Auto-Drafts: Or Anthropology Blurring Culture, and Vice Versa

Abstract

What kind of account is an ethnographic account? How does ethnography provide for the intermingling of social and empirical relations? This article provides a brief overview of the history of experimental science in the seventeenth century, where the concept of ‘relation’ was first coined both as a sociological descriptor (in ‘social relations’ parlance) and an analytical descriptor (to account for empirical phenomena). This dual capacity of relations to both ‘see’ and let themselves ‘be seen’ has played a fundamental role in the history of ethnography. Today, however, we are witnessing the rise of a variety of spaces of experimentation, in particular in contexts of so-called ‘free culture’ and ‘open culture’ practices, where the descriptive and the analytic are deliberately held in suspension and are said to work as ‘drafts’. What type of account and relation is a draft? And what kind of ethnographic genre might it inaugurate?