Disciplinary boundaries between art and anthropology

Abstract

This article provides the perspective of an anthropologist who uses art practice and theory to reflect on interdisciplinary engagements, focusing on the arguments made about disciplinarity that feature in Chapter 5 of Alana Jelinek's This Is Not Art. The article considers the nature of boundaries metaphorically and methodologically, in relation to the comparability of art and anthropology. It examines whether ‘policing’ boundaries is necessary to wrest art from not-art, considered in terms of the instrumentalisation of art, and the appropriation of methods across the disciplines. It is concerned with what counts as knowledge, and how disciplines account for their conditions of existence, which the article explores in terms of an ‘ecology of practices’, in order to consider to what extent such boundaries are meaningful.

Acknowledgements

The author's current research is part of a larger European Research Council-funded project called ‘Knowing from the Inside: Anthropology, Art, Architecture and Design’, based at the University of Aberdeen (2013–2016). Her doctoral research in Social Anthropology, Working between Art and Forestry, Towards an Ecology of Practices (2008–2013), was funded by the ESRC and the Forestry Commission as part of a Knowledge Transfer Scheme via the Scottish Government. She would like to thank Alana Jelinek for the opportunity to respond to This Is Not Art. Comments by an anonymous reviewer greatly helped to improve an earlier version of this article.

Notes on contributor

Jennifer Clarke's research practice is developed through interdisciplinary collaborations which transverse the disciplines of anthropology, contemporary art and philosophy. Her work focuses on ecological thinking, anthropology with art, and ethics, considering relationships between practices of inquiry and forms of knowledge. Her current project is an investigation into the role of art and artists in post-disaster Japan.

Notes

1. The ‘artworld’ is presented homogenously in the book, but I think this is a necessary part of the movement of the argument which aims to bring together the fragmented art-like art and life-like art dualism discussed earlier in the book. At the same time, as Jelinek points out in expressing disciplinary differences as ‘cultural differences’, it reinforces her experience of what is shared by artists, of diverse nationalities and so on, in comparison to experiences with those from different disciplines. Nevertheless, it occurs to me that to homogenise the artworld could be problematic, an assumption that all disciplines are figured as comparable, or progress through the same series of stages.

2. By which I mean acceptable according to the REF. ‘The Research Excellence Framework (REF) is the new system for assessing the quality of research in UK higher education institutions … The primary purpose of the REF is to produce assessment outcomes for each submission made by institutions’. See http://www.ref.ac.uk/ for more information.