Art and Anthropology

Interdisciplinary collaboration could be the future of both fields. We've just got to figure out how to navigate it. Originally written as part of the assessment for my MSc degree, in this essay I critically consider what anthropologists could gain (or lose) when they collaborate with artists (and vice versa).

The current relationship between anthropologists and artists is complex. Hailing from different disciplinary backgrounds with differing training, methodologies, priorities and outcomes, it’s not surprising that collaboration between the two fields often results in heated debate, allegations of appropriation, disagreement and distrust. This essay will argue that, rather than being incompatible, anthropologists and artists actually have a lot in common - including things such as a shared interdisciplinary history, interest in concepts such as the social sphere, and shared values such as reflexivity. As such, both parties have a lot to gain through interdisciplinary collaboration. By readdressing the old view of anthropologists and artists as rivals, and merging the strengths of both while navigating the pitfalls (such as subsumption of one field over another), artists and anthropologists can do more than just produce engaging work — they can transcend disciplinary strictures, giving both their fields new relevancy for the 21st century.

At present, discourse on the intersection of the two practices seems to swing between two key points (Grimshaw, And Ravetz, 2015, p.431):

1. Strategies of appropriation: where one practitioner utilises the others’ methodologies, academic critiques or outcomes without heed to the core values of the other discipline

2. Conflict bating: The assertion of irreconcilable conflict, where due to differential value systems of things such as ethics and aesthetics, no common ground can be said to be found between the two fields.

While Grimshaw & Ravetz (2015, p.432) argue that “to move beyond this impasse… requires a surer grasp of what art and anthropology do as very different ways of engaging the world” [own emphasis], this essay will argue that by placing such a focus on the differences between the two practices we are in fact not solving the problem but only aggravating and consolidating a perceived stalemate between the two disciplines. Instead, we should focus on highlighting the similarities, shared histories and common goals between artists and anthropologists in order to instigate better practice. While the limitations of space does not permit me to give a complete run down of the history of both anthropology and art practice, I hope that by considering the strengths and weaknesses of a collaboration founded in similarities, the insights the space does provide will serve to show that the pros of collaboration far outweigh the perceived cons — and that collaboration might even provide the key for increased relevancy for both fields in a progressively more digital, globalised world.

A dual-sided history

Put simply, if we were to attempt to summarise the concepts and goals behind both disciplines, artists and anthropologists both deal with forms of knowledge acquisition about the world (Schneider, 1996, p.200), with an aim to representing or capturing culture in some way (Bailey, 2008). The work of both may be driven by social issues (Geismar, 2015, p.183) and both readily adapt to shifting focuses through time: art - from politics to the social sphere (Foster, 1996), anthropology - from evolutionary theories of cultural development to cultural relativist paradigms (Kasfir, 2003, p.213). Both follow distinct, (sometimes) strict methodologies (Jelinek, 2015, p.503), and make use of similar technology, from the camera to the pencil (Becker, 1974, p.3). Both can be confronted by similar problems/limitations, and often come to similar conclusions/affects (Grimshaw & Ravetz, 2015). Lastly, both have at least some intersecting history, which I will now attempt to briefly outline.

