This book carries a title that suggests there is a great deal for architecture to learn from anthropology on a disciplinary level. This is undoubtedly the case, as in any cross-disciplinary transfer. This transfer of knowledge is important in terms of both content and methodology. The same can be said in the other direction: anthropology should not emerge unchanged from its encounter with architecture. As outlined in the introduction, the overlapping spheres of interest between architecture and anthropology are one basis for collaboration, but a more fundamental question remains over precisely how knowledge is produced.
One of the ways in which architecture produces knowledge is through drawing,1 and this is a practice of increasing interest within anthropological circles. Drawing opens up a range of options regarding the ways in which we think. The pursuit of drawing is often spoken of in terms of creative, craft-
based practice, but this is not the whole truth. Indeed, drawing has a similar status in architectural discourse to the discussion of writing in anthropology:
recent titles include The Death of Drawing (Scheer, 2014) and Why Architects Still Draw (Belardi, 2014), both illuminating a crisis in the concept of drawing – particularly with the advent of ubiquitous digital practices such as Computer Aided Design (CAD), Building Information Modelling (BIM) and three-dimensional (3D) model-making and printing. The conclusions of such apocalyptic proclamations are often to restore drawing to its position, now encompassing a wider range of practices as constituting a form ‘drawing’.
The element pulling these different ideas of drawing together is spoken of loosely as a common logic of drawing. How can it be that practices as different as freehand sketching, measured perspectives, sets of orthographic projection drawings, parallel projections and CAD drawings rendered models composited through several pieces of software, and a range of individualistic diagramming and notational practices are all considered to be drawings? There is a professional suspicion that ‘beautiful’ drawings are hiding something, with arguments similar to those raised below by the influential anthropology text
‘Writing Culture’ edited by James Clifford and George Marcus.
Recognizing the utility of drawing and other inscriptive practices as knowledge-producing activities, there is increasing interest in graphic or drawn anthropology and social science, with Michael Taussig’s I Swear I Saw This (2011), Andrew Causey’s Drawn to See: Drawing as an Ethnographic Method (2017), and books such as Anja Schwanhäusser’s collection Sensing the City (2016) and Ingold’s Redrawing Anthropology (2016). Nick Sousanis’s Unflattening (2015) is a particularly notable instance, as the work is presented in its entirety as a graphic novel, having been submitted as a PhD thesis on this basis. Annual field schools are held on the use of graphic novel and sketching techniques in ethnography, and the work of research groups such as Knowing from the Inside2 has pioneered the validation of graphic works as anthropology. Marc Higgin gives an account of what we do when we draw from an anthropological perspective (2016), concluding that we make things present by drawing them. Recent work has moved towards the consideration of imagination and its role in anthropological discourse. Elliot and Culhaine’s edited volume A Different Kind of Ethnography explores a number of options, situating alternative practices as other forms of ethnographic engagement rather than as something different. A model of three branches of ethnography is put forward, which is more inclusive (2017:9). Here, the familiar model of participant-observation is joined by interview and the analysis of documentary evidence, archival research and scholarly study. This allows extension to the postcolonial ‘insider’ ethnography as a move away from the presumption of outsiders travelling to do their fieldwork, reaching a conclusion of sorts with the ethnographer-performer which investigates the creative practice wholly from the inside of that practice.
One of the aims of this book is to develop the notion of an architectural anthropology. This has been suggested in the context of design anthropology, an established field of enquiry where anthropologists and industrial or product designers work with end users in order to enhance the design process. Whilst this approach is of great interest and is a potential model for the engagement of designer with the user, my intention is to develop Architectural or indeed Graphic Anthropology in a slightly different direction.
Forms of drawing, graphic representation or inscriptive practices are important to the development of the practice of an architectural anthropology.
Graphic Anthropology then is to Architectural Anthropology what Ethnography is to conventional Social Anthropology. The intention is to develop this approach with both architects and anthropologists, to encourage architects to consider the social life of their spaces in more detail and to open the anthropologists to the alternative logics available to drawings as opposed to writing. The drawing is capable of carrying every bit as much content as a written essay.
Indeed, a drawing (broadly speaking) offers a wide range of communicative opportunities not open to the text.
An influential work in anthropology provides a useful analogy for drawing, Writing Culture was compiled in 1986 by James Clifford and George Marcus, and concerns the project of anthropology to write culture. The focus on such a fundamental practice exposes some of the complexities of the discipline as a whole. Given anthropology is conventionally disseminated as a thesis, monograph or article (notwithstanding the more recent developments in the documentary films made in visual anthropology), what is the nature of this practice? There is a danger that such a query can result in some disciplinary navel gazing, and the prospect of returning to this debate often fills anthropologists with a degree of dread. My intention here is to discuss the possibility of drawing culture in the same manner as Clifford & Marcus argue it is written.
The aim of the collection is not simply to raise the question of ethnographic writing, but to move the discipline in the direction of more engaging texts, and away from the ‘science’ ambitions of the social sciences. There are a number of drivers behind this, drawn from the nature of the discipline at the time. The aims of a dispassionate account would all too often erase the elements of greatest interest, and the authors argued that there was no way of truly erasing the anthropologist from their account. The authority claimed by such accounts was unwarranted and unsupportable, making contested circumstances appear to be fully resolved. The collection is part of a general trend within anthropology towards the co-production of knowledge with respondents in the field rather than writing accounts of their lives; anthropology was becoming committed to writing with the lives of others. The researcher was always present and implicated, such that a neutralized and dispassionate language became increasingly disingenuous.
Marcus and Clifford and their authors found that there were, when care was taken over the ethics of the account, benefits to writing in a biographical mode, even drifting towards the poetic. The increasingly phenomenological positions of anthropology necessitated a greater focus on sensory perception and, as we shall see later in this chapter and in Chapter 8 on food cultures, the senses are a part of cognition and knowledge, not merely a precursor to it. The contextualization of ethnographic accounts and anthropological theory had to include the researcher’s presence, particularly where their presence might have altered or challenged social dynamics substantially as in the case of female researchers in male-dominated circumstances.
The manner in which we represent things is important, and Writing Culture consolidated a broader movement towards considering the means of anthropological production more carefully and opening the possibilities for creative practices such as drawing to be used to express the experience of ethnographic fieldwork as contingent and personal. A suspicion of the beautiful is rather unexpected in architecture, understood to be a creative and artistic discipline, particularly from the outside, but this discomfort has its roots in the use of spectacle to disguise shortcomings in the functionality of the design.