ABSTRACT
Anthropology may indeed be, for some artists, ‘the compromise discourse of choice’, but it can also – potentially – provide valuable resources of critically evaluated knowledge and a continuously developing research framework by which to make art that deals critically with social realities. With the sensory turn in anthropology, the subjective experience of the senses – a primary element of artistic practice – is overtly recognized as an important aspect of fieldwork; with the ethnographic turn in contemporary art, much art practice involving fieldwork can similarly be mapped to varying locations on the experience/interpretation axis. Practitioners experimenting with alternative approaches to ethnographic fieldwork now sometimes ‘explicitly aim to give voice to researchers and researched, as multiple selves of the field.’ Research and experimentation are seldom without ethical implications, and indigenous communities are sensitive about being scrutinized by outsiders, particularly in the shadow of supposedly neutral fields of study such as anthropometry.
