Abstract
This article proposes an artistic performance to reflect on the labour of fieldwork. The experimental method consists in installing myself at a café in Lisbon and Tbilisi for 35 hours beyond the reach of smartphones and laptops and then doing nothing. Across this exercise, time slows, opening a clearer window into ordinary life. The intervention raises questions about the way digital technologies transform the temporality and experience of ethnographic fieldwork. The essay sets up to make a methodological contribution to a growing literature on ‘inactivity’ and about experimental methods, reminding us that observation is a tiring physical experience and that slow time is correlated with anthropological quality. Doing nothing appears as a slow time being in front of others, which enables a break of consciousness, suspends politics of relevance, and leaves space for serendipity and embodied imagination.
Highlights
This article proposes an artistic performance to reflect on the labour of fieldwork
In my performance of fieldwork, I sat for seven hours a day for five days in a row at a cafein Lisbon and in Tbilisi without a laptop or phone
One of the paradoxes constructed by this article is that site notes are not being used as evidence about a supposed Portuguese or Georgian character: neither is there a conclusive or comparative argument done through participant observation, nor do the notes account for the impact of digital culture in everyday life
Summary
This article proposes an artistic performance to reflect on the labour of fieldwork. The experimental method consists in installing myself at a cafein Lisbon and Tbilisi for 35 hours beyond the reach of smartphones and laptops and doing nothing. This experiment helps to bring the impress of inactivity into anthropological studies (O’Neill, 2017); to interact with our surroundings at a different pace; and to understand the way the research process itself is cultural performance and an installation (Hartblay, 2018).
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