ABSTRACT
This chapter is a conversation between Tarek Elhaik and George Marcus. The point of departure is the ‘writing culture’ debate of the 1980s, led by Marcus among others, and the legacy of its call for experimental methods. From there, the two authors discuss the possibility of developing new forms of anthropological practice beyond traditional fieldwork, towards more experimental models of research, such as Marcus’s notion of the ‘para-site’ and Elhaik’s book, The Incurable-Image, in which Elhaik explores the parallelism between curatorship and ethnography. Elhaik tentatively proposes the curatorial as a third mode of anthropological work. The practice of curation can be seen as a method that corresponds to the new kinds of sites that anthropologists work with, as described by Marcus, characterized by multiplicity (the multisite), excess and ambiguity between the object and the subject of representation (the para-site).
