Anticipating user experience? Approaches to study the future

How can ethnography which allows us to study human knowledge and practices in situated ways, be applied to the study of what is not current but lies ahead of us? Is it suited at all to help in such an endeavour? In this blog post I want to argue not only that it is but that, moreover, ethnography offers a distinguished and remarkably different way to study the future, and can therefore bring a radically new perspective to discussions of this topic. In this post I also want to dedicate some words to how we might approach anticipatory user experience research.

But what exactly might seem so problematic about the future as an ethnographic area of study? At a first instance, ethnography and the future can seem antithetical. Ethnography is produced through an attention to the lived, to what is actually experienced. The future, however, is characterised by how it escapes the present moment, thereby always carrying with it a hint of speculation and aura of the unknown. People might talk about what the future holds, but they cannot experience it in such way that it makes it observable or accessible to an ethnographer. Or can they? What if ethnography's potential offering to the study and our understanding of the future lies exactly in the way it introduces elements of situatedness and the contemporary and connects them to the seemingly opposed - the future.

"The present crucially informs and shapes emerging future possibilities and probabilities. This implies a radical statement about the future made by Pink & Salazar (2017:18), which contradicts many of our popular ideas : the future is never a tabula rasa of endless possibilities."

The future studied from the present

If we think about the future as necessarily carrying an element of uncertainty, we might say that studying it is, in fact, problematic for all sciences. This is especially true for those practitioners who interpret what they do as hard science. How could claims and predictions about the future possibly live up to expectations of methodological rigour, objectivity and testability? Looking at it from this perspective, anthropology and ethnographic enquiry, with their long standing contribution to critiques of scientific objectivity, suddenly don't seem that ill-suited to study the future.

Anthropology is not that concerned with discerning what is true and what isn't or with describing an external world seperate from the social context that produces it. Rather, it's interested in the complex layers of the 'actual', that is, how society and culture work as filters through which humans perceive and interpret such an external world- and showing how they do so in very creative ways. In this sense, anthropology can study the future not by concerning itself too much with predictions of what the future will look like in actual terms but by focusing precisely on the imaginations and projections that people have and produce of the future.

This, however, doesn't meant we're limiting ourselves to what is actually observable and loosing focus on the actual interesting questions about what the future holds. Quite the opposite, it's actually making a strong claim about how the present crucially informs and shapes emerging future possibilities and probabilities. This implies an even more radical statement about the future made by Pink & Salazar (2017:18), which contradicts many of our popular ideas about the future, which is that “the future is never a tabula rasa of endless possibilities.”

Understanding technology through anticipatory anthropology

That is exactly what the field of Anticipatory Anthropology does, a field which is surprisingly older than one might think and actually goes back to the legacy of Margaret Mead who has written extensively on the topic. What draws the field together is the observation that humans have and make heavy use of the capacity to anticipate. People have dreams, fears and hopes regarding the imminent and distant future - and express these all the time.


Technology is, and has long been, at the very heart of all Western imaginings of the future. Whether it is robots or flying cars, new technologies are imagined to shift the possibilities of human life in radical ways. Big, powerful corporations today play a central role in this. What is so interesting about their role is how they contribute to a dynamic that could be described as ‘unequal futuring’ or unequal access to the future.

In a previous blog post, I’ve alluded to the ethnographic work of STS scholars Grint and Woolgar who point to influential power imbalances in ‘user-centred' design processes in a company dedicated to the manufacturing of micro-computers for educational purposes (Grint and Woolgar 1997:78). Although conducted in 1997, much is still true for the present. It is typical for corporations to spent large sums of money and resources on determining what the future might hold and how requirements and actions of users might change. However, in that effort of thinking through and placing strong emphasis on future scenarios (often in a race against competitors) corporate actors actually develop the framework and conditions of the future they are trying to predict.

"Looking at technology through a future lens also teaches us a lot about the general nature of technology and what effects it has in our present. It shows us that more than providing solutions, what technologies really do is create possibilities."

There are many (more recent) examples of interesting fieldwork carried out in the space of future and technology, for example, Hannah Knox’s fieldwork in Manchester which looked at the city’s plans to transform and prepare for the transformation from a post-industrial to a much anticipated new ‘knowledge’ economy. What is so interesting about ethnographic work like Knox’s is that it pays attention to the passage from the present to the future. It looks at planning and ‘futuring’ efforts and locates them in the present, within strikingly mundane processes. It thereby helps us understand which ideas of the future persist into the future, which get lost or abandoned and how these decisions come about.

