often images are only illustrative (rather than influencing the argument or research), but there is increasing use of experimental forms to stretch the possibilities of understanding people’s life-worlds (Pink, 2006).

I find photography an important way of paying attention to the things around me – I start to see slightly different. I often build up archives of photos of particular things I notice and photograph over and over.

Such archives become things to think with.

As in the case of these photos of empty billboards I took in Chile in 2017.

Surely much anthropological thought happens in the finding those gaps in the researcher’s everyday life. Fissures between expectation and experience. Things that take you by surprise. Arts of noticing, as Anna Tsing might call it.

For me, these billboards are not only an example of acts of noticing. The more I look at them, the more I see them as visual metaphors for the processes of noticing those things that hide in plain sight. They depict the gaps in the fabric of everyday life, gaps of understanding, that stand out in their quietness.

These billboards stand out in their emptiness and quiet.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen an empty billboard in Australia.

Whereas I was finding myself asking

– why are there so many empty billboards in Santiago?

-and why are there so many in Australia?

Is it from a slowing economy? With a slackening of consumerism perhaps, this advertising space isn’t necessary anymore?

Or perhaps Chileans just don’t see it like that? Perhaps they have a much less regimented idea of public space, no need for the ‘completeness’ of an environment.

(Admittedly I never asked anyone about it, so I didn’t conduct proper research around it).

To me these photos provide a provocation around public space. The shocking lack of advertising makes me realise its total ubiquity. And it provides a kind of visual hope too, that perhaps gaps in the totality of consumerism is possible. I only really notice advertising through when it disappears, and it is replaced with a series of Robert Hunter paintings.

Research(ing) Fields / Anthropology of Food

June 10, 2019June 12, 2019 AnatolLeave a comment

My honours thesis is about coffee so I’ve been reading a lot about the anthropology of food, which is a larger subfield than I had realised. As a research area it is interesting because it allows for multidimensional research that links together ecological concerns with economics and symbolic and ritual meaning-making. Food studies also directly connects the body with these wider social-cultural-economic systems. Because of the way that food travels, or not, it also can be at the forefront of multi-sited ethnographic research.

In an overview of the subdiscipline, Sidney Mintz describes three areas that the anthropology of food focuses on (Mintz and Du Bois, 2002):

Political-economic value-creation
Symbolic value-creation
Social construction of memory

Mintz, himself, is the author of Sweetness and Power (1986)a very influential book that gives a history of the modern era through the lens of sugar. As one of the most important global commodities, sugar has always been embedded in colonial economic relationships. His fieldwork in Puerto Rico with sugar cane labourers led him to think about the history of the commodity in shaping both the producing nations and the consuming nations. He ties together the economics (demand/supply) of sugar with its changing social meaning.

The research field, for Mintz, started in the sugar cane fields of Puerto Rico, but he believed that in order to understand these economic and power relationships required a historical and transnational lens, paying attention to the ways in which meaning is made through use. Mintz sees the production and consumption influencing each other in complex ways, just like the intertwined relationships between the economic, geopolitical and cultural spheres.

In doing so he uses the ‘follow the thing’ research method, which traces a single object as it passes through different exchanges and social spheres (Marcus, 1995). The object in such research is often seen as being made of up a multitude of social relationships.

Studying food is also about the connection between these larger social practices and one’s sensory experience. The sensory experience of food is critical to a fuller understanding of people’s relationships to it. How can anthropology describe sensory experience? One example of the increasing attempts to tackle this problem is Sarah Pink’s ethnographic description of a Slow Food Movement walking tour in Wales (Pink, 2008). Pink takes a cue from the slow food walking tour to propose a multimodal ‘slow ethnography’ that embeds itself in the places sensory experience of being there (Sutton, 2010). This then allows Pink to understand ethnography itself as a “place-making process”, shared between researcher and participants (Pink, 2008, p. 175).

References:

Marcus, G.E., 1995. Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology 24, 95–117.

Mintz, S.W., 1986. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. Penguin Books.

Mintz, S.W., Du Bois, C.M., 2002. The Anthropology of Food and Eating. Annual Review of Anthropology 31, 99–119. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.32.032702.131011

Pink, S., 2008. An urban tour: The sensory sociality of ethnographic place-making. Ethnography 9, 175–196. https://doi.org/10.1177/1466138108089467

Sutton, D.E., 2010. Food and the Senses. Annual Review of Anthropology 39, 209–223. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.012809.104957