How can we deploy, today, anthropology’s de-territorializing force? First, by continuing the historiographic operation of recuperating previous media experiments that had re-situated art/anthropology engagements, such as those of classic experimental ethnographic experiments of Maya Deren in Haiti, Miguel Covarrubias in Bali, and Sergei Eisenstein in Mexico, or more broadly what James Clifford had called Ethnographic Surrealism. Then, in a second moment, the task at hand is to mediate anthropology’s radical constructivism via the dispositifs of new technologies of communication, installation art, digital video, web-art, but through a gradual break with the Malinowskian scene of encounter and classic ethnography’s reliance on the trope of alterity. This break has already been inaugurated by Trinh T. Minh- ha’s work in Senegal and Japan, Francys Alys in Mexico, Isaac Julian’s in Martinique. While the radical constructivism of Writing Culture gave expression to the trope of alterity in fascinating experimental ethnographic texts and films during the 1990s, our post-Writing Culture concerns ought perhaps to be mediated through other modes of interplay of tropes and forms. Curatorial practice came to me as the most obvious experimental form to mediate my research on cosmopolitan modernism in contemporary Mexico. This interplay of cosmopolitan modernism (the trope of affinity instead of radical alterity) and curatorial work (form) operates as both a mode of production of anthropological knowledge and a complex framework of reception. Moreover, curatorial work is an inter-medial research and spatial practice that involves not only the movie-theater, the site of modernity par excellence, but also the white cube of the contemporary art museum or the independent artist-run space. This double spatial location requires that we re-evaluate hand in hand the alliance between the ‘ethnographic’ and the montage of avant-garde cinema almost established by Writing Culture and the futures of the ‘cinematic’ in the age of installation art, new media, etc. By framing it thus I try to harness the potentials of installation for a pedagogical use in anthropology. Curatorial work is therefore a permanent movement in/out of anthropology, back and forth between the university classroom, the movie theater, the site understood as an aggregate of detours in modernity, and the white cube.

Marcus:

Perhaps we can develop our exchange by unpacking further two themes that you capture in your statement: “The interplay of cosmopolitan modernism (the trope of affinity rather than radical alterity) and curatorial work (form) operates as both a mode of anthropological knowledge and a complex framework of reception.” First, as you indicate, affinity hearkens back to the appeal of “montage effects” in the hopeful discussions of the 1980s about experiments in ethnographic writing and film (my own essay(5) on montage and writing ended withacallfor “ethnographics”). Today, the possibilities of montage in theory and practice seem finally to exceed the limited sense of modes of producing ethnographic texts and filmmaking. They seem to have more to do with the performances and forms of doing research, distinctive of anthropology, that are still governed by the vague but professionally emblematic term, ‘fieldwork.’ What are these possibilities? And, could we say more about the form that you are developing—curatorial practice? If ‘radical alterity’ is both the milieu and what is to be explained by fieldwork, then is it the case that ‘affinity’ is the milieu and what is to be explained by curatorial practice? Curatorial practices involve the kind of performances that are characteristic of installation and conceptual art (and one reason that I have been interested in studying their resonances through the 1990s with the diverse ways that ethnography seems to be produced now under the rubric of fieldwork).

Let’s take up curatorial practice, first, and then the possibilities of montage within it. Are you inhabiting, as a fieldworker, a well understood form among your particular subjects— art worlds and their elites—as an ethnographic modus operandi, or are you inventing a form of anthropological investigation appropriate to your problem? If so how is curatorial practice as fieldwork, or its surrogate, different from curatorial practice as an art world professional modality?

Elhaik:

As a literary, aesthetic, and political trope, affinity is meshed with complex histories of cosmopolitan modernism and debates on modernization that do not lend themselves to easy categorization: the affinity between the primitive and the modern; the affinity between the classic trope of ritual and contemporary performance arts in the collaboration between Victor Turner and Richard Schechner; the mimetic encounters with alterity that have generated fascinating intersections between the historical avant-garde and the social sciences during the 1920s and 30s in Paris, Mexico City, New York, Sao Paolo; the political affinities fueling transnational modes of solidarity and resistance against neocolonial orders, as for instance in the context of the South-South discourses and ideological horizons of the post- Bandung and post-colonial eras that have generated the politico-cinematic experiments known as Third Cinemas. But the trope of affinity, as I deploy it, stands in a productive tension with the trans-cultural paradigm and consequently ‘affinity’ ought to render un- tenable the conflation of anthropology only with the version of the cross-cultural conceptualized out of North/South ethnographic mise-en-scenes. The milieus generated by the connection of affinities ought to initiate, if not the undoing, at least a questioning and remaking of the trans-cultural (6). This is an enduring tension of cosmopolitan modernisms and indeed the problem I try to address through my curatorial work. But this is an open process: one can therefore establish and deploy relations hinged on affinity in myriad ways, and generate, consequently, alternate experiments with form through those relations.