‘Border crossings’, a term coined by Arnd Schneider (Schneider, 2006, p.1), between the two fields can be traced as far back as the 19th century, when, building on ‘cabinets of curiosity’ and studies in the natural history of mankind (Van Keuren, 1989, p.26/7), anthropologists first became interested in material objects for what they could potentially illustrate about the society that made them. In the hope of demonstrating key theoretical discourses such as evolutionary paradigms, anthropologists like Pitt Rivers, Edward Burnett Tylor, and Baldwin Spencer actively started collecting and documenting objects from Imperially colonised states, bringing these back to the UK for study within institutional spaces such as museums (whether by purchasing them from markets, or collecting them on fieldwork expeditions) (Stocking, 1985). This included art objects - from masks and cave drawings to woven baskets and beyond. It wasn’t long before the interests of sub-disciplines such the Anthropology of Art (helmed by anthropologists such as Franz Boaz (1955), Claude Lévi-Strauss (1982), Geertz (1976), Gell (1998)), paralleled and intersected with the concerns of theorists researching the History of Art (helmed by art historians and critics such as Gombrich, 1990; Gardner & Kleiner, 2009; Clark, 1972), with a common desire to document and understand the wide range of material objects produced by people around the world (Coote, 2017). While the History of Art prioritised such things as aesthetics, individual artists and linear progression (Gombrich, 1990), the Anthropology of Art tended to avoid subjective descriptions in favour of things such as studying an artwork’s social biography (Kopytoff, 1986), what art processes and practices could illustrate about collective societies (Morphy, 2007), and more recently, how institutional paradigms such as the tourist and art market as well as museums have affected art production and meaning (Coote, 2017). Parallel to this, tied to a desire to depict and question notions of difference encapsulated by concepts such as the ‘primitive’, there arose renewed interest in artists towards anthropology and ethnography. Helmed by European artists such as Gaugin, Picasso and Brücke, and rising out of early modernism and the European avant-garde (Rhodes, 1994; Myers, 2006), ‘primitive’ art produced problems for anthropology, a discipline that was trying to distance itself from the narratives of colonisation and imperialism present in its history (Clifford, 1988).

During the second half of the 20th century, however, exchange between artists and anthropologists became centred around different concerns — namely the so-called ‘ethnographic turn’ (Clifford, 1988), coupled with the emergence of the new fields of material and visual culture studies (Appadurai, 1986; Hockings, 2009). Ethnography, long associated with depicting ‘the other’, became a rich source for artists attempting to engage in socially motivated work and ‘tracking difference’ (Marcus & Myers, 1995). This trend of artists adopting the methodology so long monopolised by anthropologists led to a deep division within anthropology — on the one hand some theorists, exemplified in the essays of James Clifford (Clifford & Marcus 1986; Clifford 1988) welcomed the turn as a fresh shake up, broadening conceptions of ethnography from that of a strictly academic pursuit. On the other, anthropologists exemplified by Hal Foster’s essay, ‘The Artist as Ethnographer’ (1996) viewed the turn and these new artist-anthropologist hybrids with great distrust. Dubbing it the rise of the “pseudo- ethnographic” (Foster, 1996, p.180) in a “neo-primitivist guise” (Foster, 1996, p.196–7), the worry was that these artists were only engaging with ethnography on a superficial level without the proper adherence to the ethical principles that had guided anthropologists for decades.

While artists were being accused of pilfering anthropologist’s methodologies, anthropologists, spurred on by a return to the emphasis on material studies in the social sciences (exemplified by theorists such as Appadurai, 1986, and Miller, 2008) started to re-address and re-return to the more stereotypically perceived ‘creative’ methodologies such as film, photography and sketching (Weinberger, 1992; Ingold, 2011). This, coupled with increasing developments in technology and globalisation, saw anthropologists begin to move away from strict ideas of cultural relativism (Boas, 1955), towards an ethnography of art objects and processes more globally, such as the art and tourist art markets (for example of studies, see Fillitz, 2015, or Harris, 2012).

With seemingly so much to gain from broadening this interdisciplinary work, the last 20 or so years have seen a proliferation of interest in documenting and expanding the nature of ‘border crossings’ between the two fields, with everything from conferences and workshops to exhibitions, publications and projects being conducted (Büchler & Ravetz, 2007; Schneider & Wright, 2006; Rutten, K., Van. Dienderen, A. & Soetaert, R., 2013). While the dialogue hasn’t always been agreeable (something I will go into in more detail below), a number of anthropologists have been working hard in the hopes of developing an increasingly expansive collaboration between the two fields — suggesting that contemporary art practice could offer a way to shake up anthropological practice, distance it from its academic roots and expand what ethnography means in the 21st century (Schneider, 2006; Ingold, 2015; Ssorin-Chaikov, 2013). On the other hand, artists such as Christian Boltanski, Fred Wilson, Joseph Beuys, and Marina Abramović are producing increasing collaborative outputs, not only choosing to use traditional ‘anthropological’ subjects such as objects, collections, displays, decolonisation, ethnography and participant-observation as tools to expand their art practice into increasingly social spheres, but also actively utilising anthropologists’ methodologies to question not only anthropology as a discipline, but anthropologists monopoly on them (Grimshaw & Ravetz, 2015, p.424).

