Anthropology and the Arts Sit at the Same Table: Performing Fieldwork in Lisbon and Tbilisi

Abstract

This article aims at rethinking experimental forms of ethnography by sitting in semi-public spaces of Lisbon and Tbilisi for 35 hours without any laptop or mobile phone. The research accounts of processes of social self-regulation and meaning-making, capturing scenes of mundane life through the subjective lens of the observer and his fieldnotes, and then framing them with anthropological ideas in an exercise of montage and play of mirrors. The article contributes to debates about the relevance of slowness and banal moments of life; also it shows how the politics of methodology and epistemology are a matter of temporality too, since methods unfold in time and grow old. Through the repeated effort of doing nothing, the author reflects on the changing relation between the sensible and the knowable in the contemporary social world, offering alternatives for doing ethnography and showing how the process of research is an experiential participation in itself.