‘Practice-being’: The synthesis of art and anthropology through social media storytelling

Anthropology and art overlap as documentation that interrogates culture, history, and self. These two disciplines both have potential to involve a generous listening, an embodied action that has the potential to engage with subjects in a way that disrupts power structures through connection. Focusing on the ways art and anthropology inform each other, this presentation will elaborate on personal projects and the ways in which I used social media to document, interrogate, disrupt and sustain. Social media is a living archive and has unprecedented potential for furthering discourses and engagement while subverting traditional media or institutional knowledge sharing. Building on Sonyini Madison’s critical ethnographies and understandings of performance, I enacted a digital performance of self that informed what kind of art I was making, how I was making, and why. Documenting the process became a new form of making, a thinking with and a thinking for, and the lines between a spiritual ‘saying yes’ to art and a making for consumption or income were blurred. This presentation chronicles my journey into an art/anthropology onto-epistemology and argues the two fields as mutually informing, shaping, and supporting through a ‘practice-being’ that can be a means of enacting care for the self, but can also lead to deeper insights and roadmaps for social change. This ‘practice-being’ onto-epistemology is being furthered by my current work as a Fulbright scholar where I am employing both art apprenticeship and critical ethnography as tools for inquiry about craft, histories, and knowledge sharing amongst metal smiths in Nepal.