demonstrations of fresh ingredients and cooking to the infrastructure of dormitory towns and long hours of work.
Our food is more than a reflection of cultural codes and attitudes, but is an important element of that culture in itself. Understanding more about the underlying politics, economies and social class of what Mary Douglas calls food events allows us to better understand this important element of everyday life and how it is framed architecturally. Japanese cuisine provides a set of examples ranging from elaborate multi-course kaiseki meals to informal street dining at festivals. Each example shows a clear multisensory relationship between architectural form and the sociality of how we eat.
The conclusion in Chapter 9 suggests how we might begin to assemble anthropological architectures: plural in nature, these assemblages might find different approaches in each context.
The book is arranged around various building types: studio, home, museum, market, sacred space, theatre, restaurant and festival. The intention is not to tie specific anthropological theories to each example: Ingold’s dwelling perspective can be just as useful in understanding a theatre, Douglas’s notion of purity and cleanliness has clear application to religious spaces, Pink’s sensory ethnographies can apply as easily to museums, and agency theories such as Gell’s apply very well to marketplaces and performance spaces.
The aim is also not to provide an exhaustive list of anthropological theories.
Kinship and ritual are not discussed explicitly, for example, but might well find relevance in a number of chapters.
There is a general applicability of anthropological theories to architectural contexts, which shall be explored in greater depth in the concluding chapter, which presents the question of what architects can make with this, what can you do or make with an anthropological architecture and architectural anthropology?
4 I have also, in my discussions with anthropologists, addressed the question of what anthropologists can learn from architects. The focus here is on what architecture can learn from anthropology, but this is not to suggest that architecture as a discipline is in a junior position: anthropology can benefit greatly from the sophistication in discussing spatial conditions, materiality and construction understood by architects. Our knowledge base is both well established and greatly in demand by anthropologists.
5 See Lucas (2016:10–11) for a discussion of the etic and the emic with regard to architectural history.
6 See Grimshaw (2001) and Grimshaw & Ravetz (2005) as well as MacDougall (2006) for more on visual anthropology, particularly its relationship to ethnographic filmmaking.
7 See Pink (2007) for visual ethnography methods focusing on lens-based media.
8 For further exploration of methodological issues in design anthropology, see Gunn (2008) and Gunn & Løgstrup (2014).
9 I have an event organized by Laurent Stalder and Momoyo Kaijima on Architectural Ethnography in Einsiedeln, November 2018 to thank for triggering some of these observations on the ethnographic qualities of my work. This remains a tension within my own work, but hopefully a productive one. See Kaijima, Stalder & Iseki (2018).
10 Other aspects of this market, such as its nuanced provision of surface, and the limits placed on it by infrastructure are discussed elsewhere. See Lucas (2017a and 2020).
11 Wade Shepard (2015) gives a convincing account of this in relation to the construction of empty cities in China, where the apartments are built and purchased as investments ahead of the settlement’s completion. Indeed, the infrastructure required to make these places liveable may be many years away in these cases.
Introduction
As so much of this volume relies on drawings, diagrams, notations and other forms of trace, it is important to explore what this can mean. This makes for an unusual anthropology in itself, but it is intended to bridge the practices of architectural research and anthropological research. The starting point is to situate this work within the theories of practice. The primary importance of drawing is not the ‘finished’ article, but the processes of making it. This process can include the form of attention and perception employed, the hand–eye coordination required to make the gestures and the materials which allow for a trace to be left upon a surface. The practice continues through the reception of the work: it is never truly finished so long as another audience can produce new meanings from it.
Drawing is gaining traction within anthropological practice, most often in the form of sketched perspectives and graphic novel style sequential art.
The argument of this chapter is that this can be expanded substantially to include the conventions of architectural drawing. Architects use a mixture of idiosyncratic personal notations and stable, codified conventions when drawing. These have alternative roles in the process of architectural design and can also serve different purposes in anthropological research. The term
‘inscriptive practices’ is used to sidestep debates around what ‘drawing’
might include or leave out, and to redirect the debate to the practice of making meaningful marks on or into surfaces.
This chapter gives a brief survey of the status of drawing in anthropology followed by a personal, perhaps auto-ethnographic account of what knowledge can be produced through drawing. It is not sufficient to state that inscriptive
2
Inscriptive Practices and
Anthropology
practices allow for the production of alternative knowledge, equivalent and supplementary to the ethnographically driven text of anthropology. The character of this knowledge is quite furtive, a dense knot of potential meanings and understandings made possible through the codification of an object in to plan, section, axonometric or other forms of drawing.