American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting

Description

Rhizomic Ethnographies: Doing Fieldwork With Creative Networked Communities of Digital Artists/Practitioners This paper presents findings from ethnographic fieldwork with creative networked communities of digital artists and practitioners. Using a multi-sited ethnography, the study looked at how creative communities form within transnational and transcultural contexts, within a globalized and distributed communications environment. This ethnographic study is about a “creative land”, a process of places and people and things. It is about creativity as a synergy of spaces, practices and artifacts, interlinked in such a manner that their singularity(-ies) form an assemblage. Spaces are lived by bodies (both human and non-human); practices are performed by bodies; artifacts are made by bodies. The connecting commonality here is a community of bodies – people and things that make this assemblage happen. Agency and becoming are immanent within assemblages of things and people. In other words, agency and becoming are dynamic qualities, innate whenever things and people come together. In this study, creativity is understood as an emergent property of relations, of communities. What kind of methodological framework could best accommodate these insights on creativity as an emergent property of assemblages? How should fieldwork be done in a way that accorded with the dynamic and constantly shifting patterns of interconnection between the communities under study? This paper unpacks the above queries and explores concepts of serendipity, happenstance and rhizomic lines of inquiry in ethnographic fieldwork.

Period	24 Nov 2013
Event type	Conference
Location	New Orleans, United States