Myself and some spirits made a thing, but were we researching?

For two years I, an anthropologist, worked as a woodworker with university colleagues, community groups, artists and members of the public on an artistic project called ‘Recycling a Hospital’. The project culminated in the installation of a sculpture called the 'Spirit Case' in the new Edinburgh Futures Institute building, which from 1880 to 2002 housed the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh. The Spirit Case gathers together pine floor joists from the 1870s with elm wood harvested during the recent redevelopment, and brings them into a relationship with roof slates, sandstone and poetry to provide a home in this new research institute for the 'spirit of publicness' which animated the building during its life as an NHS hospital.

In the project there were many immaterial collaborators, which included the 'spirit of publicness', the concept of ‘community spirit’, what George Nakashima identifies as the souls of trees, and "the invisible and ineffable resonances ... the echoes, affinities, imaginations, and frequencies of memory and history ... elicited as feelings by ruined buildings and the objects that occupy them" (Benedicto 2013: 29). Spirits were fundamental collaborators in this artistic endeavour, through which humans, spirits and an artwork animated each other and reciprocally brought each other into existence (Ingold 2006).
We made art, and this definitely involved research of various kinds, but was this academic research? Or even research that might be interesting to the Academy? In this paper I will engage with these questions with insights from anthropology (eg George Marcus and Tim Ingold), and the wisdom of woodworkers such as George Nakashima, James Krenov, and Jennie Alexander. I will also, more importantly, attempt to collaborate with the spirits again, and consider whether we care whether it was research and, if we do, under what terms we might accept such a designation.