"Reflecting on fieldwork for the 21st century, anthropologist and artist Susan Ossman invites readers on a journey across North Africa, Europe, the Middle East and North America. Ossman makes art and text equal partners, creating three "waves" of research, developed on media, globalization and migration. She reveals fieldwork today is not only about being immersed in a place or culture, but instead creates a field, and sets the frame, rhythm and tone for research. Exploring diverse settings including a colonial villa in Casablanca, a Cairo beauty salon, a California mall turned gallery, and Amsterdam's Hermitage museum, Ossman guides the reader through the relationship of individual to collaborative work. Vividly drawing art and anthropology together, Ossman develops programs with multiple outcomes, from conceptual advances to dialogue, from artwork to new kinds of communities. Comprising a new kind of autoethnography, this book is a primer for anthropology, and a history of field design"--
Reflecting on fieldwork for the twenty-first century, anthropologist and artist Susan Ossman invites readers on a journey across North Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and North America. She reveals that fieldwork today is not only about being immersed in a place or culture; instead, it is an active way of focusing attention and engendering encounters and experiences. She conceives a new kind of autoethnography, making art and ethnography equal partners to follow three "waves" of her research on media, globalization, and migration.
Ossman guides the reader through diverse settings, including a colonial villa in Casablanca, a Cairo beauty salon, a California mall-turned-gallery, the Berlin Wall, and Amsterdams Hermitage museum. She delves into the entanglements of solitary research and collective action.
This book is a primer for current anthropology and an invitation to artists and scholars to work across boundaries. It vividly shows how fieldwork can shape scenes for experiments with multiple outcomes, from conceptual advances to artworks, performances to dialogue and community making.