Gains and Losses

Using this shared history as a starting point, this essay will now turn to various case studies in the hopes of illustrating that if collaborative work comes from a place rooted in shared history, goals, priorities and/or perspectives, it can have multiple gains for both artists and anthropologists. On top of this, like any good relationship, it is only by keeping an open dialogue that both parties can attempt to tackle perceived losses. To illustrate this, I will consider contemporary collaboration in four different present-day ‘contact zones’ (to repurpose the terminology used by Pratt, 1991): in the field, in the classroom, in the museum/gallery, and in digital landscapes.

In the field

Whether anthropologists like it or not, fieldwork is no longer in their monopoly (Foster, 1996). But how can a collaborative rather than reductive approach to fieldwork lead to gains for both anthropology and art?

First, by acknowledging that art practices has always played an important part in fieldwork, anthropologists can remove the perceived loss of artists’ contemporary appropriation of this methodology. Art has always been utilised by science — from the visualisation of core principles through sketching, diagrams and models (from key texts such as Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), to anthropology’s very own Gell’s Art and Agency (1998)), to the capturing of the natural and manmade world through illustrations (such as those of Sir Hans Sloane), photographs and film (such as those by Brian Cox and David Attenborough). If you look back to early anthropologists’ field notebooks, you will find them proliferated with sketches and drawings — take Franz Boas’ field-notes as one example (Lewis-Jones & Herbert, 2016). So not only has traditionally artistic endeavours allowed anthropological fieldworkers to visualise, record and inscribe their work and findings for study at a later date, but, more pertinently for the 21st century, it could also be key to providing a new way of communicating research to audiences. One of the main criticisms consistently levelled against anthropology is that it is still an overtly ‘academic’ discipline, still concerned primarily with the production of heavy texts, extensive fieldwork analysis, and classroom discussion over wider distribution, public influence and applied work (Manganaro, 2014, p.27). Looking at more interdisciplinary offerings, there is a reason why work such as Robert Frank’s The Americans (Hoyem, 2012), Gladys Nilsson’s The 1980s (Garth Greenan Gallery, 2017), Wolfgang Tillmans' 2017 (Tate, 2017), along with books such as Explorers Sketchbooks (Lewis-Jones & Herbert, 2016) have such a resonance with contemporary audiences (Hoyem, 2012). Offering a fascinating insight into the human minutiae of everyday life, these works capture and communicate cultural and social life without the overly academic discourse that large texts do. So, in order to overcome the stigma against artistic methodology, we must remind ourselves that the pen or typewriter is not that different from the artwork or performance piece. Each is equally subjective and at the whim of a skilled practitioner, each captures a form of ‘truth’ (but not the whole truth) (Becker, 1974, p.3). By beginning to question such assumptions and the aim of our work (do we want it to be seen by a select few, or have a more public resonance), we can expand our notions of fieldwork to be more inclusive of artistic endeavours such as methodological experimentation.

