Ethnographic Experimentation and the Disappearing Field of Ethnography

Experimentation is becoming increasingly common in anthropology as a growing number of anthropologists have engaged in a range of experimental practices in the activities of analysis, theorisation and fieldwork. Although this experimental drive is neither generalisable nor representative, it points to a significant effort to reorient the empirical modes of anthropological inquiry. Ethnographic experimentation in fieldwork is especially relevant because, in contrast to the naturalistic tradition, it involves an interventionist practice dedicated to devising conditions for the ethnographic encounter. Displacing the centrality of observational activities, I argue that ethnographic experiments involve an epistemological transformation, since the locus of knowledge production is not the anthropologist’s unmediated experience in the field, but rather the experimental devices through which ethnography takes place. In this process, the field loses its relevance in the conceptualisation of ethnography, and the experimental arrangement – what I call field devices – becomes the organisational principle of the ethnographic encounter.