STATES OF CURATION

This study builds on a participant-observation of curatorial platforms and experimental media arts in Mexico City. It animates a trans-media assemblage that grew out of a convergence of three interconnected tableaux whose motions form a triptych: 1. the productive role played by the discipline of anthropology in shaping the contours of Mexican modernity and its avantgarde media arts and visual culture; 2. the lessons learned from the tradition of experimental ethnography and the important “Writing Culture” debates in academic anthropology in the United States during the 1980s; and 3. the so-called “anthropological turn” in visual studies and contemporary art from the 1990s on. Writing Culture, in particular, had opened promising conceptual and formal directions informed by radical critiques of representation, ranging from the interrogation of the ethnographer's voice of authority characteristic of classic ethnographic cinema to shedding doubts on the very counternarratives and strategies of self-representation and collaborative tactics deployed in both indigenous media and auto-ethnographic documentaries. Writing Culture had also drawn much conceptual energy from film and media studies, had radicalized the subfields of visual anthropology and the anthropology of art (slowly blurring them in the process and shifting attention away from the so-called radical alterity of non-Western art and cultural forms), and inaugurated a shift towards a search for alternative forms of composition beyond the monograph and the classic ethnographic film. Today, its experimental ethos, as well as its fears and hesitations, live on in ways that have not yet been properly evaluated.

Working creatively through the impasses of cross-cultural anthropology and media arts, these debates managed to fray detours and shortcuts for those of us who entered these conversations through the privileged hindsight afforded by the unfolding of more than twenty years, by the usual conceptual delays across disciplines, and by the errancies of previous anthropologists in multiple modernities. Some of the questions raised during the Writing Culture discussions have been fully addressed and worked through; others are still open to reformulation, while some concerns have simply been discarded and laid to rest. Said differently, the afterlife of Writing Culture ought to be approached as an expansion of roads taken and not taken after the 1980s, and as the art of posing good questions while strategically and creatively designing fieldwork mise-en-scènes.