Anthropology News • May 2006

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I N F O C U S

JUSTIN ARMSTRONG

MCMASTER

When asked where Ido my fieldwork, Ioften find it diffi-cult to explain

what I do and where I do it. This isnot to say that my methodologies orchoice of subject matter are beyondthe intellectual scope of non-anthro-pologists, but rather that I, myself,am often uncertain of the exact lim-its and locations of my chosen field-site: the streets and walls of NewYork City and London and the pub-lic art that is found there. It is with-in these city spaces that I seek outand study things that are at oncecompletely devoid of humanness,and yet, solely dependant onhuman thought and action.

Studying Street ArtI study street art (a “post-graffiti”form of illegal public art). I reflect

on the ways that it interacts withpeople and the ways that peopleinteract with it. I look at the postersand stickers, the spray-painted sten-cils and intricate leavings of thesehidden artists. I am less interested inwho produced these things, theseaesthetic signatures of city-life; I ammore concerned with the practice oftheir inscription and the result oftheir existence. The people whoproduce this art are secondary to myresearch since it is their very absencewhich gives the works power.

I am attempting an ethnographynot of people or community per se,but one of the spaces between people.These spaces are not simply the areathat exists between city dwellers asthey pass one another on the street;these are also (and more important-ly) the spaces between urban livingand the built environment. I lookat the ways in which seeing be-comes a form of commerce, andhow aesthetic experience is mediat-

ed through urban planning and so-called “quality of life” legislation,such as anti-graffiti laws in NewYork City. My work takes place aspeople disperse and street artremains, whether that is the peel-ing layers of paper fastened to adoor in Brooklyn, or noticing apasserby overlook imagery that isnot trying to sell something. It is anapproach modeled after KathleenStewart’s A Place by the Side of theRoad (1996), where she describes aculture that exists on the periphery,a culture that silently continues toflow alongside the mainstream.

This is how I believe street artfunctions: as a quiet layer of visualculture that often goes unnoticed inthe face of the ocular over-stimula-tion that has become symptomaticof the landscapes of our moderncities. In making the peripheral andoverlooked noticeable, I hope toevoke a sense of place within thespace between people’s footsteps.This “location” is not limited to New

York or London, but occurs any-where there are ideas resting on theedge of our self-imposed limits ofvision. We need to allow ourselvesthe freedom to see beyond the bill-boards and street signs of the city.

Ethnography in the Spaces Between Footsteps

Communities of SpacesWherever there is art on the street,whenever it may occur and whoev-er creates it, ideas of a fieldwork inthe absence of people apply, but inthe presence of the spaces they occu-py and leave. These spaces mayremain for only a few seconds, orthey can last forever. These spacesand the way we, as anthropologists,frame them, constitute a communi-ty that is both infinite and micro-scopic. This community of spacestraverses geographic and politicalboundaries and is not bound to itsinitial creator. Street art, like muchof visual culture, is able to travel

C O M M E N T A R Y

Large-scale wheat-pasted poster by NYC street artist WK Interact, New YorkCity. Photo courtesy of Justin Armstrong

Street art installation by Monster Project, New York City. Photo courtesy of JustinArmstrong

May 2006 • Anthropology News

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I N F O C U S

through the Internet, books, maga-zines, artist exchanges and interna-tional air travel via artists’ and theirsupporters’ photographic recordsand other representations andcopies. Street art and the communi-ty it creates are everywhere andnowhere. Street art and its produc-ers can be found in almost any cityin the world, yet it holds no singu-lar place as its primary location or“home.”

In light of the newly recognizedanthropological understanding oftranslocality and multi-sited ethno-graphy, we must consider how andwhy we are critiquing and reques-tioning our methodologies and the-oretical standpoints. We are oftentoo quick to pigeonhole ideasbefore they have ever been releasedby attempting to place our ownpre-conceived understandings andtheories on them. An example ofthis might be the over-eageranthropologist who sets out with aspecific set of ideas as to what theywill find in the “field” before theyhave even begun to undertake theiractual research.

Perhaps we might benefit from amore relaxed approach to the prac-tice of these new ethnographictruths and allow the methodologyto emerge from experience ratherthan pre-meditated analysis; if so,anything can become fodder forethnographic reflection. Although,it is important too to avoid the auto-matic response of immediate analy-sis of ethnographic experience; whynot propose reflections rather thanrevisions? Instead of continuallyreworking our “data” to fit a pro-posed project, why not allow the“data” to wash over us as ethnogra-phers and let the understandingsemerge from this process of reflec-tion. In this way I believe that we, asethnographers, will be subject to amuch more in-depth insight intothe nature of those cultures andspaces we choose to study.

Ethnography is not only aboutpeople, but also the boundaries thatare erected between us; theseemerging, changing spaces becomethe locations that identify us. �AN

Justin Armstrong is currently finishing amaster’s thesis on the global street art sceneat McMaster University in Hamilton,Ontario, Canada. Justin has collected hun-dreds of photos of street art from aroundthe world and interviewed many of its prac-titioners for the writing of this thesis. Heworks in the areas of audio-ethnographyand Japanese film studies.

Globality Continued from page 9

Tsing might call “world-makingforces” at the level of the intimate.

