Ethnography and Artistic Experiments: Emerging Research Areas in Anthropology

To what extent is it possible, in the humanities, to frame research in terms of pre-textual and non-textual ways of reading? Following the textual turn, which is mostly associated with semiotics as well as descriptive and interpretive orientations, ethnography is. returning to more source-based and immediate endeavours. This is, however, a return to very demanding and uncertain methods, which are only now being examined, unearthed and tested. They emerged against the backdrop of the ontological turn in contemporary anthropology and the practical and action-based turn in the social sciences. In the research team that I direct, we are developing a definition of a creative ethnography that has the potential to create openings; although linked to the anthropology of art, it is also able to propose new languages and ways of grasping cultural facts. Thus I aim to outline a possible path for anthropology, where its unique'developmental cycle'parallels the ontological turn and the action-based turn. A particularly important role in this development falls to the artistic experiment as a way of creating a new field of research and of reaching towards unforeseeable research situations.