Rethinking performativity: ethnographic conceptualism

Abstract

ABSTRACT Ethnographic conceptualism takes its cue from conceptual art and uses artistic interventions as an anthropological research tool. The term ‘ethnographic conceptualism’ was coined to sum up the method of the exhibition project Gifts to Soviet Leaders (Kremlin Museum, Moscow 2006) as simultaneously a reflection on the vast and complex economy of public gifts to heads of Soviet state, a distinctly post-Soviet political and cultural artefact, and as a tool for ethnography of post-socialism. This article explores ethnographic conceptualism’s contribution to performativity theory. I look at how it makes visible the tension between what such projects perform and describe. In doing so, I use ethnographic conceptualism as a vantage point to revisit the foundational distinction of performativity theory between the constative and performative statements (Austin). Drawing in this artistic and research method, I redefine the performative, not as a domain or a type of utterance that is distinct from the constative, but as an act of drawing this distinction.