Practicing Art and Anthropology by Anna Laine

Author:Anna Laine [Laine, Anna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, General, Art
ISBN: 9781000181074
Google: _0MHEAAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 37534581
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-06-14T00:00:00+00:00

Transition between research fields

The diaspora emerged as an expansion of my work in relation to events in South Asia as well as in London. Firstly, the hazardous situation of the Tamils in Sri Lanka provoked an awareness of the magnitude of their flight following the brutal Sinhalese oppression. This came to my knowledge during a visit in Chennai in February 2009, three months before the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) were defeated by the Sri Lankan military after 30 years of civil war. At the time, supporters on the Tamil mainland instigated riots and self-demolitions. My assistant was off work due to a three- week closure of the universities, a TV-series on Tamil history was broadcast non- stop, and I read about the situation in the Indian national magazine Frontline (2009). A few months after the death of the LTTE leader Prabhakaran, I read a glorifying biography of his capacities (Kuppusamy 2009). Secondly, my anthropological interest turned to transformational processes caused by flight and migration. This shift was related to experiences in London where the presence of diaspora groups forms a large part of everyday life, but also to the necessity to counter misunderstandings by increased knowledge on intercultural dialogues. The kolam practice appeared as a relevant point of entry into a study of the Tamil diaspora. The initial idea was to expand the doctoral thesis for publication with this material, and involve diaspora members in an exhibition about their situation based on collaborative artistic work.

My hitherto explorations with art practice and continued publications on the overlap between art and anthropology motivated more explicit and thorough engagements. The attempts with artistic workshops described in the previous chapter provided increased knowledge of the everyday lives of the participants, as well as of the role of images and objects in the constitution of social relationships and cultural values. In addition, the kolam exhibitions assessed in Chapter 3 and 5 demonstrated a synaesthetic possibility to evoke understanding and they accomplished a dissemination of my work beyond academia. During a research project at the Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm which investigated experimental methods in studies of their collections, I incorporated drawing in my exploration of Tamil palm leaf books on sorcery held in the archive. The books contained designs intended to aid the sorcerer and the method of drawing them resonated with my embodied skills in the benevolent kolam practice which improved my understanding of the malevolent nature and effect of sorcery designs (Laine 2013). These positive results spurred me to develop a research project in which my explorations of artistic practices as methods and presentations of research could advance. The ad hoc solutions presented in Chapter 2 were no longer an option. However, the iconophobic attitude towards aesthetic and affective responses to images as a threat to scientific rigour and the constitution of valid anthropological knowledge became an obstacle in this aim. I was advised by well- meaning colleagues to make a choice between being an anthropologist or artist, and if choosing the former, abide by the rules of using visual materials as evidence and illustrations.

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