Ethnography by Design: Scenographic Experiments in Fieldwork
by Luke Cantarella, Christine Hegel, George E. Marcus
2019
Ethnography by Design, unlike many investigations into how ethnography can be done, focuses on the benefits of sustained collaboration across projects to ethnographic inquiry, and the possibilities of experimental co-design as part of field research. The book translates specifically scenic design practices, which include processes like speculation, materialization, and iteration, and applies them to ethnographic inquiry, emphasizing both the value of design studio processes and “designed” field encounters. The authors make it clear that design studio practices allow ethnographers to ask and develop very different questions within their own and others’ research and thus, design also offers a framework for shaping the conditions of encounter in ways that make anthropological suppositions tangible and visually apparent. Written by two anthropologists and a designer, and based on their experience of their collective endeavors during three projects, Luke Cantarella, Christine Hegel, and George E. Marcus examine their works as a way to continue a broader inquiry into what the practice of ethnography can be in the twenty-first century, and how any project distinctively moves beyond standard perspectives through its crafted modes of participation and engagement.
By weaving together ethnography, art, and design, this book displaces anthropology’s logocentric emphasis on written texts toward designed encounters where creation and genuine surprise might not be the exception but the rule. Ethnography by Design, finally, enables us to perceive anew the elusive onto-epistemic constellation always lurking at the intersection of the real, the possible, the emergent, and the futural. – Arturo Escobar, University of North Carolina
Luke Cantarella, Christine Hegel and George E. Marcus have played a leading role in new research located at the intersection of art, design, and anthropology. Ethnography by Design provides an invaluable guide to this promising new terrain, combining important speculative insights with a pragmatic guide to their unique working method. – Grant Kester, University of California, San Diego
Ethnography by Design brilliantly enacts and teaches speculative design practices that cultivate thinking through making. – Kathleen Stewart, University of Texas
This book brilliantly sets the scene for ethnography as collaborative practice, and is essential reading for artists, designers, and anthropologists, as well as others interested in the study of people in and as part of the world. – Kerstin Leder Mackley, University College London, University of London
“A Week in Pasadena: Collaborations Toward a Design Modality For Ethnographic Research” in FIELD: A Journal of Socially-Engaged Art Criticism
by Luke Cantarella, Christine Hegel and George E. Marcus
2015
This article describes a recent phase of an ongoing collaboration that has evolved since 2001 between anthropologists George Marcus and Christine Hegel and designer Luke Cantarella. The collaboration has been driven by the observation that the signature method of anthropological research—ethnographic observation and immersion in fieldwork—can benefit from some of the techniques and interventions that are characteristic of studio design inquiry and participatory art practice. It has also been propelled by our observation of the ways in which design or art commissions can evolve into ethnographic inquiries. Marcus founded the Center for Ethnography at the University of California, Irvine in 2006, and he has since discovered that a number of new labs, collaboratories, or studios have emerged over the past decade or more to experiment with the classic orientations of ethnographic method, leaning especially toward design and art practices, combined with new visual and sensory technologies. In 2010, he met Cantarella when he was head of the Scenic Design faculty at UCI, and Hegel when she was an associate of the Anthropology Department at UCI. Cantarella and Hegel produced an initial project together at UCI that led to further, ongoing collaborations, including the Stern v. Marshall Archive (SVMA) project described below. An examination of this project provides an opportunity to articulate, in the midst of the creative process, the first draft of a working model of our activity together, which we are calling Productive Encounters. We would like to thank Elizabeth Chin, her graduate student participants in the Laboratory of Speculative Ethnology, and others at the Art Center College of Design who provided resources, skills and insights, as well as Justin Richland and Kent Richland for their willingness to collaborate in the workshop and for sharing material for design/ethnography experimentation.
Chapter 3
“Ethnographic Reentanglements in the Collaborative Ecologies of Film and Contact Improvisation” in Collaborative Anthropology Today
by Christine Hegel, with contributions from Luke Cantarella
2021
As multi-sited research has become mainstream in anthropology, collaboration has gained new relevance and traction as a critical infrastructure of both fieldwork and theory, enabling more ambitious research designs, forms of communication, and analysis.
Collaborative Anthropology Today is the outcome of a 2017 workshop held at the Center for Ethnography, University of California, Irvine. This book is the latest in a trilogy that includes Fieldwork Is Not What It Used to Be and Theory Can Be More Than It Used to Be. Dominic Boyer and George E. Marcus assemble several notable ventures in collaborative anthropology and put them in dialogue with one another as a way of exploring the recent surge of interest in creating new kinds of ethnographic and theoretical partnerships, especially in the domains of art, media, and information. Contributors highlight projects in which collaboration has generated new possibilities of expression and conceptualizations of anthropological research, as well as prototypes that may be of use to others contemplating their own experimental collaborative ventures..
“Ice Time: Transversal Knowledge Production between Hockey and Art” in American Anthropologist
By Luke Cantarella (Pace University, USA), Christine Hegel (Western Connecticut State University, USA), and Sari Pietikäinen (University of Jyväskylä, Finland)
2021
Ice hockey is many different things simultaneously: brutal and graceful, chaos and choreography. It is raw athleticism and sheer luck. It is a national pastime and a family tradition. Barely a living for many players, yet a multimillion-dollar global industry. Entertainment. Work.
Pietikäinen has been at work unraveling these internal contradictions as one node within a four-year multi-investigator project entitled Cold Rush that explores Arctic economies, identity, and language. Cantarella and Hegel began collaborating with her in the fall of 2017 to participate in analyzing her ethnographic data on Finnish ice hockey through a speculative design project. What developed out of our studio time was a detailed sketch for an installation piece, or “conversation piece” (Kester 2013), made up of objects to prompt rumination on the meanings and practices of managing a major hockey team. The next phase of the process, underway as of May 2018, is to prototype and produce a three-dimensional version of the installation. As the sketch indicates, the installation will comprise a series of trophy cases displaying fictionalized versions of trophies, pins, rings, patches, and other “commemorative” items, all of which have particular resonance in the realm of sports for documenting and indexing achievements. The installation plays with the form and content of these objects to make analytic proposals derived from the ethnographic data. These include propositions about the forms of calculation, evaluation, observation, and speculation that are entailed in the everyday labor of the sports manager, including assessing the physical attributes, skills, and potentials of players, and evaluating intangible elements of team sports like sportsmanship, aggressiveness, and “hockey sense.” They illustrate what hockey-as-work means for the sports manager to achieve what they call “success beyond good luck.”