Fieldwork sketches, drawings, diagrams, and illustrations have been used by anthropologists since the beginning of the discipline. From Franz Boas, to Levi-Strauss, Raymond Firth and more recently Michael Taussig and Tim Ingold among others, ethnographers have variably used or discussed them as helpful aids to the construction of anthropological knowledge.

Capitalising on examples from the rich visual material stored in the RAI collections, the present workshop intends to bring together researchers and scholars to discuss the nature, roles, and modes of communication embodied in fieldwork sketches with the aim of evaluating what kind of information can be elicited from a study of images made for ethnographic purposes.

Programme

10:00 – 10:15 Welcome (Tea and coffee available)

10:15 – 10.30 Opening of the workshop

10.30 – 10:55 Leonie Stevens (Monash University)
Underwhelmed, underwater and trampled by sheep: Representation of Encounters in the Australian sketches of William Westall, 1802-3

10:55 – 11:20 Karen Jacobs (Sainsbury Research Unit, University of East Anglia)
Drawing the anthropological body: von Hügel’s late nineteenth-century Fijian tattoo sketches

11:20 – 11:45 Anita Herle (Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge)
Lines of Enquiry: Torres Strait Islander Fieldwork Drawings

11:45 – 12:10 Sue Giles (Bristol Museums, Galleries & Archives)
Case study: Adela Breton’s Mexican artwork

12:10 – 12:35 Jacopo Baron (Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Sociale) and Overseas referent for the Vanuatu Cultural Centre)
Enchanting Sketches: A study of the Deacon Collection held at the RAI

12:35 – 1:00 Discussion

1:00 – 2:00 Lunch

2:00 – 2:25 Dimitrios Theodossopoulos (University of Kent)
From Ethnographic Drawing to Graphic Ethnography: a critical intervention

2:25 – 2:50 Mette Lind Kusk (Aarhus University)
The quiet power of fieldwork sketches

2:50 – 3:15 Stephanie Bunn (University of St Andrew)
Sketching and making people, places, things and ideas: coming closer through looking, drawing and making

3:15 – 3:45 Tea and coffee break

3:45 – 4:10 Skylar Hou (Columbia University)
Drawing Anonymity: Exploring Drawings in Activism-Involved Fieldwork

4.10 – 4:35 Kyra Sacks (artist-anthropologist)
Between the drawer and the drawn: Intimacy through drawing in research

4:35 – 5:00 Closing and discussion

Fieldwork Sketches: Blurring the Lines between Art and Anthropology