Let’s take the fascinating example of Michel Leiris, a staple of the Writing Culture debates and of the recent ethnographic turn in contemporary art. With Leiris, we are confronted with an instance of mimetic relation in a cross-cultural scene of encounter that generates an affinity between the practices of the Cultural Other and the conceptualization of the practice of the anthropologist. This affinity is hinged on a fracture structural to the emblematic ‘before/after fieldwork’. As is known, Leiris saw an affinity between the ecstatic ceremonies and trance rituals he studied as an ethnologist and his scene of writing haunted by ungovernable ghosts. Via a mimetic relation to alterity, Leiris makes a distinction between ‘experience poetique’ and ‘etude ethnologique’, between ecriture and the social sciences. This example from the cosmopolitan modernist repertoire has been important to me, both positively and negatively. Negatively, to understand my own curatorial work as 1/ not a question of ecriture/writing (that is, writing culture) only, 2/ a form only partially derived from the curatorial practices of my interlocutors, and 3/ not a return to the unproductive question of whether anthropology is art or science. Curatorial work, as I deploy it, does not lead up to a search, after the completion of fieldwork, for a strategy of textualization that translates a scene of alterity. Positively, curatorial work is still ethnography: it requires the continuous invention of new descriptive and performative levels that are distributed asymmetrically through various tools one might call multi-media (radio interviews, the web, video loops, film introductions, text, audio commentary for a dvd collection). My understanding of the trope of affinity calls upon another register, that of the double agency of the anthropologist-as-curator, of the passage from the status of an independent film/video curator collaborating through film programs with various institutions (film festivals, public art events, Societies for Film and Media Studies, cinematheques) to that of a cultural anthropologist fascinated by the legacy of cosmopolitan modernism and its entanglements with experimental ethnography (in Mexico until now, elsewhere in the near future). The passage has also a temporal dimension: the anthropologist-as-curator operates within a longer cycle and time frame than the professional curator. Unable to curate one show after another, I tend to repeat for two or three years the same program with slight variations (different titles, re-assembling of cinematic material, rewriting of program notes, etc) in dialogue with a given site of reception. So in this sense, curatorial work is also a form of site- specific intervention.

(1) Assistant Professor of Anthropology (Rice University at the time of publication - currently he is Assistant Professor of Media & Culture (Department of Cinema, San Francisco State University)
(2) Chancellor’s Professor of Anthropology (University of California, Irvine)
(3) Paul Rabinow & George E. Marcus with James Faubion & Tobias Rees. Designs for An Anthropology of the Contemporary, Duke University Press, 2008.
(4) Visualizing Theory:Selected Essays from V.A.R. Ed. Lucien Taylor. New York: Routledge, 1994. In film studies the work of Laura Marks, Catherine Russell, and Fatimah Tobing Rony has equally helped me locate the ‘experimental’ between ethnography and the cinema.
(5) Marcus, George E. "The Modernist Sensibility in Recent Ethnographic Writing and the Cinematic Metaphor of Montage." Visualizing Theory:Selected Essays from V.A.R. Ed. Lucien Taylor. New York: Routledge, 1994. 37-53.
(6) One direction I find extremely useful is Laura Mark’s Deleuzian formulation of inter-culturality as the meeting of sensoria that may of may not intersect. But even there a difficulty remains: to think about the trans-cultural as more than mere encounters between national or diasporic subjects: a form of minorization that passes between both national and diasporic subjects.