Looking at technology through a future lens, then, teaches us a lot about the general nature of technology and what effects it has in our present. It shows us that more than providing solutions, what technologies really do is create possibilities.

Going forward: What might anticipatory user experience research entail?

How might we research the user experience of emerging technologies that are predicted to be part of people’s future lives but aren’t really here yet? ‘Anticipatory user experience’ is a term that has been circulated quite a lot amongst UX practitioners and focuses attention on anything that happens before the actual interaction with a 'product'. This could be all actions that users take in order to prepare for the first interaction or their general expectations around this experience. However, looking back at the ways that the relationship of the future wiht the present has been theorised in anticipatory anthropology, I think this attention could benefit from an expansion in focus, to include more interesting aspects and perspectives on future use that go beyond simply what users expect this interaction to be.

As part of a wider research team, anthropologist Sarah Pink has just recently brought together interesting methods in a volume titled “Anthropologies and Futures: Researching Emerging and Uncertain Worlds” (2017). When researching user experience in an anticipatory mode, the volume shows us, we can and should draw on many different creative methods and techniques: From the production of speculative documentaries that blur the lines between fact and fiction, films about potential futures co-created with various participants, to workshop activities that deliberately confront participants with uncertainty and situations of uncertainty. In another, especially interesting example, Pink herself conducts in-car ethnographies to explore the future of autonomous driving. She does this by employing existing technologies and familiar commuting scenarios as probes to imagine the future possibilities of this technology.
The volume is an incredibly interesting array for any UX researcher interested in playfully analysing and speculating about the future with their research participants.

Here are further resources:

The World Ahead: An Anthropologist Anticipates the Future (2005)
edited by Robert B. Textor

Anthropologies and Futures: Researching Emerging and Uncertain Worlds (2017)
edited by Juan Francisco Salazar, Sarah Pink, Andrew Irving, Johannes Sjöberg

Un/certainty (2014)
by Sarah Pink, Yoko Akama and Participants

Presenting my work 'Technology in a share home' at 4SSydney 2018!

I will participate in this year's Society for Social Studies of Science Annual Conference in Sydney (4SSydney) this August. I'll be sharing and discussing my work Technology in a shared home as part of this year’s Making and Doing session.

4S is a an international society that brings together researchers and practitioners of the interdisciplinary field Social Studies of Science and Technologies (often referred to as STS). Broadly speaking, STS researchers study the social context of technological systems and scientific production, which themselves are often thought of as operating seperate from such social contexts, or,  more generally, anything that touches on the realm of humanities.

Each year, the 4S Making and Doing sessions take a unique place within the conference program. They give participants the opportunity to share "on-the-ground practices and innovations in scholarly knowledge work in a range of formats extending beyond academic papers or books".

My work will be part of the Methods Practices panel. Along with a diverse group of practitioners and researchers, I'll be contributing to a broader reflection on experimental methods practices in science and technology research.

My contribution touches on the idea of a 'smart home' and explores through a short digital ethnography what this technology means and does in a very specific context of a share house. The work takes the form of a website where I present the outcomes of this ethnography through only a few images and hyperlinks. My presentation at the conference will explore new modes of ethnographic representation and discuss ways of producing and experimenting with non-linear narratives.

The 4S conference website includes a full abstract of my submission and a full list of submissions to the Methods Practices panel.

4SSydney will take place from August 29 to September 1 at the Sydney International Convention Centre (ICC) and Powerhouse Museum.

What the Digital entails: Some Misconceptions

Some helpful notes on common misconceptions that should be avoided (or at least reviewed) when talking about the use, implications, effects or consequences of digital technologies.

The virtual/real divide

In his ethnography of Second Life, Boellstorff has shown that the dichotomy between virtual and real is not very useful: Someone who is selling virtual clothes in the world of 'Second Life' and making a living out of it will tell you that his or her business does have real-life implications. In a similarly way, it would be wrong to assume that human communication through digital media is less 'social' or 'real'than face to face interaction.

What's more, anthropologists like Boellstorff are trying to show us that virtuality is inherent to human culture. He says:

'It is not only that virtual worlds borrow assumptions from real life; virtual worlds show us how, under our very noses, our “real” lives have been “virtual” all along. It is in being virtual that we are human: since it is human “nature” to experience life through the prism of culture, human being has always been virtual being (Boellstorff 2009: 5).

