Expanded Fieldwork: In-site Arenas, the Actant Archive and the Sensorial Studio

Abstract

Embracing scholarship that reviews fieldwork practices, this article analyses fieldwork as a series of juxtapositions of observations-experiences, interventions-mediations and memories that surpass the space-time of what is constructed and designed as ‘fieldwork’, and suggests looking at fieldwork in expanded ways. In the first part of the article, I focus on para-sites and collaborations by highlighting to look closely to Latin American anthropologies which have been constantly socially engaged practices, and to what I call ‘in-site’ arenas as a form of knowledge-shaping of the field beyond discussion on reflexivity. In the second part, and in dialogue with art studio practices and place-making theory, I argue that fieldwork expands to the anthropologist’s studio through the encounters and new connections amongst our research material, body and space. I place emphasis on the agency of our archives, the transcription-inscription of interviews, and the processes of weaving through drawings, diagrams and charts that are produced in the studio. My attempt is to highlight the sensorial-material-visual experiences that unfold in the anthropologist’s studio bringing closer the field, the visual and the text.