Since Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus, 1986) anthropology has considered itself a reflexive field. However, Schneider (2006) has argued that artists such as Christian Boltanski (Artsy, 2017) were using fieldwork to reflexively challenge underlying assumptions in anthropology long before anthropologists were — with some still far ahead of anthropologists today in tackling difficult issues such as taken-for-granted norms, conventions and practices (Grimshaw, And Ravetz, 2015, p.422). While artists such as Marina Abramović (The Art Story, 2017) and Joseph Beuys (Grimshaw, And Ravetz, 2015, p.423) question notions of what it means to ‘go native’ both in the field and in the museum space - Abramović’s latest film The Space in Between (2016) follows her completing fieldwork in Brazil, while Beuys has adopted the role of a ‘Shaman’ to illustrate cultural constructions within institutional spaces - others such as Ellie Ga push the boundaries of fieldwork to new zones by doing ethnography on a ship in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean (Weltzer, 2012). Work like this, while a far cry from traditional Malinowskian fieldwork (Malinowski, 1979) could aid in helping anthropologists understand or challenge the subjective role they play in their own fieldwork processes - perhaps even aiding them in coming up with new forms of engaging both Indigenous communities and various audiences in their research.

There can also a lot to be gained from collaboration between anthropologists and emerging Indigenous artists in the field. Work such as that produced by artists Maria Hupfield (Hupfield, 2015), Tracey Rose (O’Toole, 2011), and Christian Thompson (Pitt Rivers Museum, 2012) is unafraid in its reappraisal of difficult histories, and not only has more power to represent these histories and say what needs to be said unapologetically, but also has a more direct and accessible way of communicating the complexities of these issues to wider audiences. For example, in one of Maria Hupfield’s works, Jiimann (Canoe) (2015), she drags and moors a canoe to a courtyard’s fountain outside a Catholic church in Venice Italy. She then has a drink before exiting, leaving her canoe, wine glass, gloves and shoes behind. This performance thus metaphorically confronts the colonial activity of sailing in somewhere, claiming it, and then leaving it in devastation in your wake (Hupfield, 2015) - a powerful, thought-provoking yet easily understandable and accessible analysis of something complex and difficult - something many academic texts have been written about. How these artists utilise their practice to communicate and comment on issues such as colonial histories, contact zones, repatriation, and as forms identity, memory and healing processes, is of value to anthropologists today - not only as something to study in the more traditional ethnographic sense, but as a way to build bridges in the field itself, readdressing the part anthropologists have played in these pasts and issues themselves.

On the other side, a criticism often levied by anthropologists at artists is that they utilise fieldwork in a way that suits them, while not upholding a duty of care to those people they seek to represent or engage with. By collaborating with anthropologists and utilising fieldwork in a more traditional sense, artists may be able to produce more meaningfully researched and socially engaged work (Geismar, 2004), including being more ethical in their pursuits and representations. Not only that, but they may also engage with a wider range of discourses (Geismar, 2004), and find new ways of stretching and pushing the boundaries of art practices that are quickly subsumed by an ever-hungry art market (An & Cerasi, 2017, p.125).

While fieldwork is certainly no longer considered the domain of just anthropology, it still very much lies at the heart of the discipline. However that may not be true for much longer, as theorists such as Ingold (2015) are questioning the very notion of fieldwork as integral to anthropology at all — even calling for its separation from anthropology altogether. By looking to fruitful examples of where anthropologists and artists have collaborated successfully in fieldwork, both artists and anthropologists could help redefine fieldwork for a new generation of practitioners, including suggesting new relevancies for ethnography in Indigenous communities today, all the while being both ethically-respectable and culturally-informed. One such example is Hugh Brody’s and Antony Gormley’s Inside Australia (Gormley, 2005). While the main outcome of the project was always intended to be Gormley’s statues, by inviting anthropologist and filmmaker Hugh Brody to not only act as an intermediary but also to record the process with film, Gormley could make certain that his project was both successful from an artist’s viewpoint and that of the Indigenous community he was working with. This almost meant that the whole process could be studied as a form of fieldwork later down the line by anyone who so desired — anthropologist, artist, or the community itself.

