Curating Ambivalence: An Interview with Erica Lehrer, Concordia University

Abstract

Jane Lief Abell (JLA): What made you choose anthropology? Did it have anything to do with your interest in photography? Erica Lehrer (EL): I chose anthropology because I wanted to be able to tell good stories that came from sustained attention to small things. I hoped—and still hope— that seeing how individuals (and also objects) are constrained and enabled by the larger social and cultural forces that they are caught up in can create both critical consciousness and empathetic understanding. Photography was an early tool that helped justify my desire to observe and analyze the world around me. I grew up with parents who developed and printed their own photos, so looking closely at the social and material world was part of my upbringing, which I later pursued on my own. My mom liked to take surreptitious photos of couples kissing; my dad preferred seaweed and rusty nails. My earliest attempts to document, make sense of, and communicate about what would later become my dissertation fieldwork (and then my book Jewish Poland Revisited: Heritage Tourism in Unquiet Places [2013]) was through photography—photo essays, and later exhibits, which included field notes and then some material artifacts I had collected during fieldwork. The impetus for making exhibitions grew out of a few parallel realizations. First, I began to see that the topic of my research, namely Jewish heritage brokering in Poland, was a source of great dispute among the people whose cultural imaginaries it implicated. I felt like I needed to be in conversation with these broader audiences—foreign Jews and local Poles (including some Jews)—alongside the ostensibly primary goal of writing for other anthropologists. I was also struggling to capture and transmit what for me was the peculiarity of the forms that “Jewish culture” was taking. These included wooden figurines of Jews and “kosher” vodka in bottles with caricatured Jews on the labels and also the particular aesthetic of the urban landscape—atavistic, candlelit cafes with “Jewish” food