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AAA Montreal (16-20 November 2011)
SESSION CALL FOR PAPERS

We have two (of ten) slots available in our double-length session at the 
AAA meeting in Montreal this November. Please send abstracts (250 words or 
less) before TUESDAY 12 APRIL to each of the following email addresses:

Nikolai Ssorin Chaikov ([log in to unmask])
Felix Ringel ([log in to unmask])
Michał Murawski ([log in to unmask])

Selected submitters will be notified by Thursday 14 April. More information 
about the AAA Meeting here: 
http://www.aaanet.org/meetings/2011-AAA-Annual-Meeting.cfm

ETHNOGRAPHIC CONCEPTUALISM: PERFORMING METHODOLOGICAL EXPERIMENTS
 
The term ‘ethnographic conceptualism’ refers to ethnography, conducted as 
conceptual art, and to artistic and aesthetic experimentations in 
ethnography. It takes its cue from conceptual art or ‘conceptualism’ that 
creates art objects out of concepts — and, most importantly, out of 
audiences and their reaction to these objects. Much of contemporary digital 
art, for instance, is performed by the audiences of digital art 
exhibitions. And while there is a recognition of the performative character 
of museum anthropology, there has been little discussion so far of the 
methodological deployment of these performative acts. What happens when 
performances become research tools? What is seen in a society that one 
studies if performance of anthropological concepts is an explicit method of 
this study? If conceptual art is a mirror representation of the audience, 
what kind of informant is this audience? If ethnographic conceptualism is a 
form of participant observation, exactly what is ‘observation’ in this 
‘participation’? And what is being ‘observed’?
 
The goal of this panel is methodological: it is to explore the heuristic 
possibilities of this kind of anthropological engagement of 
audiences/informants. But it is also to explore cultural contexts that are 
conditions of possibility for such performances. If we work on an 
assumption of blurred boundaries between ‘things’ and ‘publics’, does our 
method depend on the kinds of things that are being offered (science 
models, Soviet-era artefacts, genetic data, indigenous art, newspaper 
columns or artistic provocations written or staged by an anthropologist)? 
And do they depend on the kind of public that is being displayed and 
explored through exposure to these objects? Most of such experimentation 
occurs in urban contexts. What changes if performances take place in other 
locations? Does this performativity work beyond an already educated urban 
public or the public that is (in)formed by post-colonial criticism, 
indigenous politics and anthropology more generally? Which anthropological 
concepts, and which notions of what anthropology is, travel and are 
recognised by such and other publics? Do conceptualist performances fail? 
What are the ethnographic consequences if they do? In other words, what are 
the contours and historical and socio-cultural limits of societies that are 
constituted by such performances?
 
The term ‘ethnographic conceptualism’ was coined during work on an 
exhibition of gifts to Soviet leaders at the Kremlin Museum in 2006. The 
curators expected this exhibition to be controversial, and thought that the 
process of curating and the exhibition itself could be an excellent way to 
explore a post-socialist audience and its politics of memory (Sosnina and 
Ssorin-Chaikov 2009). From this vantage point, they explored the exhibition 
visitors’ comment book as an artefact that the many visitors thought was 
actually part of the exhibition display. This panel seeks to bring together 
explorations of other forms of ethnographic experimentation with art, of 
portable analytics and traveling theories and of anthropological knowledge 
production and representation not after, but during fieldwork.

Conveners: Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov (University of Cambridge), Felix Ringel 
(Cambridge), Michał Murawski (Cambridge)

Discussants: Ina Dietzsch (University of Durham) and Maria Pasholok 
(University of Oxford)

Confirmed speakers: Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov (Cambridge), Michał Murawski 
(Cambridge), Felix Ringel (Cambridge), Olga Sosnina (Tsaritsyno Museum), 
Eleanor Cooper (University of Oxford), Maja Petrovic-Steger (University of 
Cambridge), Marta De Maghaeles (University of Cambridge), Dmitrii Baranov 
(Russian Ethnographic Museum, St Petersburg)

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