Times of Collaboration: Performances of Urban Knowledge

Abstract

The article takes a specific experience of what I shall suggest is an example of «experimental collaboration» to discuss aspects of the production of anthropological knowledge in today’s cities. The ethnographic description of a project on Madrid’s infrastructures developed in one of the city’s cultural centers will allow me, not so much to define the abstract value and nature of the experiment in anthropology—a debate that would exceed the limited space of this text—as to use a somewhat different kind of anthropological project to give a new twist on a reflection that has always accompanied the discipline, despite its topical character in a given time and place, namely reflection on the legitimacy of anthropological knowledge and on the practical conditions of its production. The topos of this text is the city or, perhaps, more precisely, the contemporary Western metropolis, where, in this case, anthropology emerges as what is still called, though increasingly diffusely, anthropology «at home.»