The Anthropologist As Hero, 2019

with the participation of Linda Franke, Justine Melford-Colegate and Jessica Hyatt
​performance, live-feed video, 2 overhead projectors, collage printed on transparencies, headlights

In Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1961), Susan Sontag wrote a short text on Claude Levi-Strauss under the title of “The Anthropologist as Hero.” Indeed, the anthropologist is a “man [sic] who submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner alienation as an urban intellectual.” In contrast to other intellectual disciplines, anthropology embraces alienation, as technique de depaysement, and uses it to develop a critical distance between oneself and what is considered “home”, and “out there.” According to Levi-Strauss, it is not the duty of the modern anthropologist, like those of the early exploration era to subjugate what is termed “other” cultures to one’s dominant ideology. On the contrary, one subjugates oneself to the “exotic” in order to discover oneself. In other terms, what arises when one constructs one’s identity through difference, rather than assimilation to a hegemonic norm?  

Traditionally, anthropology is a study at the service of colonization and Western empiricism: it serves to divide, categorize, and valorize “home” over “abroad”, the civilized over the savage, the citizen over the immigrant. It produces a narrative that places Western civilization as the ultimate outcome of human destiny. What happens when the mirror is turned inwards and we exist as subjects in a foreign, fragmented world that aligns with our inner selves more so than a single origin? Can the experience of unfamiliarity break down boundaries between “here” and “there”, “self” and “other”? Can those limits also apply to temporality, gender and sexuality? I am interested in the process of construction of identity that is fragmented, absorbent of cultures that we traverse, and how these narratives can counter the centuries-old grand nationalist narrative of a single origin.

As the outcome of the residency at PAM, the performance space is turned into a camera obscura, bringing the outside, inside. This inversion of what is culturally observed and what is presented, is furthered by the presence of the performers/anthropologists. No longer disembodied voices, expounding theories on the “other”, the performers are invited to stage their own narration through projections and a mix of live reading and pre-recorded sounds. Their bodies are silhouettes in the dark, and identities blur in the collective presentation of being.