However, Boellstorff does recognize the usefulness of distinguishing between 'virtual' or 'digital' and 'actual' (as in 'physical'). Not only is the distinction meaningful to his informants in 'Second Life' (since participants would exclusively interact with other participants 'in-world') but also does the sole definition of 'digital' prohibit the assumption that those two categories could somehow fall together in the future (like Rogers 'The end of the virtual' suggests)

Read more: 'Digital Anthropology', by Daniel Miller and Heather Horst (2012)

Community/network paradigm

community or community of practice: it's more of a normative and cultural category ('folk notion') that is often used in public rhetoric. It doesn't seem to have an empiric referent so it's not an actual social group that we can study. Also, the notion of community (much like 'culture') sort of imagines a homogenous and bounded group. As Postill puts it 'community of practice proponents have played down questions of power and conflict'(Postill 2011: 13). Postill suggests using Bourdieus concept of 'field' instead.

networks: conceptualizing the internet or digital technologies as 'networks' is an incredibly popular idea (especially in Internet studies). Reviewing the value of this concept can lead to more productive approaches. For example, thinking about the social ties in a certain group as a network oversees all 'the constraints, tangles and disconnects that invariably accompany all human endeavour and should not be left out in a ethnography' (Postill 2011: 15).

Read more: Localizing the Internet, by John Postill (2011); Bringing Things Back to Life: Creative Entanglements in a World of Materials, by Tim Ingold (2010)

Global vs local

When turning to a defined, physical place (like Silicon Valley or a neighborhood in Kuala Lumpur) in order to look at local uses, understandings and effects of digital technologies like the Internet we need to avoid the idea that a 'seemingly stationary 'local community' is […]impacted upon by 'global' technologies'(Postill 2011: 11)

Rather, as anthropological scholars of Globalization teach us, not only is the 'global' produced within local structures but global structures themselves produce local ones!

Read more: The Internet, by Daniel Miller (2000); Modernity at large, by Arjun Appadurai (1996)

The digital experience is not universal

While we can not deny the ability of digital technologies to connect people globally and its potential of transforming society and culture as such, ethnographic work on the uses of digital technologies around the world show that there is no evidence of a universal digital experience. Instead, there are interesting approaches like Miller and Slaters concept of 'expansive realization' that triy to explain how digital media like the internet is 'appropiated' in different social and cultural contexts (with regard to the false opposition between global/local we should use the word 'appropriate' with caution)

An Ethnography of Reddit: Some thoughts

Here are some thought on a possible ethnography of Reddit. Some of these questions do not only relate to the specific case of Reddit but could also be asked more generally for other online ethnographies.

What is reddit and how does it work?

The idea of reddit is simple: Users (Redditors) can link to stuff they find on the web and share it with other redditors or simply write something and submit it . Others can give that post 'up' or 'down' votes, depending on whether they like it or not. Users can also comment the post and reply to comments already posted. This basic concept doesn't differ a lot from social networking sites like Facebook or internet forums. But there are some distinct features that make reddit stand out. First, the infrastructure allows for an open communication with all users (you don't have be 'friends' with someone and in most cases you don't have to be a formal member of the specific group to interact with them). Second, the up and down votes create lists of posts that are especially popular in the community. A very popular post raises to the top and will be highly visible for most of the users on the home page (front page). The Front Page itself is a selection of the most popular 'subreddit', which is probably the most distinct feature on reddit. A 'subreddit' is like a subtopic in a forum and there are hundreds of thousands of them. If you chose to post on reddit you would first have to decide which of these thematic sub forums to submit your post to. The subreddits are very diverse and defined by various characteristics like hobbies (r/music r/gaming') or by the type of media submitted (like videos in r/videos) or they can be designed to support and help others (r/personalfinance). 

Some thought on how to approach fieldwork on reddit.com:

Picking one subreddit and aspect of Reddit

Generally, any active subreddit could be the subject of an ethnography. However, the bigger subreddits like AskReddit where users ask very general questions about virtually anything would be more difficult to overview due to its high popularity and trying to argue for a single shared culture to exist in this space would be rather difficult. A very interesting but also highly problematic subreddit would be 'circle jerk'. In this subreddit redditors make fun of the stereotypical viewpoints and phrases of redditors and especially the fact that a lot of discussions on reddit could be described as 'preaching to the choir' and the same views are repeated over and over again by like-minded individuals. The fact that redditors in this subreddit interact exclusively in a satirical manner makes serious ethnographic work (like interviews) in this subreddit very difficult.

