nonchalANTH: Casual Anthropology Chats

In this limited series, VAR design assistant Kat Iresine Timm chats with VAR authors about how their visual creative practices intersect with their ethnographic work.

“Take lots of photographs, or films, or sound recordings. Just gather, especially together with the people you're working with, and treat it very much as an emergent and creative experimentation.

Let the unexpected happen.”

“You have to learn to observe in a particular way if you want to do fieldwork.

You would benefit from learning what the images do—not so much what they are, but what they do—in the field of study.”

“I think the idea of parachuting yourself with tried and tested methods that you apply on whichever situation you want to investigate at any given time is a bit flawed because it doesn't favor an interaction during fieldwork…

There's a broader interaction with the fieldwork situation and with the aspects you want to draw out of that situation.”

“Anthropology is a way of thinking, and it's a way of producing knowledge. There are all sorts of processes that we use to do that thinking and produce that knowledge…

We shouldn't limit our ideas of what those processes can look like.“