Ethnographic Experimentation: Field Infrastructures and Relearnings in Anthropology

Abstract

What form would an ethnographic experimentation exercise take in fieldwork? Ethnographies studying new media, science and global organizations in recent decades offer the chance, or, indeed, present the need, to reconsider norms and forms in ethnographic fieldwork. Based on our ethnographic experience, this article discusses what we define as experimental forms of fieldwork. We make our case by narrating an urban teaching project conducted in close partnership with two architectural groups: an urban learning infrastructure, referenced by vernacular languages in the field, and ethnographic conceptualisations, a recursive technique in which ethnographic findings cause us to revisit our own practice. We argue that this project gives us chance to relearn and reimagine our ethnographic experience, not through the traditional aesthetic of the ethnographic encounter, but through an infrastructural installation that conditions fieldwork for what we describe as an experimental exercise. Rather than breaking away from method, our approach to the experimental seeks to renew the descriptive vocabulary and conceptual language of field accounts in our ethnographies.