As a possible starting point, wehave turned to contemporary theo-retical physic’s “anthropic principle,”propounded by such researchers asStephen Hawking. Drawing on theidea that electrons can exist in eitherof two states at the same time, thatthey can, in other words, occupy twopositions or states simultaneously,the “anthropic principle” posits theexistence of parallel universes exist-ing at the same time, and the possi-bility that people themselves canoccupy such multiple worlds simul-taneously. We suggest this idea mightbe fruitfully mined as metaphor fortheorizing instances of anthropolog-ical subjects and objects existingsimultaneously in multiple frames ofmeaning, in differing magnitudes ofpractice, and multiple domains ofmateriality, thus confounding stan-dard anthropological conceptualiza-tions of space and time that keep ustied to the ground. It providesanthropologists with a conceptual

framework for rethinking the localand the global as simultaneous,understanding them as indeed insep-arable, and therefore not conceptual-izable in terms that depend on sin-gular locations.

In addition, the anthropic princi-ple asserts “that the laws, constantsand basic structure of the universeare not completely arbitrary. Insteadthey are constrained by the require-ment that they must allow for theexistence of intelligent observers.”The central place given to observa-tion in representations of the uni-verse in contemporary “anthropictheory” extends insights of early-20th-century quantum theory,which up-ended the then-currentconception of the universe. Bohr,Heisenberg and others revealedinstead a probablistic universe dom-inated by chance and complexity,one comprehensible only throughoverlapping, and sometimes evencontradictory descriptions, since thevery act of observation could beshown to constitute and change theobject of analysis, ideas that clearlyfound their counterpart in the con-temporaneous cinematic work ofEisenstein and later worked theirway into anthropology.

Thus anthropic theory holdspromise for our efforts to think

liberal values privileged above fam-ily, ethnic group or nation. Thenotion of a borderless cosmopoli-tan community, for Bhabha, seemsinadequate in relation to the mil-lions of refugees and migrants flee-ing violence and poverty.

In what sense does cosmopoli-tanism need to be grounded in anopen, experimental, inclusive, nor-mative consciousness of the world,which calls for “perpetual” peaceand the end of cultural intoleranceand hostility? Such a consciousnesswould need to include elements ofself-doubt and reflexivity, an aware-ness of the existence and equalvalidity of other cultural practicesand values.

Is travel without such an inclusiveconsciousness cosmopolitan? Doestravel inevitably lead to such open-

Cosmopolitanism Continued from page 7

ness and reflexivity? Despite theirglobal commercial acumen, Senegal-ese Mouride traders are said by Dioufto engage in rites of social exclusive-ness, to maintain a homogenizedculture that excludes foreign values.

Similarly, members of the jet-set-ting wealthy Chinese living andtrading overseas studied by AiwaOng, with their multiple passportsand multiple homes in differentcountries, appear to lack the kind ofcultural openness and sensitivitynormally associated with cos-mopolitanism.

Clearly cultural groups adjust dif-ferently when traveling, moving andsettling abroad, nor are all their mem-bers equally tolerant and open-mind-ed. Diasporas are by definition com-plex. Sometimes it is factory workers,rather than wealthy merchants, whodisplay more openness in their newplace of living, while intellectualsmay be alienated from working classcompatriots despite their celebrationof multiculturalism, as JonathanFriedman has pointed out.

Much depends on con-text, and some environ-ments are more cosmo-politan than others. Con-stantinople, Alexandria, Cairo andThessalonika were great cosmopoli-tan cities. If we take vernacular cos-mopolitanism to refer to a multi-centered world, beyond the West, inthe sense proposed by Arjun Ap-padurai, it is perhaps among theelites of such cosmopolitan citiesthat distinctive vernacular cos-mopolitanisms are created. �AN

Pnina Werbner is a professor of socialanthropology at Keele University and con-vener of the 2006 Association of SocialAnthropologists diamond jubilee confer-ence on “Cosmopolitanism andAnthropology.” She has published exten-sively on migration, diaspora and Suficults, and is currently researching a manu-al workers’ trade union in Botswana. Thispaper is an abbreviated revised version of“Vernacular Cosmopolitanism,” appearingin a special March 2006 encyclopaediaissue of Theory, Culture and Society onProblematizing Global Knowledge.

about an ethnographic practice thatcan attend to the co-presence of theglobal and the local and enable us tothink about doing ethnography(and being ethnographers) within aframework that admits the possibili-ty of multiple temporalities of thepresent, our own present included.Like the uncertainty principle whichdepends on an accumulation ofexperiments/observations to ap-proach what can never be seen froma singular fixed position, theseimages alert us to the need for anethnographic practice unencum-bered by a single metaphorical geo-graphic position, one which notonly recognizes that all truths are sit-uated and partial, but also that theanthropological project itself canonly be constituted by overlappingand multiple images, with varying,and perhaps infinite “depths offield,” that are at once materiallydependent and interdependent. �AN

Fran Mascia-Lees is professor and chairof the department of anthropology atRutgers University, and editor-and-chief of the American Anthropologist. JeffHimpele is assistant professor in thedepartment of anthropology at NYU, and visual anthropology editor of theAmerican Anthropologist.