In Japan, teaching a multitude of creative anthropology practices

One of the goals of Penn’s Center for Experimental Ethnography is to form connections with people engaged in similar research practices across the globe, says Director Deborah Thomas, R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology in the School of Arts & Sciences. These research practices, known as multimodal techniques, include performance, film, mapping, sound, and collaging. “There are a lot of people who are trying to establish this kind of research process as legitimate, and I think because we have this center at Penn, it helps give legitimacy to their groups,” says Thomas.

In January, she traveled with four other Penn-affiliated anthropologists to Japan, where they taught workshops on these practices to about a dozen doctoral and master’s students in anthropology and other fields at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto. They were hosted by professor Sayaka Ogawa and graduate student Pero Fukuda.

“There’s something really powerful about being able to leverage Penn’s resources to be able to provide this kind of experience,” says Alissa Jordan, associate director of CEE. She says the group was able to share skills with students who are engaged in multimodal practices but have no training in it or have not applied their practice to research inquiry. The other attendees were Leniqueca Welcome, who received her Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from Penn in 2021, and current anthropology doctoral students Pablo Aguilera Del Castillo and Jake Nussbaum.

Jordan called her workshop Daydream Studio and began by asking students to visualize recurring dreams. She then had each student capture video on their phone that related to the content of their dreams and narrate their dream in an interview with a partner. The partner remixed the video and audio into a film lasting a few minutes.

“I wanted students to gain experience as ethnographers to really attending to the way their attention can get attached to certain moments in research and to use that as a sort of insight,” Jordan says. “It was really exciting to see what the students found very attractive or enticing in the dreams of other people, and the way that they went with that in order to build out their ethnography.” She says it also had the benefit of expanding notions of what ethnographic research can be, beyond traditional frameworks involving ritual or colonial objects.

Thomas did a workshop on performance, starting with a lecture on thinking about what the body knows and how it transmits knowledge. She had each student bring in a newspaper article that was important to them, share its importance in a small group, summarize their feelings in two or three words, and express what those words meant to them through movement. That resulted in performances incorporating the words and movements.

“It was really to think about how we bring affect and emotion into the research process, how we think through the things that are politically important to us in embodied ways, and how we might then translate that to some kind of performance, as a sort of a research output,” Thomas says.

Field recordings in Kyoto

Nussbaum offered a workshop on sound, starting with a lecture on field recordings—gathering audio outside a studio—and how anthropologists have used such recordings in their work. He and the students talked about the origins of the practice in salvage anthropology, when anthropologists recorded the languages and sounds of communities they thought were going extinct due to settler colonialism, genocide, or enslavement, and about what sound can communicate in an ethnography that text cannot.

Nussbaum then had the students practice using field recorders before sending them on an assignment in teams: going to a location of their choice in Kyoto, recording sound, and combining a few recordings into an audio ethnography of no more than four minutes. A few groups went to temples, while one went to a shopping center and another to a cemetery.

“They were all really, really interesting pieces that did not fall into the tropes of the anthropology of ritual practice, but they were really getting into the intimacies of these different spaces,” Nussbaum says, “and using the microphone to capture gesture and touch, even.”

Communicating through collaging

Welcome, now an assistant professor of anthropology and international affairs at George Washington University, gave a workshop on collaging. She says the medium has become central to her research on criminalization and policing in Trinidad, because it allows her to process what she has seen and present complex stories of death and life to an audience.

Her lecture involved working with students to unpack the history of anthropologists using photography to make subjects legible for Western audiences, and to think about how to share their field experiences with audiences “without completely exposing the people they are working with to the colonial gaze in the way traditional image-making can.”

In one exercise, students made a collage with images Welcome provided from magazines she got at the Japanese embassy when getting her visa. For the second exercise, she had students work on collaging with images that are relevant to their own research.

“What a lot of them communicated is that they found the first (exercise) in some ways therapeutic, because they didn’t have necessarily a personal connection to the images,” Welcome says, whereas the second workshop brought anxieties about what it means to manipulate images from one’s own ethnographic work.

Outside-the-box mapping

Aguilera Del Castillo, who studies the relationships of people of Yucatán with the local aquifer system, organized a workshop on collective mapping that went beyond the dominant forms of representing and making sense of place, such as using Google Maps or GIS. He showed examples of pre-modern mapping practices from Latin America, northern Africa, and East Asia, and shared the work of contemporary scholars using various forms of mapping as part of their research. These examples emphasized the critical role of affect and emotion in engaging with and making sense of any place.

In one exercise, Aguilera Del Castillo gave students large-scale maps of Kyoto and had them identify their habits, movements, and memories throughout the city, leading students to realize they go to the same park or walk the same route along the river. In another, he asked students to choose photos from their phone over the past year and think about creating a more abstract representation of their different experiences of 2023.

“It was really exciting as a grad student to see all this work together, because I know my own practice, and I know a little bit about Jake’s, and a little bit about Leniqueca’s, but I never really had the chance to see all this together,” Aguilera Del Castillo says. It felt “like a really radical space, in terms of scholarship, and it was really inspiring to see all that put together in only a week.”