In the classroom

While fieldwork may be the main crossover between art and anthropology today, collaboration isn’t just confined to the field. As mentioned briefly above, conferences, workshops, papers, etc., could elicit processual insights from both parties that could be central to the future of successful collaboration between the two disciplines. By removing practice from site-specific endeavours and taking it into an academic environment where it can be fostered, encouraged, dissected and studied together, a dialogue could be promoted that may offer a critical lens with respect to thinking about disciplinary conventions and the future of both fields (Schneider, 1996). Two examples of this in action that we will briefly consider here are: the 2003 Tate conference, Fieldworks: Dialogues between artists and anthropologists (Geismar, 2004), and the Connecting Art and Anthropology workshop facilitated by Büchler and Ravetz (2007).

During the Tate conference, a number of potential pros and cons considering collaboration between artists and anthropologists were made. While attendees fully acknowledged the differing approaches to fieldwork outlined above, there was generally a consensus that although art practice could potentially provide a way for anthropologists to contest or escape the overriding ‘Malinowskian mis-en-scene’ (Marcus, 2010, p.263-5) in the present day, both artists and art practice could also provide inspiration and a fertile testing ground for newly emergent methods in anthropology and fieldwork such as discourses in sensory ethnography (Geismar, 2004, p. 48; Pink, 2015). In turn, as suggested above, the representational demands of academic anthropology might aid in assisting practising artists in framing their work within a wider social context, so as to be taken more seriously by governments or social institutions (Geismar, 2004, p.48). While the conference was successful in championing collaboration in these ways, it also threw up a number of potential losses that could ensue through collaboration - mainly created by a misunderstanding and prejudice of each field’s strengths and weaknesses by the other. While some of the artists present seemed to harbour hostility towards more discursive forms of engagement, particularly that of text accompanying their work, and a disbelief that anthropologists could engage with art in anything more than a shallow way, they also accessed anthropologists of failing in that core aspect of artwork, output, by falling flat in providing audience-appropriate framing for their work for a non-academic context (Geismar, 2004, p.42-8). For example, an artist Susan Hiller accused anthropologists of having no populist public to speak of, instead sticking to the realms of academia or ‘government’ policy out of fear or snobbery (Geismar, 2004, p. 42). Another artist, Cariadne Margaret MacKenzie, also protested that she felt like anthropology’s present-day preoccupation with art, rather than expansive, was more like “the equivalent of the nineteenth century native being explored by early anthropologists”, in that art was not only disrespected but treated like a tool to be consumed ethnographically by the hungry anthropologist (Geismar, 2004, p.43). On the flip side, anthropologists accused artists of being too concerned with the aesthetic experience, rather than the social issues, communities or people they pretended they were trying to work with or address. While these may be hard critiques for both parties, they raise valid concerns that must be addressed if there are to be hopes of any successful collaborations between the two fields in future. So how do we go about tackling these perceived losses? First and foremost, as Geismar (2004, p.49) suggests, anthropologists need to be open to self-reflexively examining the aesthetics of representation that take place in their own anthropological research. Secondly, these impasses illustrate a dire need for both to promote clearer, concise and constructive dialogue between the two fields circumvented in educational sharing. Lastly, in order to collaborate prosperously both fields must be ready to leave outdated assumptions at the door.

To see this in action, Büchler and Ravetz’s 2007 workshop seems to provide a good example of a successful model towards expansive collaboration. With an aim to fully occupying and testing out the ground that theorists such as Schneider (2006), Marcus and Myers (1995) had sketched out, they used the three day workshop to actually pair-off anthropologists and artists into groups to engage in collaborative work there and then, with the aim of studying this process and the pitfalls and successes in action. This seemed to make the outcomes a lot more fruitful, as confronted with no other option than to collaborate and see each other in action, some artists and anthropologists even left the workshop with their minds permanently changed about the other field of practice. With participants such as Lucien Taylor (filmmaker and anthropologist), Amanda Ravetz (trained in anthropology and art), Chris Wright (anthropologist with an interest in border crossings), and David Chapman (site-specific artist) etc., they truly engaged with each other’s work in a way that only an academic setting such as this could provide.

