ABSTRACT
The knowledge of how Tamils in South India and in the British diaspora with a background in Sri Lanka understand and renegotiate their everyday lives presented in this chapter has improved by engagements with artistic practices of making. Firstly, artistic practices have been the subject of study as forms of creating social and material relationships, through women's daily kolam drawing and through diasporic contemporary art making. Secondly, artistic practices have been employed as methods of inquiry during fieldwork by implementing various photographic and video techniques, and additional experiments with kolam-making in collaborative and participatory workshops. Artists are trained to focus on the tentative, and anthropologists on the conclusive. However, the working processes within both fields include creativity, planning, organization, analysis, improvization, contingency, and criticality, to various degrees. Learning takes place where participants are situated in a context and actively engaged in communities of practice, where reflection and interaction, cerebral and embodied learning, interact in the process.