The research question

Although research questions are more likely to emerge after the first weeks or months of observing and participating in the community (or more precisely: for these questions to emerge the initial phase of observation is indispensable) there are nonetheless some interesting aspects one could focus on from the beginning:

Rules. For example, one could look at the underlying rules of the subreddit. What type of posts are allowed? What behavior is encouraged by the mods? In most subreddits these rules can be found in the sidebar but there are probably more rules that are not necessarily written out but become evident after spending some time on the subreddit.

Interaction. One should also focus on the different types of interaction: Replying, gifting gold, private messaging, up voting, down voting. When do users of the selected user group reach out to private messaging? What makes them up or down vote a post or give reddit gold?

Shared knowledge. An integral part of being a redditor is knowing the memes that are being used. It's important to look out for words, phrases or shared memories and the way they are being used and activated in discussions and the way they contribute to the forming of the community.

A potential problem: The Internet & Place.

The relationship between the on - and offline world.

In what way should Redditors offline lives be included in such an ethnography? Should participant observation extend to these offline worlds or stay in the limits of the online community? To what extend can we ignore offline 'worlds' and still have a representative image of these Redditors?

Some good examples: In his ethnography 'The Internet: an ethnographic approach' about Trinidadians and their use of the internet, Daniel Miller and Don Slater integrate the on-line and the off-line worlds. In fact, this entire ethnography is based on previous ethnographic work in Trinidad that focused solely on the off-line world. What's more, Miller and Slater argue against the notion of a placeless 'cyberspace' and suggest that to understand what the internet is as a whole in this specific ethnography you have to consider what 'being Trini' means  (Miller & Slater 2000: 1). On the contrary, in 'Coming of Age in Second Life' Boellstorff (2008) studies 'virtual worlds only 'in their own term'' because 'the vast majority [of participants] interact only in the virtual world'. Nevertheless, Boellstorff understands that these virtual lives have a great impact on the social life in the offline world.

More thoughts to follow.

Recapitulating

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It’s been three months since I’ve first started to write on this blog. Today, I want to summarize the most important things of the 'Anthropology: Art or Science?' debate. I want to start with briefly outlining all the texts that the blog posts are based on. Then, I will summarize my blog post and finally I will conclude the work by depicting the results that I gathered from this debate.

Process & Progress

In general, the texts and discussions on this blog so far evolved around three main concerns: First, locating the boundaries between art and anthropology, which includes all discussions on the definition and differentiation of these two fields. Second, the ways in which anthropology studies art and art studies anthropology (this part is mainly concerned with the content of such study). And third, the intersection of anthropology and art, where the boundaries between art and anthropology are more or less dissolved and the concerns are more methodological.

People and Baileys textbook introduction and Carrither’s text ‘Is anthropology art or science?’ deal with our first concern. While both try to maintain a clear distinction between art and science, People and Baileys text does this in a very classical scheme of science and art opposition, while Carrithers rejects the criterion of ‘absolute certainty’. People and Bailey’s text also deals with the second concern: The study of art in anthropology and vice versa. Once again, People and Baileys text represent the classical Art-Anthropology with the assumption that artists communicate encoded ‘meanings and messages in symbolic forms’. Victoria Walter’s text deals with the opposite. Here she depicts artists employing ethnographic methods which enable them to study how ethnographers work. All these texts indirectly imply the question ‘What is art and what is anthropology’ but the question is either never explicitly asked or inherently answered. Therefore, they bring little insight to the ultimate question of where to draw the line between anthropology and art.

Moving to the third concern (the intersection between art and anthropology) we expand into the heart of the debate. Schneider’s ‘Three modes of experimentation with art and ethnography’ suggests using visual experimentation in ethnography as a way of improving general research in anthropology. The three examples that Schneider discusses have obvious traits of an artwork, two are even works by artists. So, to put it in simple terms, Schneider suggests using artistic practices to change the way anthropologists do research. The boundaries between art and anthropology are clearly dissolved with one reaching to the other and the other way round.

Ingold’s and Latour’s texts don’t really deal with the question in the way Schneider does but rather uncover the general flaws of the patterns we think and classify in. In a way, one could say that their concern is the intersection between everything in life.

