Ethnography and Volumography: Drawings of Theory on the Blackboard

Abstract

The author presents drawings made on the blackboard in front of his students at the university. This article aims to show the heuristic value of drawing in view of a human-oriented anthropology, i.e. focused on a human being, as detached as possible from other humans, situations or contexts. The drawings aim to illustrate the differences between ethnography and what he calls volumography, which focuses on the human being as a VoB. Throughout the article, the author discusses the notions of separation, perspective, and relation. In asking who is really describing this or that person in the spectrum of sciences, the author proposes that this task falls to existential anthropology.