News from Home: reflections on fine art and anthropology

Abstract

The anthropologist James Clifford has argued that the term ethnography refers to more than the research technique associated with anthropology. Ethnography is a term for a cultural predisposition shared by twentieth-century social science, writing and arts. In this expanded form, ethnography suggests ‘a characteristic attitude of participant observation among the artefacts of a de-familiarised cultural reality'.

Having trained first as an artist and subsequently as an anthropologist and filmmaker, my practice has been shaped by a concern with visual ethnography. Although visual ethnography cuts across a number of disciplinary boundaries, those whose work comes under its broad reach typically pursue their practice under the influence of separate specialist fields. This raises questions about what is distinctive in each field and what is shared. Taking Clifford's idea of modernist ethnography as an attitude that seeks to make the familiar strange, I use autobiographical narrative as a way of looking at art and anthropology's approaches to the play of the familiar and the strange through the use of visual means.