Refiguring Art and Anthropology, For Whom? A conversation with George E. Marcus and Fred R. Myers

Karin Zitzewitz: We wanted to begin our conversation by asking about what we call here “the will to collaborate,” both among anthropologists in projects like Traffic in Culture, and among anthropologists and art world professionals. Since Traffic in Culture, George has written about this in terms of para-ethnography, in which anthropologists collaborate with “experts with shared, discovered and negotiated critical sensibilities,” including “those who are deeply complicit with and implicated in powerful institutional processes” (2000: 3,5). We recognize that current strands in the anthropology of art tend to rest upon collaborative processes with artists and, to much less of an extent, with other art-world actors. That stands in contrast with the call for independent ethnographies that you all made in the pages of Traffic.