To take a couple of interesting examples from the workshop that illustrate potential gains behind collaboration, anthropologist Soumhya Venkatesan showed how her ethnography of fine mats woven by Muslim craft workers in Pattamadai, South India, benefited from her actively learning how to weave them (Büchler and Ravetz, 2007). She found that bridging the gap between art and anthropology practice, rather than eliminating this artistic background and context from the mats, could add a deeper level of understanding of them — on the one hand they were social agents, but on the other they were also aesthetically beautiful and sensuous objects, something only truly discovered in the making of them. It was this tension between the two that informed their context, something that could only be truly understand by the anthropologist embracing artistic methodology fully in her fieldwork (Büchler and Ravetz, 2007).

In another interesting example, artist Ade Hunter went on to describe that what he gained from the experience of the workshop was far more than he had bargained for:

“What I got from this experience was the feeling that people were doing similar things but their approaches were different… I suppose I started off with a preconceived idea about anthropology, that it is an academic subject, a bit stuffy, with time spent lecturing, researching and writing papers and reports. This was easily dismissed, as there were no clear boundaries between some of the participants’ work. The research and methodology of the anthropologists could open new possibilities to the artists, as the variety and diversity of the ways in which artists represent subjects to an audience, could give the anthropologist new outlets for their research.”

Ade Hunter (Büchler and Ravetz, 2007)

These outcomes, just like the Tate conference, seem to suggest that in order to gain from collaboration, both artists and anthropologists have to start from a place of openness and willingness to let go of preconceptions, embrace each other and collaborate. However, in contrast to the Tate conference, it also suggests that discussion, although helpful, is not enough to navigate pitfalls, and that it is only through actively collaborating that long-held assumptions about the limitations of either field can be negated and true strides made.

In the institution

One of the spaces where artists and anthropologists are increasingly coming into contact in the 21st century is the institutional place, particularly, the gallery and/or museum space. Whereas once there was a distinct separation of art/artefact into the respective fields of art and anthropology due to entrenched notions of the value of aesthetics being a purely Western preoccupation (Danto, 1964; Danto, 1989), new processes such as globalisation and decolonisation have enabled the realignment of non-Western art away from artefact alone into the aesthetic sphere, from the science museum and into the art gallery (Morphy, 2007). Vice-versa, this breaking down of previously established disciplinary barriers has seen increasing recognition by both anthropologists and ethnographic museums that they can and do deal in both artworks and artefacts (Morphy, 2007; Gell, 1998). As such, they have been more than eager to arrange border crossings, inviting contemporary artists into the domain of the ethnographic now more than ever before (Geismar, 2015). But what sort of gains and losses can be found in collaboration between artists and anthropologists in these new spaces?

While perhaps most obvious, the collaboration of artists and anthropologists in heritage institutions has its greatest gain in that it offers differing perspectives on the objects on display to a museum-going public. As such, it makes objects, and by extension, the people or cultures behind these objects, more three-dimensional, highlighting the differing contexts, uses and aspects of these objects and their histories in a way that one field alone struggles to.

While traditionally anthropologists may have sought to bring to life objects in museum and gallery spaces through collaboration with artists (Gell, 1996), and artists may have sought to offer new aesthetic and social commentary on ethnographic objects collected from pre-twentieth century expeditions, truly both fields can gain by recognising that neither the museum nor gallery space is really a truly neutral nor wholly-contextual space - it is an institution speaking to an target-specific audience. While traditionally anthropologists may have thought a textual label enough to evoke an objects history, increasingly digital savvy audiences are seeking out more from their museum experience (Parry, 2009). By working together, artists can help anthropologists engage present-day audiences in objects in a new way, bringing old collections to life again by giving them renewed social context in the form of collaborative or reactive pieces or performances. This can be seen in work conducted in the Pitt Rivers Museum, an ethnographic museum in Oxford, where artists are often invited to create reactive pieces in response to the collections in the museum. Two such artists were Marina Abramović (Pearce, 1997, p.153) and indigenous artist Christian Thompson (Pitt Rivers Museum, 2012). While Abramovic went for a performance art based piece questioning notions of artefact by illustrating herself as decaying object on multiple video installations (Pearce, 1997, p.153), Thompson created eight large photographic self-portraits and a video installation that questioned the notion of identity contained in the museum’s historic archive of photographs from Australia (Pitt Rivers Museum, 2012). Both these projects served to help the Pitt Rivers Museum engage with and question the meaning and relevance of its collections, what they mean to its visitors, and to indigenous communities as well.