My focus of attention

The sources of impulse for writing the blog posts came from a variety of input. That input material was not only diverse in form (texts, films and digital projects) but also quite versatile regarding its content. So naturally, during the process of coming up with something to write on the blog I had to focus on aspects and subjects that spoke to me the most. I want to take a brief look at what my subjects of interest were and the aspects that had the biggest impact on my learning process.

The main question I had on my mind during the course and while writing the blog was ‘Where do we draw the line between art and anthropology?’. There is still no definitive answer but the material I considered points to one answer in particular. From the dichotomy between art and science to all the assumptions we make about the things in the world, it seems that we might have to rethink everything. And at this point art could be a helpful pathfinder.

I would say that the core of what I learned is reflected in the blog post ‘Ethnography is about experience’. Schneider’s text as well as the works of the Harvard's Sensory Ethnography Lab (especially Castaing-Taylor’s and Paravel’s ‘Leviathan’) demonstrate that visually creative attempts to capture the lives and environments of people are of high anthropological value and offer forms of immersion in a way that textual approaches are not able to.

What can be concluded?

In conclusion, looking into this debate offered an insight into the ways in which anthropology uses art and the ways in which art practices can be useful for anthropology. Dealing with the question ‘Art or anthropology?’ as an isolated issue seems to be an impossible endeavor since it is always linked to more general, ontological concerns about the nature of research and the way we come to know.

Generally, there are a lot of scholars in contemporary anthropology identifying new perspectives and ways in which anthropology can be thought of. However, this is still happening within the framework of classical research practices, which, for now, makes it difficult to see how the proposed changes can be put into practice. To me, the practical examples of anthropologists at the SEL indicate how future anthropology could look like.

On the difficulty of moving boundaries

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For quite a while now, many scholars in anthropology have argued for a new way of practicing and looking at anthropology while pointing out the important intersection between their field and contemporary art. Most of them also argue that such an approach is largely being ignored in anthropology. This might have been true a few years back but as far as I can see, today, there are many different ways in which anthropology as a discipline is trying to engage in new practices and trying to ‘learn from artists’.

There is the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab that I’ve already mentioned in a previous blog post, there are also many anthropologists writing on the subject like Schneider & Wright or Anna Grimshaw and there are projects like the exhibitions of ‘Ethnographic Terminalia’ that have been part of the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association since 2011.  So while I wouldn’t necessarily argue that there hasn’t been thought, said or written much about ‘pushing the boundaries of anthropological scholarship’, there has indeed been done close to nothing to actually move them.

Why do anthropologists like Tim Ingold write meticulously on how anthropology or even science as a whole is wrong about almost anything they assume while presenting those ideas in the most conventional textual form? This practice seems to be symptomatic for anthropologist wandering on the unsettled grounds where art and science intersect.

The approaches have very well found their way into anthropology as a topic of discussion but they haven’t found a way of causing an actual shift in anthropological practice and methods.

This might only be a matter of time. But either way, this problem seems to go back to the question of how to draw the line between art and science.

What does soundscape research do?

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Soundscapes: “a total appreciation of the acoustic environment” (Schafer 1994)

After reading a lot about Anthropology’s new research interest in soundscapes here and here and mentioning it briefly here, I became more interested in the practical aspects of soundscape research in anthropology. The importance of rethinking and including sonorous aspects of cultural life in anthropological research was clear to me but what could that research actually focus on? What are interesting questions that could be asked? And how can the findings from research contribute to a more insightful conception of sound (outside of academia)?

I stumbled upon a European network of scientist and researchers that aim at bringing together research projects dealing with soundscapes. This network is called ‘Soundscape of European Cities and Landscapes’ and covers research in many academic disciplines such as psychology, architecture, anthropology and medicine. What all these projects have in common is that – as opposed to the noise policy that has been carried out by the EU – the research projects from this particular network focus on environmental sounds as a ‘resource rather than a waste’ and consider cultural differences in soundscapes.

Policy is aimed at measuring noise levels and controlling or reducing noise levels in order to meet targets and limits for exposure. What isn't addressed is the issue of the sounds we want to hear. What makes sounds attractive or unattractive? Can we find out? Then can we develop ways of measuring sound quality rather than noise? Ultimately can we design desirable soundscapes in the same way that we design buildings, lighting or landscape effects in urban areas?

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any details on specific projects or details on how these questions are approached, especially by the anthropologists involved. I would like to know more about the methodologies employed by the anthropologists and how they contribute to an enhanced understanding of soundscapes. Do they limit their research to traditional field recordings and qualitative methods or do they work with sound and editing technologies in new ways?

