Sum up note / Shanghai Other Other Conference May 2024

on ethnographic practice

It has been a wonderful two days. And I must put a disclaimer - I dont know what to think about it but I'm probably the only person who is not a PhD person. But still and also I'm an architect, I've not done much ethnographic work, really, but still I mean, I want to say that from what I could learn from all the presentations, that it's a lot about negotiation of meaning. And what I was thinking throughout is: ‘is or isn't meaning provisional? and you know, and does meaning operate temporally in experience? Because how do we understand ethnography which is inscribed in the meaning that is the changing locus of both the subject and the object? Like what I understand today is not what I understand of this object tomorrow, and what this object is today will not be the same object tomorrow? So, you know, if the meaning of an event is continually changing with the evolving lives of the subject and object, then what do we make of a given ethnographic process or product? and this was the thought that, you know, was running in my mind.

And the second is my engagement in this, in, like, my closest association with ethnographic kind of practice, is to kind of coordinate with many kinds of people. In the sense that you know, my or even my context of other other coordinating with many others in curating. Or when i'm kind of bringing many people together to kind of understand what are the vulnerabilities they are experiencing or assuming or foreseeing in getting somewhere, doing something, and as a curator, I'm always kind of trying to help them mediate that - sometimes effectively, sometimes not, sometimes Getting into many fights, and because of lack of, you know, conversation, and I wonder if this can itself be an ethographic reflection. 

[...] and as an architect, I am trained to read spaces. And so I kind of do ethnography of spaces and objects, and I kind of like to think through Appadurai's Social life of Things or Kopytoff’s Cultural Biography of Objects, because we feel that people because we think of people as embodiment of spaces; or embodiment of spatialities and therefore I'm interested, or I also think of it as archaeology of space, or in some sense, reading space to excavate behaviors of people. So in that it is in that sense that I kind of think of ethnography and ethnographic practice. And so, you know, in that sense, i've been thinking that what other qualities than an ethnographer must possess. And what, after all, is the ambition of ethnography, you know, because we all were kind of discussing some time ago that, you know what jobs we'll do, or whether we should do academic practice, or whether or not we should join corporate spaces and stuff like that. But what do we really want to do as ethnographers? And I think in the least it can be, of whatever we want to do, it could be about culling out of concepts of space and living. You know, rather than creating regimes of control because you've seen that colonial ethnography has mostly been about controlling, and I've also been very skeptical about these Area Studies Departments that come in many Western universities, because they have, primarily, it's the historic force behind. Kind of a new colonization. So i'm always skeptical of these Area Department or area department studies, so I don't know how to think about it. But also I mean, therefore, how do we produce frameworks of alternative practice through our new ethnographic context?

So with that, I kind of invite you all to think and linger through these thoughts and bring this Bring this two day intensive workshop to conclusion and invite you for dinner.