This sort of collaborative work in institutional spaces not only works to invite more collaboration between practitioners of the two fields in question, but also to invite more audiences to engage with and visit institutions that might have never considered before. It can also aid in illustrating that anthropology itself is embracing reflexive critique in the wake of decolonisation (Henare, 2005). Lastly, by inviting artists into the museum space and allowing them the freedom to create reactive pieces to anthropological work, whether they be performance art or something more physical, anthropologists can potentially find a new lens through which to view their work, and new relevancies for their work to contemporary audiences today.

Another aspect of this is that by working together, anthropologists and artists can critique and advance discourse in other fields - for example, in this case, museum studies. While their work may differ in output or design, the results they come to can often be similar, questioning the role that museums themselves may play in contemporary culture today. While anthropologists like Ruth Phillips are examining issues such as the role of museums as custodians of objects in an increasingly decolonised world, and the role of objects themselves in processes such as repatriation (Phillips, 2005), artists such as Simon Fujiwara (Andrea Rosen Gallery, 2017) and Roman Ondak (Donoghue, 2017) are similarly concerned with approaching these issues, albeit from a different vantage point. In The Museum of Incest (2012), Fujiwara created a proposal for a museum based on the premise that the origins of man are rooted in incest. Envisioning an alternative natural history museum in which we are all products of society’s greatest taboo, the artist aimed to get visitors to think about and question narratives that museums construct around their objects (Weltzer, 2012). While in Roman Ondak’s Swap (2011), notions such as repatriation, exchange and the value of commodities are raised as the artist engages in bartering with audiences to try to swap objects with those around him.

One of the most prominent ways collaboration between the two fields could aid productively in respective theoretical discourses and practices is by attempting to tackle the reductive and repressive notions that still seem to haunt or pigeonhole each discipline, for example, that of the collective (anthropology) versus the individual (art). By collaborating in the museum and gallery space, even the most subjective of works, such as ‘Soul Archive’ by artist Al Karim Harim (Victoria & Albert Museum, 2017), and the most anthropological of artefacts, such as a Papua New Guinea shield, can gain a new perspective when interpreted through the other disciplines methodologies.

The future

This essay has illustrated that current state of collaboration, often viewed with circumspect by both fields, raises many issues for anthropologists and artists. If we are truly to engage in a successful interdisciplinary practice for both sets of practitioners, it will have to involve a letting go of things such as premeditated and pre-assumed outcomes, slavish application, literal borrowing of a priori methodologies, and outmoded expectations implied by terms such as ‘ethnography’, ‘primitive’ and ‘the Other’. Instead, while not abandoning the most important priorities of both fields such as ethical processes and artistic innovation, they need to work together to map a terrain in which non-traditional work might be more appreciated by anthropologists and artists both - something that can only be done through doing, rather than discussion. This terrain can already be glimpsed in the expansive nature of collaboration between the disciplines already being engaged in in the field, the classroom, the museum/gallery and in digital spaces. While newly emerging disciplines in anthropology such as visual and sensory anthropology (Pink, 2015) may have more to offer artists presently due to their experimental nature, the ideal would be to open up the whole of anthropology to the potential gains associated with interdisciplinary collaboration — whether the projects ultimately succeed or fail.

When two sets of people with different backgrounds, training and motivations come together, there is always going to be tensions (as anthropologists know well from fieldwork). But if these tensions are navigated, it is easy to see that both anthropologists and artists are united by shared values and the desire to produce truly important work. So surely there is a lot more to be gained, than lost?

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