Reference to gesture: Curatorial practice and anthropological inquiry

Artists have long engaged with ethnographic approaches and equally anthropologists have sought to work with artistic methods in their research inquiry. That said, there has been little attempt to articulate a broader methodological platform to structure such encounters. In this paper, I detail an anthropological understanding of socio-aesthetic form and its importance for our theorization of today's times of crisis and emergent subjectivities. Within this framework, I propose a research inquiry I term ‘reference to gesture’. Partly inspired by curatorial practice, I suggest that such an approach offers the possibility of researching and experimenting with contemporary artistic practices in a manner that provokes different relations between ethnographic realities and aesthetic worlds, and also possibilities for a manner of research that is collaborative, multi-disciplinary, and strives toward the horizontal. In putting forward this research process, perhaps we can reimagine anthropological practices and create practical pathways to work methodologically in a manner that is rooted in the arts.