| Sumario: | This dialogue between GeorgeMarcus and Tarek Elhaik begins by re-visiting the shifts in research practice and paradigms initiated more than twenty years ago by the Writing Culture discussions and proceeds to evaluate the after-life of those debates in contemporary anthropological thought and practice. Conceptual affinities are exchanged, probed and refined between a key figure of theWriting Culture moment and an anthropologist trained in the aftermath of those discussions. The conversation brings a set of key strategic concepts from the cosmopolitan modernist repertoire dear to both anthropologists (montage, design, installation) to bear upon the emblematic figure of fieldwork. It foldsMarcus’ call in the early 90s for an ethnographics as an antidote to the hopeless realism of ethnographic films and texts and recent performative “para-sites” at his Center for Ethnography at UC Irvine with Elhaik’s deployment of curatorial practice as a procedure, method and mode of theoretical production that opens the possibility for thinking and composing an ‘installation book’. The conversation proposes these emerging figures and new experiments with form as alternate modes of mediation of ethnography in process and, perhaps, as surrogates to fieldwork itself.
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