I will certainly try to find out more about ongoing research in this particular area.

Ethnography is about experience

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New approaches in ethnography strengthen the importance of material and sensory aspects of the world anthropologists observe. A prominent endeavor into new modes of experimentation with sensory ethnography are the media projects of Harvard's Sensory Ethnography Lab. What do all these projects contribute to ethnography? Are these experimentations worth anything in the depiction of reality or are they simply abstractions and individual interpretations? I want to take a very brief look at why I think that experimentation with media is not only helpful but also necessary for ethnography.

Photo: http://sel.fas.harvard.edu/works.html

Doing ethnography is an attempt at capturing the unique realities of people's lives by experiencing these lives as closely as possible. By the practice of experience I refer to a certain state of awareness, of 'being there' and seeing, feeling, tasting and listening to the things that happen around us. 'Knowledge is gained through cultural immersion'. How much of this knowledge is lost when ethnographers produce textual representation of the physical world they experienced? How much 'experience' can a textual approach even represent if experience itself is known to be multi sensory?

A textual approach might focus on the meaning people create and attribute to the world they experience. But wouldn't we, as readers of ethnographies, first want to gain a sense of what their world feels like? I would argue that people create meaning based on what they experience – not what they experience individually, but rather what they experience intersubjectively as humans in interaction with the physical world. Trying to convey a sense of this group experience should be the first duty for every ethnographer and the first step in any attempt of depicting the culture's practices and knowledge. Here, experimentation with sound and images can offer ways of depicting these experiences, especially if the ethnography is concerned with bodily aspects of cultural life or people's perceptions of environment.

soundscapes

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'[Sound] is a great source of knowledge because hearing enables you to gather information, to appreciate, to have a response to the environment. But then so does seeing, smelling, touching, feeling, tasting. Sound is very important but it's not the only thing that is important. More and more it interests me how our senses interact to create our composite or our whole feeling.'

Peter Cusack is a field recording artist. He examines soundscapes and uses sound as a way of documenting places. I find Cusacks sound maps  especially interesting because they seem like an interesting contribution to ethnography.

http://favouritesounds.org
http://sounds-from-dangerous-places.org/

What anthropology sees in art, and vice versa

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Before becoming an artist, Susan Hiller completed a Ph.D. in Anthropology. One day, during a lecture on African art in a ‘moment of brief clarity’ she promised herself ‘to happily abandon the writing of a doctoral thesis whose objectification of the contrariness of lived events was destined to become another complicit thread woven into the fabric of ‘evidence’ that would help anthropology become a ‘science’.’ What is it about the way anthropologists work and the way they see art that upset the artist so much that after years of dedication to the subject she decided to abandon anthropology?

Anthropologists have traditionally been interested in the ‘art’ of the people they studied. The study of art in these cultures was closely, or even exclusively, linked to the so-called ‘material culture’. In their fieldwork, ethnographers looked at a range of objects, the technology applied in their making and at the underlying meaning in the broader cultural context.

However, anthropology has evolved since then. As Peoples and Bailey describe in their textbook ‘An introduction to Cultural Anthropology’ anthropology today is interested in the study of art as part of a culture’s expression of aesthetic values and ideals. Anthropology recognizes the many forms of artistic expression: clothing, basketry, architecture, music, dance and theatre. Through art, the artist communicates encoded ‘meanings and messages in symbolic forms’. Art for an anthropologist is part of the culture they study and can only be understood within the cultural framework. Or as Peoples and Bailey put it: ‘Anthropologists are not interested in art simply for art’s sake. […] art is embedded in a cultural context.'

At this point, I began to wonder.
In creating art, is the artist merely reproducing their ‘culture’?

As an artist, Hiller has her own stance on the subject. Distancing herself from anthropology, Hiller suggests that artists not only perpetuate but also modify and change their culture by stressing hidden, suppressed or unrecognized aspects. Therefore, artists act as experts of their culture.

So should anthropologist turn to these experts in order to collect their field data?

For Hiller, the problem of anthropology’s view on art lies deeper than that. She claims that ‘art exists primarily in its relationship to the viewer who must participate in it, intimately experience it’. There is simply no room for objectivity. If art must be felt and experienced on a very intimate and personal level, then there are only limited possibilities for an anthropologist to objectively observe art. Consequently, anthropological participant/observer split activities become a vain endeavor.

One question remains.

Can anthropologists pick up on Hillers thoughts without giving up anthropology in its entirety?